Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire 9781350989511, 9780857728036

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Victor Taki is Research Fellow at the Centre for Historical Research, National Research University Higher School of Economics (St Petersburg). He previously held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta, Canada and holds a PhD from Central European University.

‘Taki’s lively and well-researched study of Russian Orientalism from late Muscovite times until the Crimean War reviews the pomp and circumstance of Russian – Ottoman diplomatic ceremonies, the theme of Ottoman decline in Russian journalism, and the military details of Russian – Ottoman wars in Russian historiography. The book contains a great deal of fascinating, fresh information that sheds new light on Ottoman, Russian, and Balkan history.’ Lucien J. Frary, Associate Professor of History, Rider University ‘Tsar and Sultan discusses, in an entertaining and accessible way, centuries of Russian perceptions and representations of the Ottoman Empire. Victor Taki does a good job revealing the complexity of the Russian perspectives upon the imperial rival that hides behind the “sick man” cliche´. The book is a rewarding read for all those who seek to understand the cultural context behind one of the oldest imperial conflicts.’ Alexei Miller, Professor, European University in Saint-Petersburg and Central European University in Budapest ‘Tsar and Sultan is an important contribution to our understanding of Orientalism that also has much to say about Westernization. In his erudite new book, Victor Taki reveals the fascinating and often surprising ways Russians saw their great imperial rival to the east. And it is a pleasure to read. While he is well versed in post-colonial theory, the author deftly avoids becoming mired in excessive jargon.’ David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Professor of Russian History, Brock University

TSAR AND SULTAN

Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire

VICTOR TAKI

Published in 2016 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2016 Victor Taki The right of Victor Taki to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. Library of Ottoman Studies 57 ISBN: 978 1 78453 184 3 eISBN: 978 0 85772 898 2 ePDF: 978 0 85772 803 6 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Garamond Three by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

To Zina, Olia and Sonia

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

At the Threshold of Felicity Captivity Narratives The ‘Turkish Campaigns’ ‘The Sick Man’ Peoples of Empire

viii xi 1 17 51 91 129 168

Conclusion

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Notes Bibliography Index

214 272 297

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As all first books, this one would not be possible without the assistance of many people. My first gratitude goes to Heather J. Coleman, my postdoctoral mentor at the University of Alberta, whose support was crucial to making this project happen. Always the first reader, Heather provided the intellectual guidance and practical advice at all the stages of my work and her friendly criticism helped me to avoid many pitfalls. Her unfailing support has meant a lot for a young scholar who chose to put aside his dissertation and embark on a new project. At the same time, I will remain forever grateful to Alfred J. Rieber, my doctoral dissertation supervisor at Central European University. Although we have been separated by the ocean for the past eight years, Al had played a crucial role in igniting my interest in Russian and East European history and has remained a professional and personal model to follow. I am also sincerely grateful to Alexander Martin, a member of my doctoral committee, who has supported me since 2007 from a distance, yet always unfailingly, and provided the much appreciated encouragement in my post-doctoral endeavours. As any book on Russia, Tsar and Sultan would not be possible without the help and sympathy of Russian and East European friends and colleagues. Alexei Miller, in many respects my second mentor during the doctoral studies at CEU, has been a living reminder that historians need not be antiquarians, and can in fact contribute poignantly to contemporary debates, a lesson, which, I admit, I have not yet fully mastered. Whereas Professor Miller helped me arrange two important

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research trips to Moscow, Vladimir Ryzhkov and Tatiana Khripachenko made my stays in St Petersburg thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring. Long walks and conversations with them have made my research trips to Russia’s northern capital particularly productive. I am also grateful to Andrei Cusco, a long-time friend, fellow student and faithful interlocutor, who has helped me keep in touch with Moldova, my country of origin, throughout of all these years of writing on Russian– Ottoman encounters in Canada. I would also like to thank the staff of the Russian State Library, State Historical Public Library and National Library of Russia for their cooperative attitude. Over the years, I was able to present portions of the manuscript at a number of intellectual venues. The first of these was the Laurence D. Stokes seminar in history at Dalhousie University in 2010. The interest and sympathy with which its regulars treated an early chapter of this manuscript greatly motivated me to pursue this project and generally enlivened my lonely days in Halifax. My special thanks go to John Barnsted, the most knowledgeable Northern American Russianist that I have ever met, for his moral support and precious practical advice. I am grateful to the participants of the East Europeanist circle and the European History colloquium at the Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, who responded to each of the chapters as they appeared. My special thanks go to John-Paul Himka, who, in addition to giving valuable feedback on my project, also played an important role in my early steps on Canadian soil. An opportunity to present part of my manuscript at the Russian History Workshop at the University of Michigan in March 2013 helped me to better understand what I needed to take out from the book in order to make it more focused. I am therefore grateful to Olga Maiorova for arranging my visit as well as to Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny, the two perfect hosts, attentive listeners and critical readers. I owe many insights to a number of colleagues with whom I share an interest in Russia’s Balkan entanglements and Oriental encounters. I am grateful to Denis Vovchenko, an erudite historian, unfailing co-panelist and untiring explorer of the Northern American urban space. The streets of Washington, New Orleans and Philadelphia that I trod with him in fruitful and stimulating conversations generated many useful insights. Denis introduced me to other American historians focused on the Russian– Ottoman encounters, Mara Kozelsky and Lucien Frary,

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whose interest in my project likewise motivated me to pursue it. For the same reason, I also would like to thank David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, whose work on Russian Orientalism I found so inspiring. I have also greatly profited from the support of a number of organizations. A research scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation in 2009 aided me at the early stages of my work. The bulk of this book was researched and written in 2011–13, with the help of the Post-Doctoral Fellowship of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as the Post-Doctoral Award of the Kule Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Alberta. The I.B.Tauris editors, Joanna Godfrey and Sophie Campbell, have been helpful, understanding and constructively rigorous. The two anonymous reviewers have encouraged me to refine my central argument as well as fill in several lacunae. I am also really grateful to Sergei Dobrynin for a thorough reading that he gave to the manuscript in order to help me make it more English, as well as for our emotional debates and principled disagreements. Finally, I have to thank my Edmonton friends and colleagues, Mark Solomonovich, Elena Krevsky, Marya Melentieva, Eugene Miakinkov and Mark Sandle for a congenial atmosphere that they have helped to create during those long Canadian winters. No less crucial was the support of my family. I dedicate this book to my mother for her faith in me, my wife for her patience with my outlandish interests and my daughter for her sincere love.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

All images courtesy of The Prints Collections of the National Library of Russia

Plates Plate 1. The Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid I receives the Russian ambassador N.V. Repnin, 1775. Plate 2. The plan of the naval battle between the Russian and the Ottoman navies, 24 June 1770 (The Battle of Chesme). Plate 3. The Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II visits the Russian naval squadron during the latter’s stay at the Bosphorus in May 1833. Plate 4. Russian officers at the Ottoman Porte, 1840s.

Map Map 1. The Ottoman Empire in 1801 (Wikimedia Commons).

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Map 1

The Ottoman Empire in 1801 (Wikimedia Commons).

INTRODUCTION

Throughout its history Russia was more frequently at war with the Ottoman Empire than with any other power. The Russian –Ottoman wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries followed one after another every fifteen to thirty years and were accompanied by other forms of contact such as ambassadorial exchanges, scholarly journeys and tourism. War diaries and memoirs, narratives of the captives and prisoners of war, diplomatic correspondence, statistical descriptions and travelogues constitute a vast body of literature that richly illustrates the experiences and perceptions of the rival empire among the diplomats, officers and educated Russians more broadly.1 Based on these sources, Tsar and Sultan is the first book-length history of Russian encounters with the Ottoman Empire from the early modern period to the Crimean War. The book’s main argument is that the evolving Russian perspectives on the empire of the sultan constitute a crucial aspect of Russia’s discovery of the Orient and an equally important chapter in the story of Russia’s Westernization. A contribution to the cultural history of empire, diplomacy and war, the book offers a new perspective on Orientalism in general and Russian Orientalism in particular. Tsar and Sultan addresses different aspects of Russia’s encounter with the Ottoman Empire that represent an underappreciated dimension of Russian cultural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Early modern Russian embassies to Constantinople occasioned symbolic struggle for the affirmation and maintenance of Russia’s imperial status. In the same period, the Ottoman Empire was a place of captivity or slavery for tens if not hundreds of thousands of the tsars’ subjects, whose

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experiences can be reconstructed through the analysis of the narratives of those few who had the chance to return. The six Russian– Ottoman wars that took place between the reign of Peter the Great and Russia’s defeat in Crimea gave the Russian officers ample opportunity to reflect on the peculiarities of the Ottoman warfare. These diplomatic and military contacts informed Russian representations of the Ottoman Empire and its subject peoples. Since the 1700s, the declining empire of the sultan served as a counter-image of post-Petrine Russia, which in a century and a half prior to the Crimean War tapped the Western sources of knowledge and power with apparent success. In the meantime, the perceived national qualities of the Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians, as well as the interrelations between them, informed Russian philhellenism and PanSlavism, both of which were central themes in the debates about Russian identity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Russia can be described as the first non-Western nation to pursue a conscious and deliberate Westernization. Needless to say that the ‘West’ in question should not be understood in the present-day sense of a community of values of a geopolital alliance. On the discursive level, the unity of the West was late to materialize. Larry Wolff’s study of the invention of Eastern Europe demonstrates that the West– East axis came to define the symbolic geography of the European continent only in the eighteenth century. Before the Enlightenment, the opposition between the southern or Cisalpine Europe and the northern or Transalpine one was much more meaningful. In fact, the eclipse of Sweden and the emergence of Russia in the context of the Great Northern War of 1700– 21 was a key factor behind the formation of the discourse of Eastern Europe, whereupon the West –East division of the European continent became increasingly current.2 The West as a geopolitical entity is even more recent. Until the end of World War II, conflicts between nations nowadays identified as ‘Western’ were more intense than conflicts between the latter and the inhabitants of other regions. At the same time, involvement in these conflicts endowed Muscovy’s western neighbours with a number of common experiences (Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution) that the tsars and their subjects shared only marginally, if at all. The desire to make up for this lack and retain full sovereignty in an increasingly competitive international environment motivated the Muscovite rulers to imitate ‘German’ and ‘Latin’ technologies and

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cultural practices.3 Although these borrowings almost always related to warfare and diplomacy, their broader social impact went beyond the domain of statecraft. During the reign of Peter the Great, haphazard imitative efforts of the earlier centuries turned into a consistent state policy, which was broadly accepted by the Russian elites despite continued political infighting. One finds a good illustration of the process of Westernization in the case of the Russian diplomat and statesman Petr Andreevich Tolstoi who will figure prominently in the pages that follow. Born to a family of upper middle class servitors of the tsars, Tolstoi pursued a rather unremarkable career within the traditional Muscovite hierarchy until the age of 52, when Peter the Great sent him and scores of other Russians to learn the techniques of naval warfare in Venice and Holland. In the course of his two-year journey to southern Europe, Tolstoi, in the words of his modern biographer Max J. Okenfuss, made a transition ‘from Muscovite provincialism to European cosmopolitanism’ without losing his deep attachment to Orthodoxy.4 Apart from his diligent, if unsuccessful, effort to master naval warfare, he learned Italian, acquired a good understanding of European politics, and kept a diary. According to Okenfuss, Tolstoi also ‘developed a new habit of logical thinking’ as well as ‘a new attitude towards wealth and time and their uses’.5 With these skills and qualities, Tolstoi greatly contributed to the advancement of Petrine reforms in a number of important diplomatic and civil administrative appointments ending up as a topmost Russian statesman at the time of the tsar’s death in 1725. The subsequent history of Tolstoi’s family demonstrates the continued importance of encounters with Europe in the development of Russian society and culture. The numerous descendants of Petr Andreevich included the artist of the Napoleonic age F.P. Tolstoi, the poet A.K. Tolstoi, the minister of education D.A. Tolstoi, and the great novelist Leo Tolstoi.6 Throughout the early modern period the subjects of the tsar remained aware of the great heterogeneity of what we now call ‘the West’. Characteristically, the eighteenth-century Russians often used the word ‘Europe’ in the plural (v evropakh), long after the abatement of the early modern religious conflicts rendered the traditional Muscovite distinction between the Protestant ‘Germans’ and the Catholic ‘Latins’ less relevant. This usage implied that Russia was distinct from all of its western neighbours taken together and, at the same time, indicated

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that the Russian eyes were fixed upon them. Thus, long before it became a geopolitical reality, the unity of ‘the West’ emerged in the eyes of an imitative beholder. The subjects of the tsar were not the only nation that adopted this posture. However, the post-Petrine Russians went farther in their attempts to become part of ‘Europe’ than did the nineteenth-century Ottomans or the twentieth-century Turks, while the Russian culture manifests much more evident Western influences than the Japanese.7 At the same time, anyone familiar with the centrality of Europe in Russian intellectual life will find it difficult to explain why the postPetrine Russians devoted a greater number of publications to the Ottoman Empire than they did to France or Germany. This circumstance cannot be attributed only to the high frequency of the Russian – Ottoman wars. No less important was the role that the Ottoman Empire played in Russia’s relations with Europe. The history of Russia’s Westernization was initially counted from the moment when Peter the Great opened the ‘window to Europe’, as Francesco Algarotti famously called the new Russian capital, St Petersburg, founded in 1703. The starting point of modern Russian history, this act of the reformer tsar supposedly helped to establish an unobstructed connection between Russia and the advanced nations of Northern and Western Europe. Later research emphasized other terrains that served as gateways of Western influence over Russia, such as the Ukrainian Hetmanate, the Baltic provinces and the lands annexed from Poland, all of which came to be known as Russia’s ‘western borderlands’ during the nineteenth century. However, neither Russia’s new capital on the Baltic shores nor its western frontier was the only interface of the country’s relations with Europe. The Ottoman Empire likewise constituted a place where numerous Russian diplomats, officers, scholars and private travellers were motivated to assume a European identity and, at the same time, to constantly question its meaning. Observations on the Ottoman manner of conducting diplomacy, making war or treating prisoners, just as their political system and their rule over the Christian subjects helped the educated Russians to assert the superiority of the European practices and principles and yet led them to retain a critical attitude towards certain forms of Europeanization. Russia’s confrontation with the Ottoman Empire left many textual monuments precisely because it constituted yet another form of Russia’s

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encounter with Europe. Although the early modern Europeans viewed the Ottomans as aliens, the Russian victories over them increasingly threatened to upset the balance of power, of which the Ottoman Empire was part ever since the anti-Habsburg alliance between ‘His Most Christian Majesty’ French King Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent. This is why the Russian –Ottoman confrontation ultimately challenged the other great powers to overcome their differences and emerge as an anti-Russian coalition, which for the first time added a geopolitical dimension to the term ‘Europe’, hitherto used only in the geographical or cultural sense. The Crimean War constituted the culmination of this process, yet the triangular structure of relations between Russia, the Ottoman Empire and other great powers was observable already at the very beginning of the so-called ‘Eastern Question’ in the late eighteenth century. The intertwining of the Russian –Ottoman and the Russian – European cultural encounters in this geopolitical context helped the tsarist diplomats, officers, scholars and travellers to articulate their own identity that was irreducible to either of its two constitutive Others. For more than a century, the study of relations between Russia and the Ottoman Empire was the preserve of the conventional history of diplomacy and war. The pre-revolutionary Russian historians were the likely pioneers in this field, motivated as they were by the persistent importance of the Eastern Question and assisted by the accessibility of the Russian sources.8 The enduring relevance of the Russian –Ottoman relations in the period of Soviet dominance in Southeastern Europe and the Soviet attempts to project power into the Mediterranean encouraged Western scholars of the second half of the twentieth century to continue the historiographic tradition established by their pre-revolutionary Russian predecessors.9 During the Cold War, attempts to legitimize Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe motivated a number of Soviet scholars to explore the Russian– Greek, Russian –Serbian, Russian – Bulgarian and Russian– Romanian relations and highlight Imperial Russia’s contribution to the emergence of the respective Balkan nationstates.10 At times the Soviet authors revealed remarkable dialectical reasoning in order to ground their apologetic accounts in the writings of Marx and Engels, who were anything but enthusiastic about Tsarist Russia and its foreign policy.11 Despite their ideological limitations, these studies had the merit of putting into circulation new archival sources that were beyond the reach of Western scholars and that

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remained unexplored by the pre-revolutionary Russian historians. In the end, these three different groups of scholars managed to provide a nearly complete picture of Russia’s wars and diplomatic negotiations with the Ottoman Empire. However, in their effort to describe the factual aspects of the Russian– Ottoman relations, Russian, Soviet and Western historians largely bypassed the cultural context, in which the wars and negotiations took place. The reconstruction of this context constitutes the main goal that the present study seeks to achieve by building upon a number of recent historiographic developments and the theoretical insights that they generated. Tsar and Sultan engages several kinds of scholarly literature. Above all, the book contributes to the subject of Orientalism in general and Russian Orientalism in particular. Until the 1970s, the term ‘Orientalism’ had been used in the sense of a cluster of academic disciplines based on the study of Eastern languages. Alternatively, ‘Orientalism’ designated an artistic phenomenon that reflected an interest of European painters, sculptors, musicians and writers in ‘Eastern’ themes. In a controversial 1978 study, the literary scholar Edward Said placed these twin aspects of Western Orientalism in a radically different light. He argued that Western academic Orientalists became part of the ‘corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it’. A characteristic example of Foucauldian discourse, Orientalism, in Said’s definition, became ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’.12 The accusation that Said levelled at the practitioners of Oriental studies and the acrimonious debates that followed are largely irrelevant to this study.13 For reasons that will be explained in Chapter Four, until the second part of the nineteenth century, academic Orientalists were much less important to Russia’s encounters with the Ottoman Empire than diplomats or officers. Instead, this book approaches Orientalism in a different, broader and more philosophical, sense, as ‘a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) the “Occident”’. According to Said, this basic distinction served a much broader company of poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators in their writings about ‘the Orient, its peoples, customs, “mind,” and destiny’.14 The West –East opposition that informed

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Orientalism represented an instance of absolutization of difference between the familiar ‘us’ and the strange ‘them’ and, as such, was a mental construct rather than objective reality. Said stressed that ‘as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary’ so that in the end ‘the two geographical entities support and reflect each other’.15 Despite apparent symmetry, Europe, according to Said, ‘was always in the position of strength, not to say domination’ with respect to the Orient. In practice, this meant that modern Europeans spoke for the people they called ‘Orientals’. As a result, the latter emerged as ‘irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, “different”’, while the former were deemed to be ‘rational, virtual, mature and “normal”’.16 Apart from asserting the ‘ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority’, Orientalism as ‘collections of dreams, images and vocabularies’ helped to make Eastern societies familiarly different. Orientalism replaced the living (and therefore disturbing) diversity of the peoples, polities, modes of life and worldviews by a much more manageable image of ‘[an] Oriental [who] lives in the Orient. . . a life of Oriental ease, in a state of Oriental despotism and sensuality, imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism’.17 This operation of substituting the lived experience of Eastern societies by a Western image of the Orient, or Orientalization, can be found not only in the nineteenth-century French and British travelogues of the Muslim East that were examined by Said, but also in the Russian writings about the Ottoman Empire that constitute the focus of this book. It has become customary to think of Orientalism as a gross Western misrepresentation of Eastern countries and cultures that underplayed their peculiarities, essentialized and absolutized their similarities and made the knowledge of them a constituent element of the colonial regimes of power. The violence that Orientalism inflicted upon the ‘Other’ is undeniable, yet this is not a reason for underestimating the role that it played in the cultural history of those societies that generated Orientalizing discourses. Orientalism hardly helped to construct a monolithic Western identity; internal cleavages within the latter became apparent inasmuch as the discourse of the generic Orient tended to become intertwined with the conflicting discourses of class, gender or nation.18 The conservative and leftist discontents with the mainstream modernity in Great Britain and France viewed the

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Orient as an alternative to the crumbling traditional hierarchies of the mother country or else as a utopian laboratory of alternative principles of social organization.19 The Orientalist discourse played an even greater role in the articulation of modern national identities in Eastern Europe, among the peoples preoccupied with their self-perceived backwardness or marginality. The putative ‘barbarity’ of the Eastern neighbours figured equally prominently in the self-understanding of the Hungarians, Romanians, Slovenes, Croatians and Serbs, who at the same time looked up to the Western nations.20 Russia offers a midway case between Eastern and Western Europe in terms of the role that Orientalism played in the country’s cultural and political history.21 Educated Russians were similar to the East European nationalists in using Orientalism in order to distance themselves from their Eastern neighbour(s) and assert their status as members of the civilized oikumene (world). At the same time, the Russian portrayals of the Orient revealed internal tensions and uncertainties about both the virtues of Western modernity and Russia’s relation to it. In this sense, Russian authors were not unlike their French or British counterparts, for whom the Orient gave an opportunity to assume a critical distance from their own societies. For a number of reasons, Russian representations of the empire of the sultans in the context of the Russian– Ottoman wars remained underexplored by the students of Russian Orientalism. Similar to Western historians, their Russian counterparts have examined the genesis of academic Orientalism in Russia and its ambiguous role in the deployment and functioning of the imperial regimes of power.22 Not unlike Western literary scholars, their Russian colleagues explored the construction of the Oriental ‘Other’ in literature and highlighted its role in the articulation of the Russian identity.23 Both historians and students of Russian literature contributed to the study of imaginary geographies that had been pioneered by some East Europeanists and addressed the issue of symbolic construction of imperial space through the discovery of Russia’s own Orient.24 The writings of the academic Orientalists and the works of literature, including the travelogues, have so far constituted the most important kinds of primary sources, through which Western and Russian scholars studied the phenomenon of Orientalism. Although scholarly publications and travelogues helped to highlight important aspects of the modern construction of the Orient,

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the focus on them led scholars to overlook another important group of relevant sources, namely the writings of the diplomats and military men. A preference for a certain type of sources went together with a peculiar geographical framework. The students of Russian Orientalism focused overwhelmingly on ‘Russia’s own Orient’ and did not devote sufficient attention to Russian representations of Asia beyond the borders of the tsarist empire. The same applies to historical and literary studies that explored the juncture between Orientalist representations and imperial institutions in several peripheral areas of the Russian Empire.25 Although some attention has been given to Orientalist descriptions of other Eurasian empires,26 the Russian perspectives on the Ottoman Empire still remain a blank spot on the map of this historiographic subfield.27 A rereading of the war diaries and memoirs, accounts of captivity and diplomatic correspondence offered in this study suggests that the Russian –Ottoman conflict was a central aspect for the Russian discovery of the Orient. Comparisons between the Ottoman diplomacy, warfare and political organization and their European counterparts served as important vehicles for the articulation of the Russian elite identity. A parallel reading of Western and Russian accounts of the Ottoman Empire also provides a rare opportunity to examine the mechanism of transfer of the Orientalist discourse and its appropriation by the educated representatives of a society that itself was perceived as civilizationally marginal by European observers.28 Apart from highlighting the role of Russia’s ‘Turkish wars’ in the country’s cultural history, Tsar and Sultan offers a new perspective on the emergence of modern Orientalism in general. Russia’s contacts with the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century included the equivalents of the early modern Habsburg grand embassies and the latter-day French and British Oriental journeys.29 At the same time, the Russian–Ottoman encounter was distinguished by a temporal compression of the forms of contacts that elsewhere followed each other in a chronological succession. The Habsburg–Ottoman wars were largely over by the time Mozart enjoyed coffee alla turca and created his Abduction from the Seraglio. By contrast, Russia’s ‘Turkish campaigns’ effectively coincided with the interest of the educated subjects of the tsar in the turquerie fashions and Orientalist travelogues. In this context, military diaries and memoirs, narratives of the captives and prisoners of war, as well as the diplomatic correspondence,

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served as spaces in which the brutal realities of the military conflict found their symbolic expression in the representation of the enemy. An analysis of these writings undertaken in this book sheds light on how a Eurasian empire was Orientalized or re-described as the Orient, a process that often fell beyond the scope of the previous studies of the Orientalist discourse. Tsar and Sultan thereby engages the broader field of symbolic geographies that emerged through a critical reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism.30 The book challenges the specialists in this field to reflect on how the images of particular empires evolve into representations of historical regions. It points to specific intellectual conjunctures that led to the transformation of portrayals of the Ottoman Empire into the Russian variants of discourses of ‘the East’ and ‘the Balkans’. Studies of Russia as an empire provide another important frame of reference for the present book. Since the early 1990s, several seminal surveys explored the multiethnic dimension of Imperial Russia and placed the latter into a comparative perspective with other nineteenthcentury empires.31 Building upon these ‘master narratives’, the historians of particular Russian borderlands have made great strides in understanding and describing Russia’s Eurasian political and administrative geography as well as the patterns of interaction between the imperial centre and regional elites.32 Their work demonstrated that behind the uniform green or red colour with which the territory of the Russian Empire was usually marked on the map, there was a complex and heterogeneous space defined by relations of domination of ‘an identifiable ethnic or communal group, and/or a core territorial unit . . . over other ethnic, territorial, or communal groups’.33 Explorations of the imperial dimension in Russian history have so far focused mainly on the interactions between imperial centre on the one hand and the elites and populations of borderlands on the other. Russia’s interactions with the rival continental empires were often left to the traditional histories of diplomacy, war and geopolitics.34 The present study seeks to incorporate these subjects into the ‘new history of empire’. It builds on recent studies in the cultural history of diplomacy and warfare in order to demonstrate that the Russian –Ottoman relations were in fact central to Russia’s imperial experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.35 Negotiation and combat with the Ottoman Empire constituted a setting for the cultural Westernization of the

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Russian elites and, later, for the affirmation of the specific Russian national traditions in diplomacy and military art. So far diplomacy and war did not fare well in the new historiography of empire. Both types of activities are usually perceived as attributes of the modern state, which itself has been more often associated with ‘nation’ rather than with ‘empire’. Indeed, diplomacy and war between states served to substantiate the realist theory of international relations, which assumes that sovereign states are monolith entities that interact in the manner of billiard balls.36 Recent theorizations of inter-imperial interaction by the notable representatives of the new historiography of empire often reject this perspective and emphasize the multiplicity of trans-border ties as well as the plurality of central and regional actors that defined the relations between continental empires.37 This study also challenges the state-centred approach to international relations, but does so not so much by questioning the solidity of the ‘billiard balls’ as by doubting the existence of the ‘billiard table’. The cultural history of Russia’s envoys to Istanbul and of Russia’s ‘Turkish campaigns’ demonstrates that there was no uniform manner of conducting diplomacy and waging war in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead, there was a conflict between different cultures of war- and peace-making, and this conflict was ultimately irreducible to the clash between ‘Europe’ and the ‘Orient’. Although the tsarist diplomats and officers took every opportunity to stress the foreignness of the Ottomans to the European principles and practices of diplomacy and warfare, their own approach to these principles and practices deviated from the European patterns. One cannot therefore speak of diplomacy and war as the universal forms of relations between empires that served to channel their rivalry. Instead, the very manners of making peace and waging war were objects of contestation, as the imperial rivals struggled to impose their preferred notions of diplomacy and warfare upon each other and make them normative. The study of this struggle reveals the heterogeneity of the space of inter-imperial interaction, just as the new history of empire has revealed the internal heterogeneity of particular empires. The significance of the Russian – Ottoman encounter for the historiography of empire goes beyond the illustration of the importance of the cultural history of diplomacy and war for understanding interimperial interactions. It is also crucial for the understanding of how

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imperial complexity and heterogeneity could become an object of reflection in an age of the seemingly monolithic great powers. The Russian historical narrative, which emerged in the early nineteenth century, occluded the inherent unevenness of the imperial space, with its complex relations between the central government and the regional elites as well as the elaborate confessional and ethnic hierarchies. At first glance, perceptions of the Ottoman ‘Other’ had the same effect inasmuch as they usually helped to construct a homogenous and unitary ‘Self’. The ethnic and confessional difference between Great Russian, Ukrainian and Baltic German representatives of the imperial elite indeed tended to recede when they wrote about the despotism of the Ottoman pashas, the anarchy of the janissaries or the fanaticism of the ulema (learned men). At the same time, the construction of the Russian elite identity in the diaries, memoirs, travelogues and statistical descriptions devoted to the Ottoman Empire went together with the discovery of the latter’s religious and ethnic complexity. The realm of the sultan not only became the subject of the greatest number of publications in post-Petrine Russia. It was also the first country that the Russians described as an empire in a modern sense of dominance of one group or territorial centre over other groups and/or territories. The imperial relations between the Ottomans and their Christian subjects, as well as between different ethnic subgroups of the latter, were recognized as such well before the educated Russians began to apply the same terms to the neighbouring Austrian Empire or to Russia proper. The readers of the nineteenthcentury ‘thick journals’ learned about the power relations that existed between the sultan’s Muslims, Christians, Greeks and Slavs well before they concerned themselves with the status and the relative share of the Orthodox, Catholics, Lutherans and Muslims (or of the Great, Little and White Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews) in Russia itself. A contribution to the subjects of Orientalism and empire, the present study also engages recent discussions of the political role of religion in Imperial Russia. Historians of modern Russia have not remained immune to the renaissance of religious studies.38 Accordingly, religion in general and Orthodoxy in particular have been the focus for a significant number of scholars who explored the imperial dimension of Russian history in the last two decades.39 Historians with an interest in the Black Sea region have drawn attention to the role of religious sectarians in the Russian Empire building in Southern Caucasus as well

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as the process of intense Christianization that the Crimean peninsula began to undergo half a century after its annexation by Russia in 1783.40 Some advances have also been made in understanding the role of Islam in the Russian – Ottoman interaction.41 In view of the demonstrated importance of religious agents on both sides of the Black Sea, it becomes highly tempting to look at the Russian – Ottoman wars as a conflict of faiths par excellence. In line with this tendency, a recent history of the Crimean War went as far as to call this confrontation a Russian Orthodox ‘crusade’ and portrayed it as a culmination of a centennial religious struggle.42 Religion has definitively come back in vogue among the historians of the Russian Empire, yet one should not unduly overemphasize its role in the Russian –Ottoman relations. First, to argue that religion was important for these relations is hardly original, given Imperial Russia’s often cited and much contested role of ‘protector’ of the Orthodox subjects of the sultan.43 Second, anyone who seeks to present the Russian– Ottoman conflict as the latter-day Orthodox analogue of the medieval Catholic crusades will have to explain why the remarkably conciliatory attitude of the early tsars towards the sultans became hostile precisely at the moment when the Orthodox religious outlook lost its undisputed dominance over the Russian society. In view of the undeniable Westernization and secularization of post-Petrine Russia, a stress on the enduring importance of religion in the Russian –Ottoman relations can occlude historical transformations in the Russian perspectives upon the realm of the sultan during the 1700s and early 1800s. Conscious of the twin pitfalls of ignoring and overestimating religion in the study of the still largely traditional, yet modernizing society, the present author sought to strike a balance between religious and secular elements in Russian encounters with the Ottoman Empire and trace their changing correlation over time. Available documentary evidence necessarily limits this discussion to the narrow sphere of written culture, which was largely coterminous with the imperial elites during the period under consideration. In a century and half following the ‘Petrine revolution’, the confessional and ethnic composition of the Russian elites evolved in the direction of greater heterogeneity while their worldview became increasingly secularized. These tendencies are particularly evident in the last three decades of the eighteenth century and the first three of the nineteenth – the period when

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the Russian – Ottoman wars became especially frequent. Unsurprisingly, the diaries and memoirs of the wars written by the representatives of the poly-ethnic and poly-confessional tsarist officer and diplomatic corps treat the Ottoman adversary from the position of ‘civilized’ military men rather than from the perspective of the Orthodox faithful. Religious references held greater significance for other aspects of the Russian encounter with the Ottoman Empire such as the captivity and relations with the Balkan co-religionists. Nevertheless, the representations of the experiences of the captives, just as the perceptions of the Ottoman Christians, evolved in the direction of secularization during the eighteenth century. Although the religious perspective upon captives and co-religionists never disappeared, with time it came to interact with the more worldly frames of reference. After a brief description of what this book is, it is important to indicate what this book is not. This is not a history of the Ottoman Empire. It does not pass any judgements on aspects of the Ottoman military and political organization or on the general evolution of the Ottoman Empire. Over the past three decades, the Ottomanist historians successfully challenged the long-entrenched tendency of Western authors to portray the realm of the sultan as a paradigmatic case of ‘Asiatic despotism’ that was corrupt and moribund. They demonstrated that even after the balance of power changed in favour of its rivals, the Ottoman Empire remained a constantly evolving and resilient organization that was able to meet and accommodate many of the challenges and changes of the increasingly competitive international environment.44 Being fully sympathetic with this revisionist historiographic trend, the present author does not endorse in any way the multiple references to the Ottoman ‘barbarity’, ‘corruption’ and ‘decline’ made by the Russian and European authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that form the subject of this study. At the same time, mistaken beliefs about other societies constitute a valid object of scholarly inquiry since they can reveal a lot about the society that generated them. This makes Russian misrepresentations of the historical realities of the Ottoman Empire a valuable source on Russian intellectual history, to which this book seeks to contribute. It is also necessary to explain briefly the basic difference of philosophical assumptions between the present author and the majority of earlier analysts of cultural encounters and portrayals of the ‘Other’. One of the unfortunate effects of postmodernism upon humanities

INTRODUCTION

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consisted in the uncritical acceptance of Jacques Derrida’s provocative thesis that there is nothing beyond text. As a result, cultural history all too easily abandoned any attempt to reconstruct the actual human experiences and focused exclusively on the textual representations, treating them as a closed circuit of interconnected references. This study adopts a less radical perspective, according to which an analysis of texts can and should help to reconstruct the experiential aspects of social phenomena. Accordingly, war, captivity and diplomacy emerge in the pages that follow not only as different aspects of representation of the Ottoman ‘Other’, but also as dimensions of the Russian historical experience of the Ottoman Empire. An attempt to complement the discussion of representations with an analysis of underlying varieties of historical experience constitutes the basic peculiarity of this book in the broad and ever expanding set of studies that explore the textual construction of the ‘Other’ and the ‘Self’. The structure of this book reflects the goal of providing a historical perspective upon the ways in which the subjects of the tsar experienced and represented the Ottoman Empire. Chapter One, ‘At the Threshold of Felicity’, offers a cultural history of the Russian– Ottoman diplomatic relations written from the Russian perspective. It argues that from the moment of the earliest contacts in the late fifteenth century, the Russian rulers and their representatives made attempts to claim equal status with the sultans, which necessarily clashed with the traditional Ottoman rejection of the principle of reciprocity and equality in the relations with other powers. The later parts of the chapter examine the Orientalization of the Ottoman approach to foreign relations in the accounts of tsarist diplomats, which was the corollary of their adoption of the practices of Western diplomacy during the eighteenth century. During the early modern period, the Crimean Tatar vassals of the sultan captured hundreds of thousands of the tsar’s subjects, many of whom were subsequently sold into Ottoman slavery. Those who managed to escape and return to Russia were few, yet their narratives make it possible to reconstruct both the experiences of captivity and the ways of narrating them. An analysis of these sources, undertaken in Chapter Two, ‘Captivity Narratives’, reveals the centrality of religion to the ways in which the early captives related their experiences. The chapter further discusses how this religious frame of reference gradually gave way to the secular Orientalist modes of emplotment in the latter-day

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captivity narratives of the Russian officers, which appeared in the context of the Russian–Ottoman wars of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Chapter Three, ‘The “Turkish Campaigns”’, describes a similar process of Orientalization that takes place in the Russian military diaries and memoirs. In an attempt to make sense of their experience of confrontations with the Ottomans, Russian officers turned to those European military writers who explored the Ottoman way of war during the period of the Habsburg – Ottoman conflict in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century. The Russian accounts of the ‘Turkish Campaigns’ combined reflections on the differences between the ‘European’ and ‘Oriental’ warfare with denunciations of the Ottoman ‘barbarities’ as well as with the discussions of the exotic and challenging character of the Danubian war theatre. Chapter Four, ‘The Sick Man’, offers an intellectual history of the idea of the Ottoman decline based on a reading of the Russian press, the travelogues and statistical descriptions of the rival empire published until the middle of the nineteenth century. Although the Russians came to perceive the Ottoman Empire as disordered and decaying early on, they could interpret the underlying causes of this phenomenon in vastly different ways. The chapter argues that in the century preceding the Crimean War the Russian interpretation of the Ottoman decline went through a remarkable inversion attributable to the concomittant changes in the way the Russian regime and the educated public conceptualized their own relation to Europe. Chapter Five, ‘Peoples of Empire’, addresses the changing Russian perceptions of the Christian co-religionists in the realm of the Ottoman Empire. It argues that these perceptions bore the imprint of changes in the Russian elite identity. Whereas the reception of Western classicism during the 1700s accompanied the Russian discovery of the Ottoman Greeks, the birth of Russian nationalism during the Napoleonic era drew the attention of the educated Russians towards Southern Slavs, while the mounting currency of Pan-Slavism alerted them to the distinct cultural character of the Romanians. The putative position of Greeks, Southern Slavs and Romanians in the ethno-political hierarchy of the Ottoman Empire conditioned the Russian perceptions of these peoples for the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond.

CHAPTER 1 AT THE THRESHOLD OF FELICITY

. . .and Sultan Bajazet himself, before whom Europe trembled, heard for the first time the haughty language of the Muscovite.1 On 16 February 1853, the Russian steam frigate Thunderer pulled to the wharf of Topkhana in Pera, the Christian-inhabited suburb of Constantinople located across the gulf of the Golden Horn from the Ottoman capital. The Russian war vessel carried the extraordinary and plenipotentiary envoy of Nicholas I, Prince A.S. Menshikov generaladmiral, minister of the navy, governor-general of Finland and generaladjutant of the tsar.2 A great-grandson of Peter the Great’s famous favourite and a personal friend of Nicholas I, His Serene Highness descended ashore accompanied by a suite of Russian dignitaries and the greetings of a crowd of Ottoman Greeks who gathered to watch his arrival. Met by the entire personnel of the Russian mission, Menshikov proceeded to the magnificent palace of the Russian embassy recently reconstructed after the great fire of 1845.3 In the words of the British charge´ d’affaires in Constantinople Colonel Hugh Rose, ‘no expense or efforts have been spared for the purpose of imparting to the Russian Embassy all the advantages that accrue from personal influence, display and entertainment’.4 Nor did the Russian government neglect ‘to impart to [this Embassy] the most powerful of influences amongst Turks, intimidation’. A day or two thereafter, a second steam frigate arrived carrying the Commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet

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Vice-Admiral V.A. Kornilov and the chief of staff of the Russian Fifth Army corps General A.A. Nepokoichitskii with other officers. As this naval and army top brass proceeded to inspect the Ottoman fortifications at the Dardanelles and Smyrna, the Russian troops were mobilized and moved to the frontier, while the Black Sea Fleet received the order to be ready to sail off from Odessa and Sevastopol. The Russian envoy accompanied this ostentatious display of power and intimidation with symbolic gestures, by means of which he sought to reassert Russia’s high standing in Constantinople that had deteriorated under his less commanding predecessors. Upon presenting his credentials, Menshikov paid his first visit to the Grand Vizier Mehmed Ali Pasha wearing civilian dress rather than his military uniform as expected. After the audience, the Russian envoy declined the invitation of the Ottoman ‘Introducer of the Ambassadors’, to call upon the minister of foreign affairs, Reis-effendi Fuad Pasha. Apprised of the latter’s anti-Russian attitudes, Menshikov passed by the door of the reiseffendi’s office that was opened to receive him and left the Porte. ‘The affront was the more galling’, wrote Rose, ‘because great preparations had been made for the purpose of receiving the Russian ambassador with marked honors; and a great concourse of people, particularly the Greeks, have assembled for the ceremony’.5 Historians unanimously denounced Menshikov’s provocative behaviour as one of the factors that precipitated the Crimean War. His ostensible insolence may indeed appear to be the very opposite of modern diplomatic conduct. And yet the affronts of the Russian envoy at the ‘Threshold of Felicity’ were more than products of his personal eccentricities.6 Similar thrusts had been characteristic of the Russian – Ottoman diplomatic relations ever since their inception in the late fifteenth century. They served as symbolic expressions of tensions and antagonisms that existed between the two empires. Through them the ambassadorial ceremony became a field of struggle, no less important than the diplomatic negotiations around territories, fortresses, prisoners or war contributions. The present chapter seeks to place the actions of the Russian envoys to Constantinople into the context of the Russian– Ottoman relations in the early modern period. Autocratic political cultures of Russia and the Ottoman Empire raised the importance of the diplomatic ritual and its contestation in the relations between the tsar and the sultan, as did their

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lack of a common language and the location of the two polities on the peripheries of the European state system.7 The desire of the Russian rulers to overcome their initial inferiority explains the early efforts of the tsarist envoys to assert their master’s status vis-a`-vis the sultan by means of constant disputes over and occasional violations of the Ottoman ambassadorial ceremony. The shift of the balance of power in Russia’s favour during the 1700s aggravated the tensions around the diplomatic ritual. Whereas the tsarist diplomats tried to add ceremonial gains to the battlefield victories, their Ottoman counterparts sought symbolic compensations for the lost battles. The Russian eighteenth-century extraordinary embassies to Constantinople thereby became a continuation of the Russian– Ottoman wars by other means. The chapter also examines the process of integration of the permanent Russian representatives in Constantinople into the diplomatic corps that had emerged in the Ottoman capital prior to the appointment of the tsar’s first resident envoy in 1702. Like their relations with the Ottoman officials and the sultan, the interaction of the Russian diplomats with the envoys of European powers on the shores of the Bosphorus for a long time was influenced by considerations of honour and prestige. The Westernization of the Russian upper classes in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made the European diplomats in Constantinople a reference group for the tsar’s envoys to the sultan. In their customary contestations of the ambassadorial ceremony, the Russian representatives began taking into consideration the manner in which the sultans and grand viziers treated their Venetian, French, British or Habsburg counterparts. Ceremonial disputes with the Ottomans thereby became a means of asserting Russia’s prestige among the European powers. It will also be demonstrated that the integration of the Russian ministers into the diplomatic corps of Constantinople affected their perception of the Russian – Ottoman relations and led them to Orientalize the Ottoman diplomatic practices. The essence of this process consisted in re-describing the peculiar Ottoman manner of conducting foreign relations as a manifestation of the generic Orient. The latter represented a collection of cliche´d images and vocabularies developed by Western Europeans with reference to Asian societies that they had encountered in the medieval and early modern periods. Russian elites borrowed these images and vocabularies together with other aspects of European culture during the eighteenth century.

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As the most Westernized segment of the tsarist elites, post-Petrine diplomats were the first Russians to attribute to the Ottoman Empire some of the ascribed qualities of the Orient, namely the total foreignness to the European notions and the inability to change. As will become clear in the concluding section of this chapter, the Orientalization of the Ottoman diplomatic ritual helped Russian diplomats to assert their own ‘European’ identity. It also occasioned the first Russian critique of the perceived discrepancy between the professed principles and actual practices of the European diplomats in the context of the Eastern Question.

The Muscovite Envoys Historians of diplomacy argue that it performed three main functions: representation, negotiation and intelligence gathering.8 While all three have been present since the beginning of modern diplomacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the relative importance of each varied depending on the period. Thus, negotiation required a well-developed communication system, a certain sophistication of political thought and, above all, the development of a special language. It could not therefore assume its full importance until relatively late in the early modern era. Intelligence gathering had to wait until the final establishment of the system of permanent diplomatic missions in the European capitals, which, for various reasons, did not occur until the second half of the seventeenth century. By contrast, the temporary embassies exchanged until the end of the eighteenth century were best suited for the function of representation. The richly dressed and often aristocratic ambassador with his big entourage embodied his royal master at a foreign court, whereby the ambassadorial audience assumed the aspect of the meeting of the two rulers. Therefore, the way he moved was as important as the words he spoke for the maintenance of his ruler’s honour and status. Taken in its representational aspect, the early modern diplomacy is essentially about the movement of human bodies and their relation to one another in space.9 The Renaissance arte dello stato, or a body of knowledge permitting the prince to maintain his or her state had relatively little in common with the eighteenth-century cameralist science of statecraft and still less so with modern political science focusing on institutions. Studies of early modern governmentality pioneered by Michel Foucault indicate

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the mastery of oneself as the starting point of the art of government.10 One of the key aspects of this mastery was the prince’s control of his or her body in the sense of correct and imposing posture, poses, attitudes, gestures and movements. The self-disciplining dancing in the grand baroque court ballets helped the pudgy Louis XIV to assume the plenitude of authority.11 At a time when governance consisted substantially of the maintenance of the ruler’s grand status among his or her subjects and vis-a`-vis other rulers, the state was essentially an extension of the ruler’s body, and so was the embassy.12 An early modern embassy was not only a form of embodiment, but also a spatial phenomenon that included three principal aspects. Apart from the royal audience, one can distinguish between the ceremony of the entry of the embassy into the foreign capital city and the journey that it had to make in order to reach its destination. Each of these stages – the journey, the entry procession and the court audience – has its peculiarities as a type of movement of bodies invested with intense symbolic significance. The embassy as journey accentuated the importance of the territory, of borders and of the political structure of the visited polity, which was enacted in the encounters of the ambassador and his suite with the local authorities and populations on their way to the capital. The embassy as entry procession was a political theatre in which the dispatching and the receiving side competed in the display of ostentation, grandness and orderliness, whereby the ambassadorial train functioned as an epitome of the polity that sent it, while their escorts did the same for the receiving side. Finally, the embassy as audience ceremony had the aspect of the meeting of the two rulers, one of which was represented by the ambassador. At all these stages, the importance of bodies moving collectively or individually was at least as great as the exchange of words, which tended to be formulaic and scarce. Considered from this point of view, the history of the Russian – Ottoman relations during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries reveals a number of striking asymmetries. For one thing, the embassies that the Muscovite rulers dispatched to Constantinople are almost twice as numerous as the number of embassies sent by the sultans to Moscow.13 This numerical imbalance reveals that, for various reasons, the relations with the Ottoman sultans were of greater importance to the Muscovite tsars than vice versa, even though the initiative of establishing the relations belonged to Sultan Bayezid II.14 In this, they were not too

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different from the French, British or Habsburg rulers who in this period likewise dispatched largely unreciprocated diplomatic missions to the sultan’s capital. This purely numerical correlation of the number of embassies undoubtedly reveals a more fundamental asymmetry between the self-presentation of the sultans and the Muscovite rulers. Whereas the Ottomans pretended to be ‘the abode of the rulers’ and the ‘refuge of the world’, to whom all other potentates were fundamentally vassals and tributaries, the grand dukes of Muscovy and later the tsars sought to assert their equal rank with the sultans, whom they addressed as ‘brothers’. For a long time, such incongruity of the claimed statuses reflected the real power balance between Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire, in which the latter was clearly the stronger one.15 It is noteworthy that the ambassadorial report of the first Ottoman ambassador to reach Moscow, Kamal (Kemal) Feodorit, did not initially contain the term ‘brotherhood’ with reference to the proposed amicable relations between Grand Duke Vasilii III and Sultan Selim I, which was introduced only at the insistence of the Muscovite side.16 As if recognizing the actual asymmetry of the Russian –Ottoman relations, the tsars made every effort to prevent the Crimean khans from serving as mediators in their relations with the Porte. In the conditions of the vassal relationship that existed between the Khanate and the Ottoman Empire since 1475, such mediation would only confirm the Russian ruler’s inferiority to the sultan. The character of the Russian – Crimean relations presented an even greater problem. Unlike the Ottoman Empire that positioned itself as a continuation of the Seljuk sultanate, the Arab caliphate and Byzantium, the Crimean khans claimed the heritage of the Golden Horde, whose tributary Muscovy had been in the fourtheenth and fifteenth centuries. As the descendents of Genghis Khan, the Crimean Ghirays enjoyed the highest symbolic status in the world of Eurasian steppe politics. This status gave them the ground to demand the tribute that Muscovy used to pay to the Golden Horde until its dissolution at the end of the fifteenth century. The ‘gifts’ that the Russian rulers would send to the Crimea up until 1700 indeed resembled such a tribute.17 The quasi-tributary nature of Muscovy’s relation to the Crimea finds another illustration in the fact that their diplomatic correspondence employed the term ‘tsar’, the Slavic equivalent of the Turkic ‘khan’, with reference to the khans of Crimea and not to the rulers of Muscovy.18 In view of the double asymmetry of

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the Crimean– Ottoman and Muscovite–Crimean relations, the Crimean mediation in the relations between the Russian tsars and the Ottoman sultans threatened to undermine the claim of the former to the eqaulity of status with the latter. The disadvantageous balance of power along the Muscovite–Ottoman frontiers had direct consequences for the Russian embassies. Although better trodden than the road of the Ottoman envoys to Moscow, the path of the Russian ambassadors to Constantinople was full of challenges. To begin with, the ambassadors had to go through the lands of the Don cossacks. Although in the service of the tsars, the cossacks would not let the ambassadors pass promptly unless they received from the latter the tsar’s salary (donskoi otpusk) and were ‘in friendship’ with Moscow at that particular moment. Next, the ambassadors had to make the transit between the cossack ‘capital’ Cherkassk and the Ottoman fortress of Azov. This could be more or less difficult depending upon whether the cossacks were at peace with the Ottomans or not, and this Moscow never totally controlled. Dealing with the Ottoman governor in Azov could be quite a challenge in itself. The ambassadors were provided with a special rescript as well as a gift of sable furs to smooth the passage. An especially greedy pasha delayed the embassy of A.I. Nesterov in 1667 for more than a month that passed in constant bickering over the amount and quality of the ambassador’s gift vs. the number of horses and carts and/or ships that the pasha was ready to provide. Once on a ship and past the Kerch Strait that connects the Azov Sea with the Black Sea, the embassy’s next likely stop was Caffa, where the local pasha could make some further delay pointing to the late season, the absence of seaworthy vessels and the necessity for the ambassadors to take the safer but much longer way through the Crimea, Edisan, Budjak, Moldavia, Wallachia and Rumelia.19 Even when the ambassadors insisted on taking the sea route (which they did most of the time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), such a voyage could prove a big trial because of bad season, the difficulties of Black Sea navigation, poor vessels and the general aversion of the pre-Petrine Russians for naval explorations. By contrast, the Ottoman envoys had a much greater advantage when travelling to Moscow. In this case they could take the land route which passed through the Ottoman-controlled territories along the Western and northern coast of the Black Sea, and after crossing the vassal Crimea, enter directly into the Muscovite domains. It is true, however, that the

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road could be as physically hard for the Ottomans as it was for the Muscovites. In fact, Kamal Feodorit, the first Ottoman envoy to reach Muscovy, nearly died of ‘winter fatigue’ in the steppe on his way to the Russian capital in 1514.20 The Ottoman embassies could also be attacked by the Don cossacks, who even killed the Ottoman ambassador Thomas Kantakouzenos in 1637.21 Nevertheless, the envoys of the sultan for the most part did not have to deal with the semi-independent local governors on the Muscovite territories. In their encounters with the Don cossacks as well as the Ottoman governors of Azov and Caffa, the Muscovite ambassadors had to maintain the honour of their ruler. At some distance from the Don cossack capital of Cherkassk, they had to be met by cossack delegates on horseback with banners unfurled and their entry into the town had to be marked by gun and cannon salvos. The cossacks had to assure the proper transfer of the ambassadors at the Ottoman border to the Azov janissaries, again to the accompaniment of salvos and banners.22 In the course of negotiations with the Azov pasha, the ambassadors, who were lodged in a special camp rather than in the city itself, had to make sure that the pasha himself came for the rescript and the ‘gifts’ or at least accepted them by dispatch. Under no circumstances were the ambassadors allowed to bring the gifts in person to the city lest the honour of the Muscovite tsar be diminished.23 If they were unable to avoid another stop at Kerch or Caffa, the envoys had at least to make sure that they were properly treated and lodged in the ‘white’ rather than the ‘mud’ city.24 Finally, the ambassadors had to refuse any suggestion to pass through the Crimea.25 If they still did have to pass through the Crimea, as was the case of the first Muscovite ambassador to the sultan, M.A. Pleshcheev, they had to be on their guard against any escorts to Constantinople that the khan might want to impose on them. They were prohibited to go to the sultan with these escorts and ‘sit under them’ during the audience.26 The audience at the grand vizier and the sultan constituted a space in which the symbolic intensity of the early modern ambassadorial exchanges reached the highest level. Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire did not share a common diplomatic culture or a lingua franca that would facilitate negotiations between them. In these circumstances the manner of treatment of the ambassadors and their behaviour at the audiences was of paramount importance. The situation was further complicated by the difference between the Muscovite and the Ottoman ambassadorial

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ceremonials. In Muscovy, a foreign ambassador was usually admitted to the presence of the grand duke/tsar, delivered his address, and then passed his ruler’s rescript, after which he met the boyars designated by the tsar to discuss the particulars. By contrast, in the Ottoman Empire foreign envoys were supposed first to have an audience with the grand vizier (which was sometimes preceded by meetings with lesser dignitaries) before seeing the sultan. The Ottoman ministers demanded that the ambassador pass his ruler’s rescript and gifts to them in advance. This, together with the discrepancy in the order of regal and ministerial audiences, was a potential source of friction. In accordance with the nascent Muscovite diplomatic ceremonial, the first Russian ambassador to Constantinople, M.A. Pleshcheev, was instructed to bow to the sultan at the audience ‘without bending the knees’. After that, he was supposed to pass the grand duke’s gifts to the sultan, and then deliver his address standing or sitting, if the sultan offered him a seat. When Bayezid’s ‘pashas’ invited Pleshcheev to a banquet and wanted to present him with the kaftans and gifts, which the Ottomans customarily provided to foreign ambassadors, the first Muscovite envoy refused to come announcing that ‘he has nothing to say to the pashas, does not need their kaftans and gifts and that he needs to talk to the sultan without intermediaries’.27 Although Bayezid II sent Ivan III a friendly message, in which he informed the grand duke about the receipt of his letter, the Ottomans were predictably consternated to hear ‘the haughty language of the Muscovite’.28 During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the grand dukes and later tsars followed the established precedent. Muscovite envoys were consistently prohibited to kneel during an audience at the sultan’s. They were also supposed to reject any suggestion to come to see him together with the ambassadors of other powers. Finally, although the first Muscovite ambassadors insisted on seeing the sultan immediately, with time they had to accept the basic principle of Ottoman ceremonial and meet with the grand viziers before seeing the sultans. V.A. Korobov, the ambassador of Vasilii III, was instructed to pass the grand duke’s rescript to the ‘pashas’, but under no circumstances was he supposed to ‘speak his speech’ to anyone else but the sultan.29 Half a century later, the envoy of Ivan IV (the Terrible), I.P. Novosil’tsev, agreed to meet with the Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, but refused to show him the tsar’s rescript to the sultan or disclose its contents.30 The

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seventeenth-century ambassadors likewise complied with the Ottoman custom of meeting the grand vizier first and sometimes even agreed to disclose the content of the tsar’s rescript to the sultan to the Ottoman ministers, but they never did it without some contestation, the length of which depended upon political circumstances.31 With time, the number of points that provided the ground for such contestation tended to grow. Thus, in 1699, the ambassadors E.I. Ukraintsev and I.P. Cheredeev disputed with the Grand Dragoman of the Porte Alexander Mavrocordatos not only the issues of the vizier’s audience and the tsar’s rescript, but also the details of the ceremonial such as the rank of the Ottoman officials escorting the ambassadors to the vizier, the number of horses given to them, the place they were supposed to sit on and the manner in which they were to pass the tsar’s rescript to the vizier. In addition to these questions, the preparation for the sultan’s audience included negotiation on the number of the embassy noblemen accompanying the ambassadors and the length of their address to the sultan. The ambassadors made sure that the Ottoman escorts did not snatch the tsar’s rescript out of their hands and that they ‘keep them under hands gently’ rather than ‘keep their hands rudely’ when entering the audience hall.32 However petty and excessive such contestations appear in retrospect, they constituted the essence of symbolic diplomacy. Contesting, even if unsuccessfully, the particular details of the ceremony was deemed crucial to the maintenance of the tsar’s honour. The danger of ‘dishonour’ that the ambassadors were to avoid at all costs was sometimes coupled with the danger of physical assault or even death. The latter was particularly real when the ritualized exchanges broke down. Thus, in 1622, an angry Mustafa I did not let the ambassador I.P. Kondyrev finish his speech and had him thrown out of the audience hall with blows. The Ottomans accused Kondyrev and his companion of hiding runaway Russian slaves in their house, while the riotous janissaries broke into the ambassador’s quarters and threatened to cut his nose and ears. The ire of the sultan was not the only thing that could make the Muscovite ambassador fear for his life: on its way back to Moscow Kondyrev’s embassy was captured by the Zaporozhian cossacks. At the time, the latter were in conflict with the Don cossacks and almost killed the Muscovite ambassadors in revenge. Imprisoned in a fortress, the embassy people managed to escape into the steppe only to fall prey to the Nogais, and were delivered only by the Ottoman troops from Azov.

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In Azov, however, the lives of Kondyrev and company were once again endangered by an angry crowd that demanded that the raiding Don cossacks be brought to obedience. Perhaps, more than anything else, the Muscovite ambassadors feared Crimean Tatars and with a good reason: during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the tsar’s envoys in Bakhchisarai were mistreated particularly often. In 1624, an angry khan ordered that the ambassador Ivan Begichev be killed out of suspicion that the latter had travelled to Constantinople to convince the sultan to apply pressure upon his Crimean vassal.33 Nevertheless, such breakdowns in the symbolic exchanges between Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire were relatively rare and, for the most part, an intensely ritualized communication by means of periodic embassies performed its functions.

The Grand Embassies The slow evolution of the ambassadorial ceremonial in the first two centuries of the Russian– Ottoman relations gave way to dramatic changes during the 1700s. It is noteworthy, however, that these changes happened not during the reign of Peter the Great (1696– 1725), which marked a new departure in so many other respects, but under the successors of the reformer tsar. This is explained above all by the major reversal that the initially successful Eastern policy of Peter the Great suffered in the course of the disastrous Pruth campaign of 1711. As a result, the tsar had to surrender Azov (captured from the Ottomans in 1696) and accept to resume the payment of ‘gifts’ to the Crimean khan, which had just been abolished by the treaty negotiated by Ukraintsev’s embassy in 1700. Russia also temporarily lost the recently acquired right to have a permanent representative in Constantinople. In practice the khans never again received the ‘gifts’ from the Russians, who soon reestablished their right for a permanent representative in the Ottoman capital (1721). Neverthless, the task of restoring and further affirming Russia’s symbolic standing in Constantinople was left to Empresses Anna Ioannovna (1730–40) and Catherine the Great (1762– 96).34 The striking changes in the ambassadorial ceremonial are illustrated by the history of the three extraordinary and plenipotentiary embassies sent to the sultan’s capital at the end of three victorious wars that the female heirs of Peter the Great waged against the Ottoman Empire.

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Called to ‘constitute and confirm’ peace and friendship between the two empires, the eighteenth-century Russian extraordinary embassies usually had few concrete objectives.35 However, their importance in formatting the relations between the two empires was paramount. Changes in the ambassadorial ceremonial were about the only important gain that Russia managed to secure as a result of the war of 1736–9, in which the fruits of a number of resounding victories were spoiled by the defeats of Russia’s ally, the Habsburg Monarchy, and the deftness of French diplomacy. The ephemeral character of other gains (the Azov lands without the right to rebuild the destroyed Ottoman fortress) explains why the Russian side attributed such a great importance to ceremony. The Belgrade treaty of 1739 stipulated that ‘solemn and extraordinary embassies’ be ‘exchanged, received, honoured and treated with the same ceremonies . . . as are observed in the honorable (znatnykh) embassies between the most-respected Powers and the Ottoman Porte’.36 Dispatched on the basis of this clause, the embassy of A.I. Rumiantsev (in 1740– 1) was specifically modelled on the ceremonial of the recent extraordinary Habsburg embassy of Count Ulefeld that took place in 1740.37 The choice of a Habsburg model for the first Russian grand embassy to Constantinople was quite natural and consistent with the self-positioning of both the Muscovite tsars and the heirs to Peter the Great’s imperial title as the equals of the Habsburg emperors.38 By the eighteenth century, large embassies sent to Constantinople by the adjacent powers were no longer novel. In 1524, the Safavid ruler of Persia dispatched an embassy of some 500 people to Suleiman the Magnificent. Among the European powers in the seventeenth century, the Commonwealth of Poland– Lithuania was particularly distinguished for the size of its embassies. The one it sent in 1677 to Mehmed IV counted 600 people, and its lavishly caparisoned mounts would lose silver horseshoes on the streets of Constantinople.39 The early modern period witnessed an even bigger number of great embassies (Grossbotschaft) coming from the Habsburg Monarchy.40 What changed in the meantime was the manner in which the Ottomans treated such diplomatic demarches of their neighbours. In 1524, Suleiman the Magnificent stopped the shah’s embassy on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus and allowed only 20 people to enter Constantinople. A century and a half later, the bellicose Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Ko¨pru¨lu¨ treated the grand Polish embassy in a similar way, comparing it to an army that

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was ‘too small to conquer Constantinople, but too big to kiss the Threshold of Felicity’.41 The situation changed after the peace of Karlowitz (1699), which marked the Ottoman retreat in Southeastern Europe. The sultans not only began to receive the Habsburg embassies with extraordinary ceremonies,42 but also reciprocated them by sending similarly big embassies to Vienna.43 Although in the eighteenth century the Ottomans were on their way towards the recognition of the principles of reciprocity and equality in diplomatic relations, their mode of treating particular grand embassies continued to vary.44 The history of the Habsburg extraordinary ambassadors during this period provides a nice illustration.45 Prince Ettingen and Count von Virmont, who came to Constantinople in the wake of the victorious Habsburg wars against the Ottomans of 1683 – 99 and 1716 – 18, were treated with all imaginable pomp that placed them higher than the representatives of other powers. This, however, was not quite the case of the embassy of Count Ulefeld in 1740, whose ceremonial the Russians obtained from the Habsburg envoy in St Petersburg, to serve as a model for A.I. Rumiantsev’s embassy of the same year. Dispatched after the Habsburg defeat in the war of 1737 – 9, Ulefeld had to deal with multiple symbolic challenges to the honour of his ruler. During the exchange of the embassies on the Sava, the commander of the Ottoman frontier troops Ali Pasha refused to cross the river in order to meet the Imperial ambassador and agreed to receive him on a raft in the middle of the river only after great pressure. The Ottoman chief usher (chaush-bashi), whose function was to accompany the Habsburg ambassador during his entry into the capital, was walking on his right side rather than ahead of him, as he had done in a mark of greater respect to the extraordinary embassies of Counts Ettingen and Virmont of 1700 and 1719 or, more recently, to the French ambassador de Villeneuve. To add insult to injury, the chief usher refused to eat at the ambassador’s table, which was more modestly served than the table of Count Ulefeld’s Ottoman counterpart during his trip to and stay in Vienna. Finally, the Ottoman ambassador proved very obdurate on questions of ceremony, while his unprecedentedly large embassy of some 900 people presented a real logistical challenge to the Habsburg authorities.46 The stipulation that the Russian and Ottoman embassies would be ‘exchanged, received, honoured and treated with the same ceremonies’

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as the embassies exchanged between the Porte and other remarkable powers was therefore rather vague and left the two sides substantial room for manoeuvre. The ranks of ambassadors, the organization and composition of the embassies, the rank of the local Russian and Ottoman governors effecting the exchange, the amount of food and forage provided to the embassies during their progress from the border to the capital and, of course, the details of the ceremonies of entry and imperial audience could become subjects of negotiation, contestation and struggle. On every occasion both the Ottomans and the Russians sought to maximize their symbolic gains by appealing to custom, precedent or the example of ambassadorial exchanges between the Ottomans and other powers.47 Whereas the earlier Muscovite envoys often held ‘civilian ranks’, the extraordinary ambassador Count A.I. Rumiantsev held the high military rank of general-en-chef.48 The same applied to the heads of the other two Russian great embassies of the eighteenth century – Prince N.V. Repnin and M.I. Kutuzov, both of whom were lieutenant-generals at the time of their embassies.49 By contrast, the Ottoman ambassadors in the early modern period were for the most part members of bureaucracy, who were conferred a military rank of pasha on the occasion of their appointment as ambassadors. Thus, Mehmed Emini Pasha, who headed the Ottoman embassy to Russia in 1740– 1, was made the governor-general (beylerbey) of Rumelia. Abdulkerim Effendi, the Ottoman ambassador to Russia in 1775– 6, was likewise a career bureaucrat who, upon his diplomatic appointment was given the same rank as his predecessor and who returned to civil bureaucracy after the completion of his mission. Only Mustafa Rasih Pasha, who headed the Ottoman embassy to Catherine II in 1793– 4 was originally a military man. No less important was the rank of the escorts (mihmandars) who participated in the ceremony of exchange on the border and accompanied the foreign ambassadors to the capital. In 1740, Rumiantsev was escorted from the border by a pasha of two tails and the chief usher. In 1775, the absence of the former in the programme of exchange presented by the Ottomans made Repnin raise this issue. Numan Pasha, the governor of Bender, which was the place of exchange in 1740, met and accompanied Rumiantsev from the place of ceremony to the ambassador’s quarters. In 1775, Repnin demanded the same from the governor of Hotin, Melik Mehmet Pasha. The latter refused on the basis

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of his superior rank (he was a pasha of three and not of two tails as was Numan Pasha) as well as his status as the sultan’s son-in-law. In return, Repnin pressed hard to be accorded the ‘right hand’ during the ceremony of exchange. Unable to overcome the ambassador’s insistence, the Ottoman governor resorted to ruses. On his order, the chairs on the raft anchored in the middle of the Dniester were arranged in such a way that both the Russian and the Ottoman ambassador, who stepped on the raft from the opposite sides, had the impression that they sat to the right of the Ottoman governor.50 In doing so, the Ottoman governor emulated the sagacity of the High Dragoman of the Porte Alexander Mavrocordatos, who ended interminable disputes over ceremony at the beginning of the Karlowitz congress by suggesting that negotiations take place in a round tent and that the representatives of the seven negotiating powers enter this tent simultaneously through seven separate entries. However, what in 1697 served to assert the equality of the negotiating powers, in 1775 was part of the symbolic struggle between the Russian and the Ottoman representatives. As he accompanied the Russian ambassador from the bank of the river to the reception tent, Melik Mehmet Pasha would constantly stop to salute the onlookers so that Repnin, who was supposed to walk on his right, now and again found himself ahead of his Ottoman escort.51 The intensity of tensions over questions of ceremony depended upon multiple factors such as the balance of forces created by the recent war, the (dis)advantageousness of the concluded peace treaty for both parties involved, as well as the relative importance of the ceremonial as opposed to the real political issues. In 1740–1, the relations between the Russian ambassador and the Ottoman authorities were repeatedly at breaking point because of the desire of the Russians to acquire from the reassured Ottomans at least a symbolic compensation for the ‘lost peace’. In 1775, as the ceremony of exchange at Hotin demonstrated, the relations were still quite tense, if only because the Ottomans sought to make up for both the lost war and the lost peace. By contrast, in 1793, the same ceremony (this time near Dubossary on the Dniester, which by that time constituted a new boundary between the two empires) went much more smoothly. In the war of 1787–92, the Ottomans suffered fewer losses in comparison with the Kuchuk–Kainarji treaty of 1774, and besides they were interested in the Russian alliance. That did not prevent M.I. Kutuzov from engaging in customary contestations of the matters of ceremony.

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Although the Ottomans, in Kutuzov’s own testimony, accorded him higher honours than they did to Repnin, he still found it necessary to engage in ‘long arguments’ over the the manner in which the customary overcoat was to be placed upon him during the audience with the sultan.52 Neverthless, the overall atmosphere in 1793–4 was more relaxed and enjoyable. According to the unofficial story of Kutuzov’s embassy written by a member of his diplomatic chancery, Johann Christian Struve, the meeting of the ambassadors on the Dniester turned into a festive affair: ‘Not a single day passed that was not distinguished by rejoicings and festivals; fireworks, illuminations on the banks of the river, feasts, balls, dances and every kind of diversion in which both Russians and Turks took their part with equal eagerness and confidence’.53 The grand embassies represented in fact small armies, whose organization, progress and provision posed important logistical challenges to both the dispatching and the receiving side. Rumiantsev’s embassy included 492 soldiers in addition to their officers and civil persons composing the ambassador’s chancery. Repnin commanded some 600 to 700 people, and he needed 1,200 horses in order to set them in motion. Difficulties encountered by the local Ottoman authorities in providing the required train explained the slow progress of the embassy. The same applied to food and forage, about which Repnin complained that they often arrived only in the evening, so that people and animals had to pass the entire day without a meal.54 By contrast, in 1793 the slow progress of the embassy resulted from the procrastination of Ambassador Kutuzov himself, who did not want to reach Constantinople before his Ottoman counterpart, Mustafa Rasih Pasha, made the much longer trip to Moscow.55 In the end, the journey, which for so many generations of Russian envoys was full of perils and challenges, could also be rather pleasant, if one is to believe Struve’s account: We composed a little army advancing gaily and easily, and abundantly provided with everything that could contribute to its accommodation and pleasure. . . . The most distinguished persons in the suite were in handsome carriages followed by a long file of vehicles filled with servants and luggage. The march was closed by a detachment of well-disciplined Russian troops. All the roads were lined with spectators who assembled from all sides to gratify their curiosity with the sight of so numerous a cavalcade.56

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The itinerary of the extraordinary embassies of the post-Petrine epoch differed from the route customarily taken by Russian envoys in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and this difference was indicative of significant changes in the Russian– Ottoman relations. To reach Constantinople, the Muscovite ambassadors negotiated their long and arduous way past the unruly Don and Zaporozhian cossacks, the rapacious governors of Azov and Caffa or, worse still, the predatory Crimean Tatars, before they tried their luck at the unpredictable Black Sea. In contrast to them, Repnin and the majority of other Russian ambassadors in the eighteenth century followed a safer route, which took them through the lands of the Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealth, substantially controlled by the Russians, the vassal Ottoman principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia and the Ottoman provinces (pashalyks) of Silistria and Edirne (Adrianople). Whereas the Muscovite ambassadors had to deal with the Ottoman authorities at the mouth of the Don and in Southern Crimea, Repnin encountered the much more amenable Orthodox subjects of the Porte. His entries into the capitals Ias¸i and Bucharest were arranged with big pomp, and the days he spent in the company of the Moldavian and Wallachian princes (hospodars) were filled with banquets and entertainments.57 Where his sixteenthand seventeenth-century predecessors risked cutting a poor figure before the Ottoman provincial authorities, Repnin radiated authority that attracted the Christian vassals of the sultan. During his stay in the principalities, the Russian ambassador was visited by the high clergy and the boyars and received their petitions against the injustices of the hospodars as well as memoranda that vindicated the historical rights of Moldavia and Wallachia trampled ever since the Phanariot Greeks established their monopoly on the thrones of the two principalities.58 In doing so, he was enacting one of the clauses of the Kuchuk– Kainarji treaty that gave Russia the right to make “representations” before the Porte on behalf of Moldavia and Wallachia. The Ottomans gave little importance to the manner of passage of the Russian embassies through various provincial towns on their way to Constantinople. However, the ceremony of entry into the capital could provide pretexts for disputes. Thus, in 1740, the chief usher of the Porte refused to dine with Rumiantsev in the tent prepared for the Russian ambassador outside the walls of Constantinople. Having noticed this incident, Repnin in 1775 was determined to insist that this time the

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chief usher do his duty.59 After the entry ceremony, Repnin was happy to report to the empress that the honours accorded to him were superior to those accorded to Rumiantsev. On the eve of his entry in the Ottoman capital, the grand vizier sent him a gift with the master of the ceremonies (teshrifatji-effendi), whereas Rumiantsev had to content himself with the gift of the grand vizier’s deputy (kiaya-bey) brought by a simple footman (chokadar). Unlike the marshal of Rumiantsev’s embassy, his counterpart in 1775 was received by the grand vizier in person in order to discuss the form of the entry ceremony. During the embassy’s entry into the capital as well as on the days of Repnin’s audience with the grand vizier and the Sultan Abdul-Hamid I, the chief usher was going ahead of the Russian ambassador rather than on his side, as was the Ottoman habit meant to demonstrate the subordinate character of the foreign envoy called by the Porte to answer for the members of his ‘nation’.60 The negotiations between the dragoman of the Russian embassy and the Ottoman master of ceremonies and chief usher concerning the reception of Repnin by the grand vizier and the sultan proved to be even more complicated than those preceding the ambassadorial exchange at the border. As Repnin wrote to the Russian vice-chancellor N.I. Panin, the Ottomans would accept certain conditions one day and reject them the day after, so that almost two months passed between the ambassador’s entry into the capital and his first visit to the Porte.61 Although an agreement was eventually reached, Repnin’s meetings with the grand vizier proved to be a veritable ceremonial war, in which each side did its best to humiliate the other by manipulating the ritual. During their first meeting, Repnin deliberately stopped at the door of the reception chamber in order not to enter it first and thereby allow the grand vizier to pretend that he had made the ambassador wait for his own arrival if only a second.62 The grand vizier retaliated on the day of Repnin’s audience with the sultan. He arrived at the Porte late and pointedly turned away when passing the Russian ambassador, who, in accordance with the custom, was attending the passage of the vizieral cortege near the wall opposite the Porte. Repnin could do no better than to reciprocate by turning demonstratively to the members of his suite and starting a conversation with them as the vizier and his suite were passing by.63 The ceremonial war continued after Repnin entered the Porte. The Ottomans were slow to invite him to take a special bench, on which foreign envoys would sit in order to attend the vizieral court prior to

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their audience with the sultan. To get things moving, the Russian ambassador had to threaten that he would occupy the bench without invitation.64 During Repnin’s second meeting with the grand vizier, which immediately preceded the audience with the sultan, the latter did not bow in recognition of the Russian ambassador, who in return took his seat not looking at the vizier.65 After the ceremonial meal of which Repnin partook with the grand vizier, the Russian ambassador was offered a dark towel and not a white one, which was given to the vizier. The Russian ambassador met this challenge by dropping the towel to the floor and drawing a white kerchief out of his pocket.66 Repnin also had to reject the offer of rose water and a pipe since he was the last to receive them among those present. Neither the grand vizier nor his suite would stand up when Repnin rose in order to proceed to the place where the customary overcoat was put on the foreign envoys before they were allowed to see the sultan. The Russian ambassador got his revenge by turning his back to the grand vizier before leaving the chamber.67 Although Repnin’s actual meeting with the sultan passed peacefully, the tense atmosphere of the entire audience ceremony apparently took its toll upon the ambassador, who complained of catching a cold.68 This small war of signs between Repnin and the grand vizier illustrates the great importance of bodies and their movements in diplomatic exchanges at those moments when representation of the ruler by his or her ambassador was at stake. It also demonstrates that diplomatic exchanges between the two powers did not proceed according to a totally prearranged script. Even though the Russian envoys and the Ottoman officials seem to have acted in the straightjacket of ritual, the terms of this ritual were constantly changing and fluctuating. As Repnin’s case testifies, these terms were re-negotiated not only prior to the exchange, entry and reception of embassies, but also during those very ceremonies. The amount of time and attention devoted to the negotiation on the matters of ceremony proves the relative importance of representation vis-a`-vis the other functions that diplomacy performed in Russia’s relations with the Ottoman Empire during the early modern period. With only slight exaggeration one can say that the most important task of the grand ambassador was to ensure that he and his embassy were properly treated. This overview of the tsar’s embassies to the sultan both before and after the reign of Peter the Great corrects the picture of the character of Russian diplomacy in the age of the reformer tsar. The grand embassy to

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Europe of 1697–8 was central to the conventional narrative of Peter the Great’s foreign policy. The historigraphic accounts of this embassy stress above all its negotiating and knowledge-gathering functions.69 Such an interpretation of the role of diplomacy in general and embassies in particular fits nicely the grand narrative of Russia’s modernization, in which the tsar’s personal ‘learning from the West’ occupies such a great part. True, the early eighteenth-century Russian elites were sometimes acutely aware of their country’s technological inferiority and were in search of military, administrative and political models that would help close the gap between Russia and the more advanced powers of Western and Central Europe. This, however, is only part of the story. When it takes the place of the whole, it leads to anachronistic projection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century mentalities and perceptions onto the early modern period. Considerations of status were at least as important as new technologies. The desire to become ‘the most respected power’ in Constantinople was the product of the early modern mentalities that made the tsars and the boyars so uncompromising in the issues of precedence. The real change produced by Peter’s reforms related not to the goals of Russian diplomacy in the capital of the sultans, but the means of achieving them. No less than their Muscovite predecessors, Rumiantsev and Repnin were convinced that contestations over issues of ceremony with the Ottomans were crucial for the standing of the Russian Empire. However, the extraordinary ambassadors of the post-Petrine era attained this goal by borrowing their notions about proper ceremony from their Western counterparts rather than from their Russian predecessors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The new sensibilities developed by the Russian rulers and elites in the course of Westernization led them to adopt the Western and specifically Habsburg model of ambassadorial ritual. The growing importance of European diplomats as role models for their Russian counterparts is even better illustrated by the example of the tsar’s permanent representatives in Constantinople during the eighteenth century.

Russian and European Diplomats in Constantinople Like diplomacy itself, the diplomatic corps acquired its definitive shape by the middle of the eighteenth century, and the term itself began to be

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used around the same time. However, the origins of diplomatic corps as a collective body of foreign representatives at the court or capital of a given ruler can be traced to Renaissance Italy. According to Garrett Mattingly, foreign diplomats in the papal Rome for the first time displayed a sense of collective solidarity, followed a mutually recognized code of behaviour and even acted as a quasi-corporate body.70 In the opinion of G.R. Berridge, a specialist on British diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire, the seventeenth-century Constantinople constituted the next chapter in the history of the diplomatic corps avant la lettre.71 As early as the 1620s, the four permanent ambassadors (the Venetian, the French, the British and the Dutch) proved capable of putting up a common front against the perceived injustices of the Ottoman government.72 By 1700, when the Porte agreed to accept a permanent Russian representative, the diplomatic society in Constantinople had de facto existed for almost a century. Therefore, in addition to claiming the highest rank in the eyes of the Ottomans, the eighteenth-century Russian residents faced the task of securing the proper place for themselves and their country in this diplomatic community. Although the Russians were clearly latecomers, their establishment at the shores of the Bosphorus coincided with the development of the theory and language of European diplomacy, which they were prompt to adopt. The integration of the Russian envoys into the diplomatic corps of Constantinople was marked by their rather aggressive usage of the discourse of European diplomacy against both the Ottomans, whom the Russians portrayed as totally foreign to its principles, and certain representatives of the European powers, whose connivance they blamed as the reason for the persistence of the ‘barbarous’ Ottoman practices. Although important changes in the ambassadorial ceremonial took place later, Peter’s reign constituted a new departure in diplomatic relations between Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire in other respects. After his envoy P.B. Voznitsyn participated in the negotiations at Karlowitz in 1697–9, Peter the Great dispatched E.I. Ukraintsev to Constantinople to sign a peace treaty in 1700. Indicative of the tsar’s desire to change the format of his relations with the sultan was the decision to send Ukraintsev on board The Fortress – one of several men-of-war that were launched on the Azov Sea after the capture of Azov in 1696. Even more important from the point of view of the present subject was the designation of P.A. Tolstoi as Russia’s first permanent envoy to Istanbul in 1702.

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The sultan’s officials met him with the demand to compensate the Greek merchants robbed by the Zaporozhian cossacks and then demanded Tolstoi’s return home, motivating it by the fact that the peace treaty had been signed and that there were no outstanding matters justifying the continued stay of the tsar’s representative in Constantinople. At first glance, such a demand suggested the unwillingness of the Ottomans to treat Russia as equal to other European powers, who already had permanent representatives on the shores of the Bosphorus. The tsar’s desire to have such a representative can be seen as one of the aspects of his effort to make Russia a European power. Upon a closer examination, however, the situation is a little more complicated. The Venetian ambassador (bailo) and the ambassadors of France and Great Britain resided in Constantinople to serve the extensive commercial relations that existed between these countries and the Ottoman Empire.73 Their continual presence was required by the great number of Venetian, French and British subjects who permanently resided in the domains of the sultan and whose status was regulated by the system of capitulations.74 Since the Russians were not one of the trading nations, the French ambassador hastened to point out to the Ottomans that the tsar’s permanent resident in Constantinople would serve no other purpose but to foment the rebelliousness of his numerous Orthodox co-religionists among the sultan’s subjects. Unsurprisingly, the Ottomans were unwilling to accept Tolstoi’s credentials. After they did so, the tsar’s envoy repeatedly complained to his brother, the governor of Azov I.A. Tolstoi, about being ‘despised’ by the grand vizier (Daltaban Mustafa Pasha, 1702– 3) and ‘humiliated before other ambassadors’.75 In practice, this meant that Tolstoi’s audience at the grand vizier’s and the sultan’s was arranged ‘on a smaller scale than the one that was granted to other envoys’.76 The quality of reception apart, the Muscovite practice was to demand that the tsar’s envoys be the only ones received by the given ruler on that day.77 Mindful of this principle, Tolstoi was particularly annoyed when on the days of his audiences in 1706 and 1709, the sultan also received the crouching envoys of the vassal Republic of Ragusa with their annual tribute, yet his protests were to no avail.78 With the appointment of a less hostile vizier (Kavanoz Ahmed Pasha, August– November 1703), the Russian envoy was allowed to reside permanently in Adrianople (which was the sultan’s place of residence in this period), ‘as is the custom with the Habsburg envoys’. In Tolstoi’s

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own explanation, the latter were allowed to stay permanently at the sultan’s court because they were sent ‘not for commercial pursuits as others, but for the treatment of great state affairs’.79 One can see that the Russian envoy was aware of the distinction that the Ottomans made between the ambassadors of the maritime nations and those of Vienna. Indeed, the Habsburg legate was the only European representative who was in charge of the primarily political (rather than commercial) relations between his ruler and the sultan. Since commerce between Russia and the Ottoman Empire at this time was minimal, the Russian– Ottoman relations were also primarily ‘political’ and thus to accept the permanent envoy of the tsar would mean to recognize implicitly Russia’s status as equal to that of the Holy Roman Empire. Given the earlier desire of the Ottomans to send Tolstoi back home, the permission to reside permanently close to the sultan in Adrianople was a clear progress. At the same time, Tolstoi remained uncertain whether the vizier’s benevolence would extend to underwriting the cost of his improved lodging.80 Rather realistically, he attributed this benevolence to the desire of the Ottomans to prevent him from establishing contact with Greek co-religionists in Constantinople. Tolstoi’s assignment to living quarters at Adrianople continued the traditional Ottoman practice of keeping the Muscovite envoy apart from the European residents. To that end, the Ottomans usually lodged the representatives of the tsar in Constantinople, away from the diplomatic district of Pera, and did not permit them to exchange visits with the envoys of other powers.81 Only by the end of his mission, in 1710, did Tolstoi manage to obtain the right to choose the place of his residence at the price of giving up the usual allowance that the Ottomans provided to foreign envoys. Having established himself in Pera, Tolstoi, in the words of the British ambassador, Sir Robert Sutton, ‘is now in all appearance upon the same foot as we, and is going to receive and return our Visits’.82 Tolstoi tried to develop this success and, in Sutton’s appreciation, ‘gain precedence of the Embassadours of Crowned heads’ by obtaining the right to be the first to visit to the new grand vizier or, when the latter was refused, to obtain a more solemn audience than was accorded to other ambassadors.83 The Habsburg resident Tallmann reported to Joseph I that, before the audience at the sultan’s in January 1710, Tolstoi ‘insisted on being treated on a par with the ambassadors of Your Imperial Majesty’. While the Ottomans would have Tolstoi don a

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simple overcoat as was practised with the representatives of all other powers, the Russian envoy demanded unsuccessfully an overcoat furred with zibeline, which until then was the exclusive privilege of the Habsburg ambassadors.84 Tolstoi’s actions demonstrate that achieving equality with other representatives at the Sublime Porte was not exactly his goal, despite his initial complaints of being humiliated before other ambassadors. Instead, working from a low start, he sought to obtain the highest esteem from the Ottomans, which necessarily presupposed having a higher status than other envoys. By the end of his mission in 1710, Tolstoi insisted on being the first of the foreign ministers to be received by the new grand vizier, Ko¨pru¨lu¨zade Numan Pasha, i.e. ahead of the French ambassador who customarily had this honour. In his memoir addressed to the new vizier, Tolstoi called Peter the Great ‘the allpowerful tsar and emperor’, to the predictable displeasure of the Habsburg internuncio Tallmann.85 Tolstoi’s stubborn defence of precedence helped the French ambassador and the envoy of the Swedish King Charles XII (who languished in Bender after his defeat at Poltava in 1709) to convince the Ottomans to declare war upon Russia.86 The struggle of the Russian representatives for their formal status in the diplomatic hierarchy of Constantinople was more or less over by the late eighteenth century. One of the clauses of the Kuchuk– Kainarji treaty of 1774 upgraded the formal rank of the Russian minister from the third (resident) to the second (envoy or minister plenipotentiary) and stipulated that ‘the Ottoman Empire would demonstrate in his regard all attention and respect that are accorded to the representatives of the firstrank powers’. Among the foreign envoys of the second rank, the head of the Russian mission was to follow immediately after the Habsburg internuncio. If the latter was absent, he was to follow immediately after the foreign representatives of the first rank, i.e. the French, British and Dutch ambassadors and the Venetian bailo.87 The Russian representative was thereby placed above the heads of the Prussian, Swedish, Danish and Neapolitan missions. The opinions that the Russian representatives in Constantinople held about their European colleagues are indicative of their integration into the diplomatic community on the shores of the Bosphorus. To begin with, before the reign of Peter the Great the reports of the Russian envoys did not contain characterizations of the envoys of European

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powers or any references to their actions with respect to Russia. It is noteworthy that initially Russian ambassadors portrayed their European counterparts as hostile towards the interests of the tsar. Sent to conclude the peace treaty in the wake of the Russian– Ottoman war of 1677 –81, P.B. Voznitsyn reported that ‘the Poles and those from the Caesar’s side [i.e. the representatives of the Habsburg emperor – V.T.] tried hard to prevent him from accomplishing his task’.88 Seventeen years later, at the time of the Karlowitz negotiations, Voznitsyn complained to Peter the Great that neither the ministers of the allied powers (i.e. of the Habsburg Monarchy or Poland) nor those of the mediating powers (England and the United Provinces) ‘show any good will to him and do everything clandestinely’.89 At the very end of the century, another Russian ambassador, E.I. Ukraintsev, reported that ‘no help was to be expected from the Imperial, Venetian, English and Dutch ambassadors, as all of them are duplicitous and calumnious’. Although the English and the Dutch ambassadors sent Ukraintsev their greetings and offered mediation, they, as well as the French ambassador and the Polish envoy, ‘support the Turks in everything’ and the Turks ‘respect and trust them’ in return.90 Although they could still find ‘the ministerial cunnings (khitrosti)’ to be ‘inscrutable’,91 the eighteenth-century Russian envoys to Constantinople were less likely to complain about a hostile environment or isolation than their seventeenth-century predecessors. Undoubtedly, this had to do with their growing familiarity with the institutions and practices of the European diplomacy. After 1700, all heads of the Russian mission in Constantinople had at least the experience of living abroad, if not of serving in various diplomatic capacities. P.A. Tolstoi and I.I. Nepliuev became envoys after educational trips to Italy undertaken on the orders of Peter the Great. Nepliuev’s successor A.A. Veshniakov occupied a diplomatic position in Spain prior to his transfer to Constantinople, while the Russian resident during the 1770s, A.S. Stakhiev, had previous diplomatic experience in Sweden. Finally, the longest-serving eighteenth-century Russian envoy, A.M. Obreskov, spent ten years in Constantinople as a member of the Russian mission before he became its head in 1750. The correspondence of the Russian envoys of the eighteenth century still contains bilious character sketches of their European counterparts. For example, A.A. Veshniakov, the Russian resident in Constantinople

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in 1734– 46, described the British ambassador George Henry Hay, Earl of Kinnoull, as ‘openly and unashamedly villainous’.92 For his part, Obreskov characterized the Austrian internuncio Johann Amadeus Franz de Paula Tugut as ‘by nature insincere and prone to intrigue’ and claimed that Tugut had ‘a personal hatred’ of the Russians.93 In themselves, such unflattering characterizations of foreign representatives were not peculiar to the Russian diplomats. The famous seventeenth-century British ambassador Sir Thomas Roe found his long-serving Dutch counterpart Cornelius van Haga ‘so corrupted by [Ottoman] manners that he is a shame of ambassadors’ and described the French ambassador Philippe de Harlay as ‘stiff-necked, impetuous and malicious’.94 In one respect, the critical attitude of the Russians towards the European representatives in Constantinople went beyond the personal invectives typical of early modern diplomats. As they interiorized the rules and principles of European diplomacy, the Russians became increasingly sensitive to the peculiarities of the Ottoman approach to foreign relations. Tsarist representatives denounced the humiliating implications of Ottoman diplomatic ritual as well as their custom of imprisoning the envoy of a foreign power to which the sultan had declared war. The eighteenth-century Russian rulers were quite eager to assert the status of their country as a first-rank power and, at the same time, were more often at war with the sultans than anyone else in Europe. For this reason, the Russian envoys were equally likely to contest with the Ottomans the points of honour and find themselves prisoners of Yedikule. In this situation, the Russians were prone to criticize what they considered to be an indulgent attitude of the European diplomats towards the Ottoman manner of conducting foreign relations. This criticism is clearly formulated in the writings of Pavel Artem’evich Levashev, who was the charge´ d’affaires of the Russian mission during the 1760s. Together with the Russian envoy Obreskov, he became an inmate of the Castle of Seven Towers at the outbreak of the Russian– Ottoman war of 1768–74. Two decades later, in his Letters from Constantinople, Levashev dwelt extensively on the difference between Ottoman diplomatic ritual and the norms and practices that Russia had recently come to share with other European countries. According to Levashev, the respect and courtesy shown by local Ottoman authorities to a foreign envoy on the latter’s way to Istanbul led one to hope that not

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only would ‘such gestures of kindness... continue’, but also that ‘the ambassador will have a pleasant reception and stay at the capital’.95 However, as guests of the sultan, foreign ministers were not only flattered and coddled, but also subjected to numerous ‘humiliations’ before and during their audiences with the vizier or the sultan. Levashev mentions the requirement that a foreign ambassador don special pelisses and kaftans, the miserable rooms where he was kept waiting before the audience and the uncomfortable furniture on which he had to sit. No less humiliating, according to Levashev, were the long hours that envoys had to spend observing the dispensation of justice by Ottoman officials before being admitted to see the sultan, or the food that they had to eat after it had passed through the hands of a servitor who used his own nails to tear morsels of meat.96 The hodgepodge of hospitality and humiliation to which foreign envoys were subjected was spiced with a sense of physical danger. Lacking permanent representatives of their own in foreign capitals and hence not fearing reprisals, ‘the Turks not only never showed respect to Christian ministers, but in fact mistreated, tortured and killed many of them’. After an impressive list of foreign envoys mistreated in Constantinople, Levashev concluded that the Ottoman ‘way of thinking and behaviour’ was ‘completely different from that of other nations, especially the European ones’.97 Levashev’s five-year stay in Istanbul came after more than a decade of diplomatic service in Stockholm, Dresden, Vienna, and Regensburg. In this period, he not only learned the practical aspects of diplomacy, but also worked on a Russian translation of Franc ois Callie`res’s De la manie`re de ne´gocier avec les souverains (1716) – a standard diplomatic textbook of the time.98 Levashev’s case is illustrative of the process whereby many Russian nobles became familiar with the emerging international diplomatic culture.99 Eighteenth-century diplomacy was francophone, increasingly aristocratic, and closely linked with royal courts. Its basic operative principles–reciprocity, continuous management of relations between nations, inviolability of diplomatic agents–were ultimately reflected in ‘certain styles, mores and intellectual values’ shared by the diplomatic agents. Ever since Peter the Great, this international francophone diplomatic culture had become a model for Russia’s autocracy and elite. In the course of the eighteenth century, no fewer than 152 young Russian noblemen studied at the famous school of diplomats at Strasbourg, and an

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even greater number received their diplomatic education as attache´s of Russian embassies in European capitals.100 Being in a favourable position to note the difference between European and Ottoman diplomacy, Levashev was highly critical of the behaviour of his French, British, Dutch and other counterparts in Constantinople. According to Levashev, the European ministers concealed the Ottoman humiliations ‘out of national pride and personal vanity’, while some powers considered their connivance towards the Ottomans ‘the subtlest machiavellian politics’.101 He also argued that the ‘Christian’ manner of reasoning was a poor guide to dealing with the Ottomans, who took it as a sign of weakness.102 The bitterness of Levashev’s remarks about the European diplomats in Constantinople must have been provoked by the attitude of polite indifference or practical helplessness with which the French and other European envoys met the news of the imprisonment of the Russian minister in October 1768 amidst the excesses committed on Constantinople streets by fanatical crowds.103 It is significant, however, that Levashev no longer spoke of ‘villainy and duplicity’ of European diplomats as his seventeenth-century predecessors undoubtedly would have done in his place. Instead, Levashev criticized them for the failure to defend collectively the principles of equality, reciprocity and exterritoriality that had come to define European diplomacy by the eighteenth century. As they became more familiar with the diplomatic context of Constantinople, the Russian representatives started to display an altogether different attitude towards their colleagues. Iakov Ivanovich Bulgakov, the envoy of Catherine the Great during the 1780s, still remarked that he had to ‘fight with the allies as much as with the enemies’.104 At the same time, for Bulgakov, the political rivalry with the representatives of other European powers was devoid of personal enmity towards them. Thus, the Russian minister treated the French ambassador Franc ois-Emmanuel Guignard de Saint-Priest as ‘a man worthy of respect’, to whom Bulgakov was ‘giving his due despite many bitter hours’ caused by the latter’s opposition to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 1783.105 Above all, Bulgakov totally overcame the inferiority complex that his predecessors might have had with respect to the European diplomats. This is illustrated by the complacently ironic tone of his description of the diplomatic community of Constantinople, in which ‘the French [ambassador] is putting on airs, the Dutch plays up

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to him, the English boasts, the Viennese writes, the Neapolitan is ceremonious, the Prussian cracks jokes, the Swedish is getting bored while the Danish keeps silent’. For the Westernized Russian noblemen who occupied the diplomatic posts at the capital of the sultans, the local diplomatic corps was above all a polite society, all the more distinct because of its small size and relative isolation from the big ‘civilized’ world. With their communication with the Ottoman hosts limited to a number of highly ritualized ceremonies, the eighteenth-century Russian diplomats ‘could die from boredom if it were not for [the company of the] foreigners that make the pastimes pleasant’ remarked M.I. Prokudin-Gorskii, a nobleman of the Russian embassy in 1760.106 Bulgakov wrote: We speak daily about weather and about plague, wait for the mail from Vienna, and when it arrives, each of us retreats to his quarters to read it; we tell each other whatnot, because we all get precious little correspondence and some of us nothing at all. We are thus forced to invent things and argue about news. On a superficial look, it could appear that the world is governed from here, but in reality this important correspondence consists of requests to get potatoes and pheasants from Semlin, despite the fact that the latter are here in abundance. In general, everyone is putting on airs, complains about high prices, economizes, but fails to get rich, curses Constantinople and nobody comes here of his own free will.107 A similar picture of apparently carefree enjoyment of life, this time untinged by ennui, was painted in the mid-1830s by the latter-day Russian consul in Syria and Palestine, Konstantin Mikhailovich Bazili, in his Sketches of Constantinople: ‘Balls, musical soirees, whist and promenades – everything is the same as in the best milieus of the civilized world and even the rumours are similar.’108 The heads of the Russian mission in Constantinople purposefully adopted a lavish lifestyle and sought to outstrip their European counterparts in the splendour of the embassy quarters and receptions. Bulgakov bought the house of the Venetian bailo in the village of Buyukdere on the Bosphorus, whereby the Russian embassy acquired permanent quarters at a time when other European missions still rented

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their premises. Bulgakov soon could report to St Petersburg that ‘now everyone regards me differently, the commoners take off their hats in my presence, the clergymen ask me for benediction and this increase of respect extends to Constantinople’s high society so that the sultan’s niece came to see the house and the garden accompanied by 60 women.109 In the words of A.I. Ribop’er, who served in Constantinople both before and after the Russian– Ottoman war of 1828–9, Bulgakov’s acquisition, the Russian summer palace in Buyukdere, ‘seemed to have been specially built for celebrations’. As a host of grand soirees in the wake of the conclusion of the Adrianople treaty of 1829, Ribop’er entertained as many as 400 guests, who would be treated with the specialties of a former chef of Prince Talleyrand. This conspicuous consumption, which Ribop’er paid for out of his own pocket (greatly enlarged by an advantageous marriage to G.A. Potemkin’s granddaughter), achieved the intended result of deeply impressing Mahmud II. The sultan privately asked the Russian envoy to lend his tableware, china and cut glass to the Porte in order to make possible a similar ‘European’ banquet at one of the sultan’s residences, which Mahmud II himself visited semi-incognito in a great departure from the traditional Ottoman court ceremonies.110 The anecdote told by Ribop’er illustrates the Westernization of the Ottoman Empire. This process, which was already well under way at the time of Mahmud II (1808– 39), had its roots in the eighteenth century. Changes in Ottoman diplomacy had taken place already at the time of the Congress of Karlowitz (1697– 9). Referring to them in his ambassadorial correspondence, P.A. Tolstoi reported the widespread opinion that the War of the Holy League (1683– 99) ‘has changed many things in Turkey and that they became very circumspect in negotiations with the foreign envoys’.111 Tolstoi’s successors in Constantinople I.I. Nepliuev and A.A. Veshniakov, much to their distress, could appreciate the effectiveness of Ottoman diplomacy during the negotiations that accompanied the Russian– Austrian–Ottoman war of 1735– 9. In his account of these negotiations, the French author Laugier portrayed the Ottomans ‘as knowledgeable about the interests of other courts, as adroit in their demarches and as refined in their politics as the most cultured of nations’.112 The emulation of the European diplomatic institutions and practices continued later in the century, in particular, during the reign of Selim III (1789–1808), who appointed the first permanent Ottoman representative in a foreign capital.

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The treatment of the Russian envoys who were present in Constantinople at the outbreak of the Russian–Ottoman wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals a characteristic evolution in this respect. Tolstoi still did not enjoy the fruits of new ‘circumspection’ towards foreign envoys that the Ottomans reportedly demonstrated in the wake of Karlowitz: on the eve of Peter the Great’s Pruth campaign of 1711 he was imprisoned in Yedikule. The same applied to his immediate successors, P.P. Shafirov and M.B. Sheremet’ev, who were sent to the sultan as hostages (amanats) guaranteeing the tsar’s implementation of the peace treaty. Of the eighteenth-century Russian ministers present in Constantinople at the moment of the outbreak of a Russian–Ottoman war, only A.A. Veshniakov avoided the famous fortress prison and was allowed to leave for Russia – the unwillingness of the Ottomans to fight in 1735–6 made them quite diplomatic.113 At the outbreak of the next war in 1768, A.M. Obreskov was thrown into Yedikule, where his condition was so abominable that he would not have survived three days according to the report of the commandant of the fortress. By simulating illness Obreskov managed to improve the conditions, but they were still by no means comfortable. Attached to the army of the Grand Vizier Moldovandzhi Pasha, who headed a campaign against the Russians in 1769, he had to cover great distances on foot and reported being treated roughly. Eventually, the Ottomans agreed to keep Obreskov in confinement in Adrianople, out of which he even managed to send letters to his immediate supervisor, the president of the college of foreign affairs, Count N.I. Panin. Obreskov owed much of his efficiency to S.L. Lashkarev, one of half a dozen jeunes de langues of the Russian mission, who effectively directed it during the absence of the envoy. Despite the Ottoman surveillance, Lashkarev not only managed to establish contact with Obreskov and Levashev, but also kept a secret correspondence with the commander of the Russian navy in the Archipelago A.G. Orlov, as well as with the commander of the Danubian army Field Marshal A.M. Golitsyn.114 Obreskov was released only in 1771 due to the insistent efforts of the Austrian and Prussian diplomats who served as mediators in the Russian–Ottoman negotiations that took place during the last three years of the war. As Obreskov’s charge´ d’affaires, Levashev accompanied his superior through all these tribulations, and this personal experience served as the basis of his invectives against the Ottoman manner of mistreating foreign representatives.

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Like Obreskov before him, Ia.I. Bulgakov was also confined to Yedikule at the beginning of the new war in 1787. This time, however, the Ottomans treated the Russian envoy as a ‘guest’ (musafir) from the very beginning, and the conditions of Bulgakov’s confinement were rather lax, not to say comfortable. He managed to dispatch to the Russian government some intelligence about the military plans of the Ottomans and devoted the rest of his time to the translation of the twenty-seven-volume Le Voyageur Franc ais by Joseph de La Porte, doing one volume each month. The speed and quality of this translation, which went through two editions within Bulgakov’s lifetime, testify that even at the time of war, late eighteenth-century Constantinople could be a place congenial for European cultural pursuits. Bulgakov was released in 1789, when the war was still in full swing, on the initiative of his former rival, the French ambassador Count Choiseul-Gouffier, and returned to Russia via the Archipelago and Italy.115 The willingness of the reformer sultan Selim III to recognize the principle of extraterritoriality of foreign diplomats was confirmed seventeen years later, at the outbreak of the Russian– Ottoman war of 1806–12. Unlike his predecessors, A.Ia. Italinskii, who represented Alexander I in Constantinople, was never placed into Yedikule. Italinskii could still fear the rage of a fanatical mob after the Porte declared a holy war against Russia in response to the latter’s occupation of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1806. Nevertheless, mindful of Italinskii’s security, the sultan dispatched troops to guard the Russian mission. Having failed to prevent war, the tsar’s envoy was allowed to leave Constantinople on a British warship in the direction of the Archipelago where he joined the Russian naval squadron of Admiral D.N. Seniavin.116 The same applied to A.I. Ribop’er, the Russian envoy to the sultan at the later stages of the Greek crisis of the 1820s, which culminated in the Russian –Ottoman war of 1828– 9. Following the destruction of the Ottoman –Egyptian fleet at Navarin in November 1827 by the combined British, French and Russian naval squadrons, the Porte threatened to imprison Ribop’er, yet he managed to escape into the Mediterranean under the fire of the Ottoman cannons in the Dardanelles.117 Bulgakov was thus the last Russian diplomat to be imprisoned in Yedikule in addition to being perhaps the first Russian representative who was fully at home in the diplomatic community of Constantinople.118 It is remarkable, however, that while they assimilated into the European

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diplomatic culture, the members of the Russian elite serving in Constantinople tended to ignore the signs of Westernization apparent in the Ottoman way of conducting foreign relations. Once formed, the perceptions of Ottoman ‘barbarity’ proved to be extraordinarily persistent. Levashev’s Letters on Constantinople were published in 1789, the year of the ascendancy of Selim III, the first in a series of the Ottoman reformer sultans. One hundred years later, V.A. Teplov’s book about the European representatives in Constantinople differed little from Levashev’s account in cataloguing the cases of the Ottoman mistreatment of diplomatic agents, even though by that time such practices had been long discontinued.119 When they could not completely ignore the transformations that were taking place in the Ottoman political system, Russian diplomats adopted a skeptical attitude towards them and questioned the authenticity of the Ottoman commitment to the policies of Westernization and/or their chances for success. In anticipation of the later critiques of the Tanzimat, the Russian envoy during the 1790s V.I. Kochubei argued that Selim III’s ‘New Order’ (nizam-i jedid) ‘will not take root’ since ‘the national prejudices of the Turks, even if weakened, will not tolerate all innovations’.120 The strenuous efforts of the sultans to bring their empire closer to European models of diplomacy, warfare and taxation were used by Kochubei and subsequent Russian commentators as illustrations of the basic immobility of the Ottoman society. The transformation of the Ottoman Empire into an ‘Orient’ was one of the corollaries of the integration of the Russian representatives into the diplomatic corps of Constantinople. This century-long process produced a paradoxical result. On the one hand, the successors of Bulgakov felt entirely habitue´ at diplomatic rendezvous and were completely familiar with the language and practices of European diplomacy. In their polemical defence of ‘civilized’ forms of foreign relations against the Ottoman ‘barbarities’, they were often ‘more European than the Europeans themselves’. On the other hand, their complete cultural integration coincided with the increasingly widespread concern of other European diplomats over Russian ‘designs’ against the Ottoman Empire, which announced the emergence of the Eastern Question. With time, this concern developed into preoccupation of the broader European public opinion with ‘the Russian menace’ that by the time of the Crimean War came to be seen as the product of Russia’s ‘Asiatic despotism’ totally foreign to ‘European civilization’.121 And yet,

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as the recent studies of Catherine’s ‘Greek project’ demonstrate, the ideology of Russia’s expansion emerged in the context of general Westernization of the Russian ruling class and was a product of this process.122 The plan of partition of the Ottoman Empire conceived by Catherine the Great in 1781 was drafted in a letter to Joseph II, and its implementation was unthinkable without Russia’s cooperation with the Habsburg Monarchy, a polity for which diplomacy and the balance of power became almost a source of identity.123 The paradox is therefore resolved as soon as one realizes that European-style diplomacy was as much a source of Russian ‘designs’ against the Ottoman Empire as a means of their implementation.124 The integration of the Russian representatives into the European diplomatic community in Constantinople and the attendant Orientalization of Ottoman diplomacy in their writings indicate that the constructed cultural distance and the real cultural rapprochement are equally capable of generating political conflict. Russia’s relation to the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period demonstrates the growing importance that ‘Europe’ acquired in the interaction of the two peripheral powers. Although it can be argued that neither the Russian nor the Ottoman Empire was a ‘peripheral’ or ‘marginal’ polity until their political elites defined their predicament in these terms, once this happened, the Russian– Ottoman relations were profoundly influenced by the position that the tsar and the sultan held with respect to other European states. The principles, practices and institutions of the nascent modern diplomacy began to affect the relations between the two powers. The historical gap that separated the beginning of the tsars’ and the sultans’ conscious policies of Westernization further complicated the picture. Even though at the dawn of the early-modern period the Ottoman Empire was much closer than Muscovy to the emergent phenomenon of diplomacy, by the eighteenth century the opposite was true. Russia’s adoption of European diplomatic practices and institutions happened earlier and was more decisive than was the case of the Ottoman Empire, where this process was slower and extended well into the nineteenth century. As a result, the Russians came to consider their relations with the realm of the sultan within the context of their relations with other European nations well before the Ottomans turned to European military and political technologies in order to avert the Russian menace.

CHAPTER 2 CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES

The loss of freedom, captivity among an ignorant and ferocious people, chains and suffering, both physical and spiritual, painful separation from the family and everything dear to me, – all this greatly shook me and weighed heavily upon my mind.1 The seventeenth-century political writer Juraj Krizˇanic´ remarked that the Russian Tsardom, however glorious, broad and vast, had suffered ‘so many defeats ( poboishcha) and devastations that its survival [was] surprising’. According to Krizˇanic´, the raids of the Crimean Tatars, whereby thousands of the tsar’s subjects became Ottoman slaves, constituted the most important drain on the Russian resources. Having visited Constantinople, Krizˇanic´ could assert with a certain credibility that the oarsmen in the Ottoman galley fleet were almost exclusively of ‘Russian origin’.2 In the meantime, the Russian captives in ‘Greece, Palestine, Syria, Egypt and Anatolia and the entire Turkish Kingdom were so numerous as to make one ‘wonder whether there [were] still any people left in Russia itself’. In Krizˇanic´’s estimation, the number of Muscovite towns and the density of the population were indeed so low as to amount to only one half or even one third of what the land could support.3 A Croatian Catholic monk, who entered Russian service in order to propagate the union of churches, Krizˇanic´ was also the first among the early Pan-Slavist authors to envision Muscovy as the champion of its oppressed co-nationals in the Ottoman Empire.4 The theme of Russian captives allowed him to demonstrate that the Ottoman Empire was an

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enemy of both Russia and the southern Slavs. While there are numerous references to Russian slaves in early modern European literature on the Ottoman Empire, Western authors did not propose to the tsar, as did the Croatian missionary, any specific plans for the conquest of the Crimean Khanate whose existence was weakening Russia and empowering the Ottomans.5 Although the Muscovite authorities of the time had little appreciation for Pan-Slavic ideas and exiled Krizˇanic´ to Siberia upon discovering his Catholic identity, the comments of the Croatian writer on the Russian captives in the Ottoman Empire spotted an important problem that the tsar and his subjects faced in their relations with the southern neighbour. Slaves of Slavic origin were a staple of Mediterranean commerce long before the establishment of the sultan on the Bosphorus. The texts of the treaties signed between the Varangian princes and the Byzantines in the tenth and eleventh centuries contained numerous references to slaves whom the former brought to Constantinople alongside fur, wax, honey and other usual items of their commercial ventures. At the turn of the millennium, the Byzantine capital featured a major slave market, at which the Slavic slaves were resold and taken to other parts of the Mediterranean such as Damascus, Alexandria, Genoa and Venice.6 This practice continued several centuries later, following the establishment of the Venetian and Genoese colonies in the Crimea and along the northern littoral of the Black Sea during the 1200s. In the next two centuries, Italian intermediaries supplied 2,000 slaves annually to Mameluk Egypt and sold as many as 10,000 Slavic and Tatar slaves per year at the Venetian market in the early 1400s.7 The share of Eastern Slavs (‘Russians’ in the European terminology of the time) in the total number of slaves brought from the Black Sea region into the Mediterranean rose from 20 percent in the first quarter of the fifteenth century to over 40 percent in the second, whereupon it began to diminish in relative, yet not in absolute terms.8 Following the emergence of the Crimean Khanate as a satellite polity of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims took control of the Black Sea slave trade from the Catholic Christians. The closure of the Black Sea to European commerce was paralleled by the intensification of the Tatar raids into the Lithuanian and Muscovite lands. Chronic rivalry between the two East European polities placed the Crimean khan in a good position to thrive at the expense of both. The grand duke (later tsar)

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of Muscovy, just as his Lithuanian and, later, Polish counterparts, faced the stark choice of paying tribute to the Tatars or else seeing them devastate their domains in an alliance with his Christian rival.9 As a result of these raids, the vast expanses of the steppe to the north of the Black Sea quickly lost what little of the sedentary population they might have acquired during the decline of the Golden Horde in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is noteworthy that the Crimean raids targeted the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth at least as often as the lands of Muscovy. Some Polish historians place the total population losses to such raids at 2 million for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.10 This might be an exaggeration, yet even the incomplete statistics collected by Alan Fisher suggests that the number of both Polish and Muscovite captives has to be counted in hundreds of thousands.11 One consciously conservative estimate suggests that the Crimean Tatars took as many as 150,000 or 200,000 Muscovite captives in the first half of the seventeenth century alone and perhaps twice as many during the entire early modern period.12 At the same time, however significant their number, the Muscovite Russian captives apparently constituted less than a quarter of the average number of 17,500 slaves, who were sold annually at the Caffa market between 1514 and 1654.13 The rest of the Caffan slaves must have been of Ukrainian and North Caucasian origin. This data suggests that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries hundreds of thousands of subjects of the tsar were taken against their will to Crimea. Some of them would subsequently be given back in return for a greater or smaller sum of money, depending upon the social status of the captive.14 Unlike other societies of the medieval and the early modern Middle East, the Tatars were rarely interested in slaves as sources of military and political recruitment. They spent little effort to convert and assimilate the captives and instead viewed them primarily as a source of revenue.15 Efforts to redeem its subjects from captivity caused a significant drain on Muscovy’s resources. In the testimony of G.K. Kotoshikhin, a subsecretary in the Muscovite Foreign Office in the late 1650s and early 1660s, the so-called ‘ransom money’ ( polonianichnye den’gi) collected from the Muscovite households since 1551 amounted to 150,000 rubles annually or seven times the total value of the yearly tribute that Muscovy paid to the Crimean Tatars.16 Considerable parts of the tsar’s treasury and of the revenues of particular boyar families were thus spent to redeem prominent servicemen from captivity.17

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By contrast, captives of low social origin were employed in agricultural work or (more often) sold to the Ottomans at the markets of Caffa and Constantinople, which greatly reduced their chances of being redeemed. Admittedly, Ottoman, Crimean Christian and Jewish subjects would all still buy Russian captives and bring them to Muscovy in order to ‘resell’ them to the Muscovite authorities.18 Moreover, a portion of the ‘captives tax’ introduced in 1551 would be given to the tsar’s envoys to the sultan in order to ransom the Russian slaves in Constantinople. However, this ransom money was not enough to redeem more than a tiny fraction of all Russian captives in the Ottoman capital, where their price must have been higher than in Crimea. Besides, the ability of the Muscovite envoys to the sultan to reach captives who had already been sold into private households of Constantinople and the provinces was severely limited as long as they acted essentially as private buyers. Only during the 1680s did the Russian government for the first time demand from the Porte the liberation of all Russian captives.19 Predictably, the Ottomans rejected this unrealistic demand just as they rejected the early attempts of the Russian government (in 1699 and 1711 – 13) to re-describe the captives as prisoners of war, to be returned in exchange for the Ottoman prisoners of war who were in Russian hands.20 The Pontic steppe was not the only Ottoman frontier region that witnessed the development of slave raids. Comparable phenomena emerged along the Habsburg– Ottoman border in Hungary as well as in the Western Mediterranean, where the vassal Ottoman regencies of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli engaged in piracy and devastated the Italian, Spanish, French and even English coasts. Robert C. Davies estimates that there were as many as 850,000 Southern and Western European slaves in the Barbary States between 1580 and 1680. According to Davies, for the period of 1530– 1780, the number of white European Christian slaves on the Barbary Coast was ‘almost certainly a million’.21 At the same time, in contrast to its Pontic counterpart, ransom slavery along the Habsburg– Ottoman frontier in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hungary was more obviously reciprocal: the subjects of the sultan were nearly as likely to become captives themselves as they were to capture the subjects of the emperor.22 Muslim piracy in the Mediterranean was likewise reciprocal, although the number of ‘Turks’ rowing away on the royal French and papal galleys in all probability never reached the number of Western

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European Christian slaves in Northern Africa.23 This disparity between the numbers of the Christian and Muslim captives was even greater along the Pontic steppe frontier, even though the Zaporozhian and the Don cossacks did take some Turkish and and Tatar captives, who would end up as servants in the Muscovite boyar and Russian aristocratic households.24 Finally, despite the comparable numbers of Western and Eastern European slaves absorbed by the Ottoman Empire and its dependencies during the early modern period, numerous French, Italian, Spanish and British accounts of Barbary captivity contrast with the relative scarceness of captivity narratives in the East European context. Compared with the Western European accounts of captivity on the Barbary Coast, the narratives of the Russian captives in the Ottoman Empire are few in number, yet they constitute a unique entry into the experiences of hundreds of thousands of the tsar’s subjects who were taken to the empire of the sultan against their will.25 Through these sources the modern researcher can attempt to reconstruct the complex choices that faced the Russian Orthodox captives in a Muslim land, their efforts to negotiate a better lot for themselves, as well as the compromises that they had to make in the process. At the same time, captivity narratives illustrate the changing social and cultural profile of their authors and readers. Thus, the vast majority of peasants, cossacks and military servicemen who returned from captivity in the seventeenth century were illiterate and their stories are accessible only through the interrogation records of the Patriarch’s Office (Prikaz patriarshego dvortsa). By contrast, those Russian diplomats and officers who became prisoners during the Russian– Ottoman wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries related their experiences with a growing literary skill and displayed familiarity with Western representations of the Barbary slavery. Produced over a period that comprised more than two centuries, the Russian captivity narratives also reveal a remarkable change in Russian attitudes towards the returnees. Initially, those who made their way back from the realm of the sultan commanded little of the sympathy and compassion that the latter-day captives would enjoy. Having spent years away from the Orthodox land, such people looked suspect to the Muscovite religious authorities who were concerned with the beliefs and practices of their subjects. In order to overcome suspicion and secure their reintegration into the native society, some of the returnees,

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particularly the military men, tried to reinterpret their experience as a continuation of the service to the tsar. Initial association of captivity with apostasy was further undermined by the narratives of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, whose authors would sometimes become captives while pursuing perfectly Orthodox goals. In the meantime, Westernization of the Russian elites secularized perspectives upon captivity without immediately depriving it of inherent ambiguity. No longer overly concerned with the religious practices of the captive, the Russian reading public of the late eighteenth century still questioned the decency and moral integrity of the individual who managed to extricate him- or herself from the Ottoman bondage. In order to render this experience compatible with the noblemen’s notions of honour and dignity, the early nineteenth-century authors of captivity narratives presented themselves as helpless hostages to the ‘barbarity’ and fanaticism of the Muslim crowds, occasionally restrained by a ‘noble Turk’. Re-described as Orientals, the captors helped to render the experiences of their victims fascinating and worthy of compassion in the eyes of the readers.

Narratives of Ottoman Captivity in Pre-Petrine Russia Although the Crimean khans were vassals of the sultans, the passing from the Khanate to the Ottoman Empire proper was arguably no less significant than the initial misfortune of falling into Tatar captivity. It opened before the tsars’ erstwhile subjects a range of altogether different prospects. For one thing, the chances to return to Muscovy, which were high enough as long as the captives remained on the Crimean peninsula, diminished drastically with their arrival in Constantinople. In place of the essentially closed society of the Khanate, the Russians found themselves in an entirely different context that was pregnant with both danger and opportunity. In Ottoman society, the importance of slavery was not only economic, but also social, political and military.26 Slaves were purchased by big households, including that of the sultan, whereby they could end up as concubines, servants or janissaries.27 Slave status assured a modicum of social integration and presented a career opportunity for the particularly capable and lucky ones on condition of their timely conversion to Islam.28 Conversion was rarely pressed upon the slaves, as it usually reduced their resale

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value. At the same time, the slave’s refusal to convert foreclosed the possibilities of comfortable living or social advancement or both. In the worst case, it subjected the Orthodox bodies to the cruel lot of galley slaves.29 Russian captives sometimes faced the hard choice between religious apostasy and physical suffering. Needless to say, few of them passed such a test with their faith unshaken and fewer still managed to escape and return to Muscovy to die as Orthodox Christians in an Orthodox Christian land. The more typical captivity narrative contained the story of forced conversion or at least some indications of apostasy behind the assurances of steadfast Orthodoxy. One finds many relevant examples in the records of interrogations of the Russian subjects who returned from abroad in 1624. One such returnee was Feodor Karpovich Vorob’ev, who fell into captivity in 1612 and was sold to Constantinople. There, he ‘was forced to adopt the Tatar faith’, but ‘was not really a Muslim’ and eventually managed to escape to the Terek river through Persia and the lands of the Kumyks and the Circassians.30 There is a similar story of Ivan Grigor’evich Zhirov, a dweller of Kursk, who had been taken prisoner by the Nogai Tatars seven years before Vorobiev, sent to the Caffa slave market and from there to ‘the Turkish land’. Zhirov managed to escape through Persia and the Caucasus to Astrakhan and claimed, similarly to Vorob’ev, that he was not a ‘Muslim’. Other returnees likewise asserted that in the Ottoman captivity they ‘secretly kept the Christian faith’, although virtually no one could boast of having fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays or observing Lent.31 Female captives confessed of apostasy more frequently. A typical example is that of Orina Reutova from Mtsensk who, after two years in the Nogai captivity in 1614 –16, was sold to Caffa. There she ‘cursed the Christian faith, was painted and ate all sorts of filth on Wednesdays, Fridays and during the Lent’. Another relevant example is the story of Avdot’ia Zabelina from Briansk, who was captured in 1611 by the Nogai Tatars and spent the next thirteen years at the house of an Ottoman pasha in Constantinople, where she had ‘renounced the [Orthodox] faith and would pray according to the Tatar custom’.32 Neither Reutova nor Zabelina would reveal any details about the character of their relationships with the master. An occasional captive was purchased by Armenian, Greek or Jewish subjects of the sultan, in which case he or she was less pressed to make up

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his or her story upon return. This was the case of Petr Semenovich Lavrov and his wife Stepanida from Orel, who were lucky enough to end up as slaves of an Armenian in Constantinople. The couple ‘held the Armenian faith’ and would take communion from an Armenian priest.33 When the master was a non-Muslim Ottoman subject, the pressure to convert and observe his religion was smaller and could be resisted. Thus, Leontii Grigor’evich Minin, who likewise lived at the house of an Armenian, ‘kept the Armenian faith’, but ‘did not pray to the Armenian devil’ (shikh armenskoi ne ispovedoval) and ‘did not take communion’ from the priest.34 The difference in the pressure to convert to Islam and other faiths is clear from the story of Anna Sudakova, who, while in captivity in Constantinople, was first owned by a Turk and then by a Jew. Whereas in the former case she adopted ‘Tatar faith’, she ‘did not hold the Jewish one’.35 However, sometimes a captive converted to a different faith each time he changed master. Thus, the peasant son Korniushka Ivanov ‘held to the Jewish faith’, when owned by a Jewish master, the ‘Tatar faith’, while living with a Turkish master, and, finally, the ‘Russian faith’, when owned by a Greek.36 Those slaves who were purchased by private individuals can be considered the lucky ones, for they had the greatest chance to survive captivity and buy themselves out or be manumitted by the masters after a period of time. By contrast, those who ended up as galley slaves were much more likely to perish quickly, even though the records of the Patriarch’s Office do contain stories of some individuals who survived this ordeal. Particularly striking is the case of Gavrilo Olekseevich Velikopol’skii, captured in battle by the Tatars during the reign of Tsar Feodor Ioannovich (1584 – 98). Velikopol’skii claimed to have spent thirty years on the galleys, during which time he ‘did not renounce the Christian faith’.37 If true, Velikopol’skii’s story is truly exceptional. A more typical story was one in which a Russian galley slave would be liberated after a shorter period of time by the Christian corsairs in the Mediterranean and return to Muscovy by way of Western and Central Europe. This was the case of Efim Annenkov who was captured by the Crimean Tatars and taken to Constantinople by way of Azov. Annenkov served on the galleys for six years before he was liberated by ‘foreigners (nemtsy) in the service of the Spanish king’. He confessed to having attended the churches in Spain and praying according to the Catholic faith.38

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The interrogation records of both the privately owned and the galley slaves indicate a concern of the Muscovite ecclesiastical authorities with the individual’s faith during the period of his captivity. Living for a long period of time outside the realm of the Orthodox tsar, the captives usually did not have the possibility to go to church and observe religious practices such as fasting. In other words, Russian captives involuntarily departed from the redemptive radiance of Orthodoxy, even if they ‘kept to the Orthodox faith’, as most of them claimed they had done. Even those Christians who saved them from the danger of conversion to Islam, such as the occasional Armenian slave master or the Catholic pirates in the Mediterranean, were themselves definitively heterodox from the point of view of the Russian church. The danger of apostasy associated with the captivity was therefore not over until the Russian captive returned to the Orthodox land, confessed and was anointed with myrrh. The majority of captivity narratives recorded at the Patriarch’s Office were very short and reflected primarily the preoccupations of the Muscovite authorities with the faith of the captives. The responses of the returnees tended to be formulaic and seem to have been at least partially suggested by the interrogators and scribes themselves. As a result, the stories look like different combinations of a limited range of elements. The captive was usually taken by the Nogais or the Crimean Tatars, sold in Constantinople and was either forced to convert to Islam or kept his faith (secretly or not), observed fasts on the prescribed days or (in the overwhelming majority of the cases) failed to do so. The Muscovite authorities would register these stories, impose a religious penance and administer the sacrament of reconciliation. Despite the existence of the overall pattern, some of the recorded stories are more elaborate, which gives the modern-day scholar a glimpse of the world of the captive.39 This is especially true of the otherwise scarce narratives of the former galley slaves. Unless delivered by the Christian pirates, they rarely managed to escape from captivity without first climbing a step or two up the social ladder.40 An interesting story was told by Mikita Iushkov, who was captured by the Crimean Tatars near Belgorod during the reign of Boris Godunov (1598 – 1605). Iushkov first lived ‘at [the house of] a Turk’, then was sent to the galleys, where he spent twelve years. Iushkov did not explain this change of fortune. Although the reason could have been his steadfast attachment to the Orthodox faith, in practice galley labour

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was quite often a punishment for less commendable behaviour such as theft or some other misdemeanor. With money of unknown provenance, Iushkov eventually managed to buy himself out and even bought himself a Russian captive woman named Fedora at the Constantinople slave market for the price of 40 rubles. Captured seven years previously, Fedora first lived in a Jewish household (‘but did not hold Jewish faith’) before being sold to an Armenian, in whose house she would take communion from the Armenian priest and ‘held the Armenian faith’. Fedora’s Armenian master eventually sold her to a Turk, to whom she was forced to offer sexual favours before being purchased by Iushkov. Married in a Greek church in Galata, Fedora and Iushkov had four children in ten years before coming to Moscow.41 Admittedly, the couple seems to have been luckier than others, yet it would be safe to assume that every captive made an effort to improve his or her condition. In particular, the captive military men had the opportunity to join the sultan’s army on condition of conversion of Islam as was the case of the knight (boiarskii syn) Feodor Feoktistovich Dorokhin. Captured by the Tatars in 1662, Dorokhin was sold two years later to Constantinople, where he ‘served as knight in place of his master’ (sluzhil vmesto turchanina v reitarakh). After years of service, Dorokhin managed to ‘ransom himself out’ (otkupilsia) and returned to Russia.42 Whereas Dorokhin bought himself out of captivity, the Kaluga musketeer Ivan Semenovich Moshkin won his freedom by leading his fellow captives in a successful revolt against the Ottoman galley crew in 1643. Captured by the Tatars near Voronezh during the 1630s, Moshkin rowed in the galley for seven years before he convinced his fellow oarsmen to ‘beat the Turks and return into the Orthodox realm’. With the help of a Ukrainian steward of the galley commander, the slaves managed to steal and hide 40 pounds of gunpowder at the moment when the commander and his soldiers were busy supplying the Ottoman troops who were wrestling the Azov fortress from the Don cossacks. Upon the return of the galley to the Aegean, a sympathizing Italian renegade provided the conspirators with a dozen scimitars and helped Moshkin to blow up the cabin that contained the sleeping commander and some forty janissaries. In the ensuing fight, the slaves managed to prevail over the remaining Ottoman crew, capture the galley and sail to Messina. There, Moshkin and some forty of his comrades rejected the

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offer of the governor to convert to Catholicism and enter the Spanish service. Instead, they expressed their intention to return to the ‘Orthodox realm’. Deprived of their galley and the riches that it contained, the Russians set forth to Muscovy ‘barefoot and naked’ via Rome, Venice, Vienna and Warsaw. Reported in a Roman newspaper, the heroic escape of Moshkin and company remained unparalleled in the history of Russian captivity in the Ottoman Empire. No less important is how their exploit became a story. Prior to being interrogated at the Patriarch’s Office, the returnees submitted a petition which contained Moshkin’s account of the rebellion and brief biographical information on his comrades, many of whom used to be Russian military men captured while on duty.43 The petition mentioned the number of years that each of the captives spent ‘suffering at the galley for the pious tsar’ and enumerated the wounds they received in the fight with the Ottoman crew. Moshkin and company stressed their rejection of foreign faiths and tempting offers of foreign rulers in favour of continued attachment to Orthodoxy and loyalty to the tsar. The returnees clearly sought to present ‘captive suffering’ ( polonskoe terpenie) as a continuation of the service to the tsar and expected remuneration. Their attempt to valorize captivity ran counter to the perception of the captives as ‘tainted’ by contacts with other faiths, which otherwise emerged so clearly in the interrogation records of the returnees held at the Patriarch’s Office. The juxtaposition of the data contained in the Roman newspaper report and Moshkin’s petition offers an additional entry point into the realities of captivity and the return from it. According to the former source, among some 280 oarsmen of the galley, there were 207 Polish subjects and 70 captives from other Christian countries.44 In all probability, the number of Russians among the latter was higher than those nineteen returnees who arrived in Moscow together with Moshkin. In fact, the latter mentions that seven of his comrades were arrested by the local authorities in Messina. Others could have chosen to stay in the Kingdom of Naples, the Habsburg Monarchy or the Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth. Invitations to enter local service, rejected by Moshkin and other returnees, must have been particularly tempting to those who prior to their captivity were peasants and, unlike the military men, had little hope of raising their social status upon return. The social origins for the returnees confirm this

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hypothesis. Thirteen of them served in the military as cossacks, knights (deti boiarskie) or musketeers, and only three identified themselves as peasants.45 Despite the heavy concentration of military men in the borderland areas raided by the Tatars, it is difficult to imagine the same proportion of service people to peasants among the original number of the Russians who rowed away on Moshkin’s galley. Moshkin’s comrades spent between two and twenty-five years on the galleys, although in most cases their ordeal lasted for seven years as was the case of Moshkin himself. The majority of the returnees became galley slaves immediately after they had been captured by the Tatars, but in several cases their biographies were more elaborate. For example, the Tambov peasant Maksimka Poluektov spent fifteen years in Crimean captivity prior to becoming an Ottoman galley slave for another seventeen. Similarly, the cossack Kiriushka Kondrat’ev ‘suffered with his life’ (zhivot muchal) among the Nogais for thirteen years before they sold him to the Ottomans. However, their travails were second to those of Iakim Vasil’evich Bykov, who spent a total of four decades in captivity. During Russia’s Time of Troubles (1605–13), he was taken by the Poles and spent the next nine years in the lands of the Commonwealth. There, he was captured by the raiding Tatars and taken to Crimea. In the course of the next ten years, Bykov made three attempts to escape, but each time was caught and tortured. Eventually, the Tatars sold Bykov to the Ottoman galley where he spent another twenty years. Exhausted by this ordeal, Bykov asked the tsar to be allowed to take monastic vows and join a monastery without paying the customary contribution.46 The narratives of Moshkin and his associates reveal a clear desire to portray their captivity as a continuation of their service to the tsar. The protagonists of this exceptional story sought to position themselves as Christian heroes who deserved rewards rather than as stray sheep who needed some form of spiritual penitence in order to secure their reintegration into the holy Orthodox community, as the Muscovite ecclesiastical authorities would have it. In doing so, Moshkin and company implicitly resisted the dominant interpretation of foreign captivity as a willing or unwilling lapse into heterodoxy, which featured so prominently in the interrogation records of the Patriarch’s Office. Although less spectacular, the latter-day captivity narratives similarly sought to valorize their authors’ experiences in the face of public doubt, suspicion and incredulity.

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The merging of captivity narratives with those of spiritual pilgrimage to the Holy Land constituted one of the aspects of this persistent conflict of interpretations. A characteristic example of captivity-turnedpilgrimage is provided by the Kievan monk Makarii, captured as a boy of twelve by the Crimean Tatars and taken to Constantinople by way of Kilia, where he was sold to a Turk named Rustem. Luckily, Makarii’s Turkish master turned out to be ‘of the Greek faith’ and possessed twelve other Orthodox slaves, in whose company Makarii would ‘attend the Greek churches’ and observe the Orthodox holidays. Eventually, Makarii was ransomed by the monk Tofilei and brought to Mount Athos, where he took a monastic vow and spent eighteen years before returning to Muscovy through Poland.47 The story of the serviceman Vasilii Vasil’evich Polozov offers an even more pertinent example of the merging of the narratives of captivity and those of religious pilgrimage. Captured as a teenager during a Tatar raid near one of the Russian border towns where he served with his father, Vasilii spent eighteen months in Crimea before being offered as a gift to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV. If one is to believe Vasilii, he remained Orthodox for the next twelve years until the sultan found out about his crypto-Christianity. Polozov faced sure death but for the ‘great murza Akhmed’ (the Grand Vizier Ahmed Ko¨pru¨lu¨ – V.T.), whose intervention secured the commutation of capital punishment to galley slavery. Vasilii would have ended his life as an oarsman if it had not been for a shipwreck off the Egyptian coast, which ended his nine-year ordeal. Having reached the shore, Polozov made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, travelling ‘in Turkish dress’ in order not to be arrested by the authorities. Upon visits to the Holy Places of Palestine, which he described in a rather detailed, if standard, way, Polozov travelled across the eastern Ottoman provinces to Georgia and Persia. There, he joined the train of the envoys of Tsar Feodor Alekseevich, which took him back to Muscovy.48 If Polozov’s description of the Holy Places constitutes a large part of his captivity narrative, contemporary pilgrims to Palestine also included the stories of captivity into their accounts, which further blurred the boundary between the two genres. In the early eighteenth century, such was the case of the hieromonks Makarii and Sil’vestr, whom the Ismail garrison did not allow to pass until they gathered enough alms to pay the head tax imposed on the Christian subjects of the sultan.49 In Tulcea, the clerics once again ‘fell into enemy hands, moneyless and speechless’ and

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were released from jail only after the Ottomans realized that there was nothing to take from them.50 In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Chigirin monk Serapion was thrown without ‘guilt and investigation’ into the overcrowded prison of Constantinople. Confined to a latrine for lack of space, the pilgrim spent several days in fear of becoming a galley slave before the intervention of the Russian envoy set him free and enabled him to see the more pleasant aspects of the Ottoman capital.51 Every fifteen to thirty years, the outbreak of yet another Russian – Ottoman war would present an additional difficulty for the pilgrims.52 Stripped of official protection, they risked becoming captives and being pressured to convert to Islam as happened to the chaplain of the Russian mission in Constantinople hieromonk Varlaam. He was in Palestine when the precarious peace established between the tsar and the sultan in the wake of the Pruth campaign of 1711 temporarily broke down. When the news of the imprisonment of the Russian envoys P.P. Shafirov and M.B. Sheremet’ev reached him, Varlaam tried to pass for a Serbian or Bulgarian Ottoman subject (reaya), a strategy that Serapion would adopt four decades later out of fear of being taken for a Russian spy.53 However, Varlaam’s servant soon revealed the true identity of his master, whereupon the vice-governor of Cyprus threw the pilgrim into prison. Until the re-establishment of the Russian –Ottoman relations some fifteen months later, Varlaam experienced ‘many privations, afflictions, sorrows and hungers’. Nevertheless, he resisted the pressure to follow the example of his treacherous servant who converted to the ‘Turkish false belief’.54 Other early eighteenth-century pilgrims were more fortunate and avoided these tribulations, yet their accounts mention encounters with Russian slaves in the Ottoman capital and the Archipelago. At one point, the Old Believer pilgrim-turned-merchant Ivan Luk’ianov found himself surrounded by some fifty Russian galley slaves in Constantinople avid for news from Moscow and Ukraine, disappointed about Peter the Great’s decision to sign a peace with the sultan (i.e. the treaty of Constantinople of 1700) and desperate to see the tsar conquer the Ottoman capital.55 Luk’ianov was ‘terrified’ to hear the stories of the slaves, some of whom had spent two, three or even four decades on the galleys. Many evidently had lost any hope of redemption and blamed the tsar’s envoy Ukraintsev for signing the peace that did not stipulate

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their liberation. The anti-Turkish effusions of others made Luk’ianov fear the prospect of becoming an inmate of an Ottoman prison himself. For the Old Believer Luk’ianov, the complaints of Russian captives about the indifference of the tsarist diplomats to their lot might have served as yet another means to criticize the ‘reign of the Antichrist’. Although not all of Luk’ianov’s potential readers were ready to go that far, they were also unlikely to view the captives merely as actual or potential apostates. Whereas the Patriarch’s Office in the early seventeenth century held the returnees ‘guilty’ for deviating from Orthodoxy in a foreign land, Luk’ianov’s reader could also blame the Russian government for not doing enough to protect its subjects from predatory raids and to redeem them from the cruel suffering. The implicit criticism of the passivity of the Russian authorities in this issue was another way of questioning the semantic link between captivity and heterodoxy that defined the official Muscovite attitude towards the captives. The efforts of Moshkin and his comrades to present their captivity as the continuation of the service to the tsar had the same effect as did the partial integration of captivity and pilgrimage genres in the accounts of Polozov, Makarii, Sil’vestr, Serapion and Varlaam. As a result, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the traditionalist Muscovite view of captivity as a lapse from the redemptive influence of the holy Russian land became severely compromised, opening the way for a variety of conflicting interpretations. The secularization of the Russian elite in the post-Petrine period further complicated Russian perceptions of captivity. On the one hand, it helped to transform captivity from a problem of individual sin or salvation into a political, social and economic problem of the state. On the other hand, the secularization of Russian perspectives on the captives did not immediately eliminate the moral ambiguity associated with captivity. Instead, it signified the replacement of the ecclesiastical authorities with the Russian educated public as the most important judge of the captive’s behaviour.

Russian Educated Society and the Changing Perspectives on Captivity It would be a mistake to assume that the realm of the sultan figured only as a place of cruel captivity and slavery in the imagination of the early modern Russians. In fact, the eighteenth and the early nineteenth

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centuries witnessed considerable numbers of willing Russian emigrants to the Ottoman Empire. These included the so-called Nekrasovtsy cossacks, who fled from the Don after the suppression of the Kondratii Bulavin rebellion (1708–9), the Zaporozhian cossacks, who migrated there after the destruction of the Sich on the order of Catherine the Great in 1775, as well as numerous religious sectarians and fugitive serfs for whom the Ottoman Empire was a place of freedom rather than captivity. It would also be a mistake to assume that all Russian captives dreaded conversion to Islam and dreamed about returning to Muscovy. The abovecited studies of Will Smiley on the Russian–Ottoman negotiations on the return of the captives and prisoners of war in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century indicate that there were a lot of deserters from the Russian army and fugitive serfs who preferred to convert rather than be reclaimed by the Russian authorities.56 However, their stories necessarily have to remain beyond the scope of the present chapter, which focuses on those Russians who were brought to the realm of the sultan against their will, who decided that they did not want to stay and who eventually managed to return to their homeland. As the foregoing discussion demonstrates, the post-Petrine period witnessed important changes in the social profile of the captives, their experiences of captivity and the ways they narrated it. As the balance of power in the Pontic region shifted in favour of Russia, East Slavic captives and slaves in the Ottoman Empire became rarer. The raids of the Crimean Tatars, already in decline by the late seventeenth century, ceased altogether after the Russian– Ottoman war of 1768– 74, which was followed by the Russian annexation of Crimea nine years later. By the end of the early modern period, Russian captives in the realm of the sultan were for the most part prisoners of war, while other categories of captives were increasingly re-described as prisoners of war in the Russian –Ottoman peace treaties. The latter considered as ‘state’ captives even those individuals who were captured by ‘private’ persons prior to or during the war or sold to private slaveowners during the hostilities. The Porte would formally undertake to release all these captives without ransom, just as the Russian government would undertake to release its own Ottoman prisoners.57 One of the last civilian captivity narratives belonged to Vasilii Iakovlevich Baranshchikov, who reported his story to the GovernorGeneral of Nizhnii Novgorod I.M. Rebinder upon return to his native

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city in February 1786.58 Eighteen months later, his account was published in St Petersburg as The Unfortunate Adventures of Vasilii Baranshchikov, the Townsman of Nizhnii Novgorod in Three Parts of the World: America, Asia and Europe from 1780 to 1787 and proved popular enough to justify three other editions before the end of the century.59 The book offered the most elaborate account of captivity in the Ottoman Empire hitherto produced by a Russian civilian. It also provided a unique perspective on the transformation of early modern Muscovite view of captivity in the realm of the sultan and the Muslim countries in broader terms, which reflected the impact of the cultural Westernization of the Russian elites. Baranshchikov was a young merchant from Nizhnii Novgorod who experienced a certain business success and was even able to declare a capital sufficiently large to enter the respectable second guild of merchants. In April 1780, Baranshchikov suddenly left for St Petersburg, where he became a sailor on a ship carrying ship masts to Western Europe.60 The decision to leave his wife, children and business for the fifteen ruble monthly salary of a sailor was due to Baranshchikov’s desire to escape the debtor’s prison after he had lost both his liquid capital and the money of his lenders at the Rostov fair. In December 1780, Baranshchikov’s vessel arrived in Copenhagen. There, the former merchant had the misfortune of falling into the trap of Danish recruiters and ended up on a ship bound for the Danish colony of St Thomas in the Antilles.61 After a five-month journey across the Atlantic and an equally long service as a garrison soldier at St Thomas, Baranshchikov was purchased by a Spanish ‘field marshal’ at the price of two black slaves and taken to the nearby Spanish island of Puerto Rico.62 For over a year, Baranshchikov had to do all sorts of menial jobs until the ‘field marshal’ manumitted his Russian slave and provided him with a passport. While the interrogation record of Baranshchikov taken upon his return to Nizhnii Novgorod did not clarify what made the master release the slave who had cost him so dearly, the published account of Baranshchikov’s travails attributed this decision to the intervention of the governor’s wife who sympathized with the lot of the hapless Russian and his family.63 There is an even greater uncertainty about Baranshchikov’s peregrinations in the Mediterranean, which he reached as a sailor on an Italian ship after a three-month journey across the Atlantic. His knowledge of Italian and Turkish suggested that he had spent years in

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the region. However, one can only hypothesize about the exact chronology of his journey, the places where he lived for a long period of time as well as the changes in his social status. Both his interrogation record and the published account of his travels are deliberately inaccurate, and only a cross-examination of these sources can bring one closer to the truth. In his report to the Nizhnii Novgorod authorities, Baranshchikov consciously minimized his stay in the Ottoman Empire. Upon arriving in Venice he worked for a number of Italians until early 1783, when he became a sailor on a pilgrim ship bound for Jaffa. From there, he reached Jerusalem where the Greek patriarch ordered to brand Baranshchikov and twenty-eight other sailors with the images of the sun and the crucifix on their right hands. Back in Jaffa, Baranshchikov became a sailor on a Greek ship bound for Constantinople. After a tenweek stay in the Ottoman capital, he left for Russia by way of Shumla, Bucharest, Focs¸ani, Ias¸i and Soroca.64 The published account of Baranshchikov’s travels presents a radically different picture. According to it, he left Puerto Rico on a Genoese ship, which was captured by the Tunisian pirates off the Gibraltar coast in January 1784.65 Forced to convert to Islam and branded with an image of the sun on his right hand, Baranshchikov was taken across the Mediterranean to Palestine, where he spent twenty months as a slave serving coffee to the pirate chief Mohamed in his house in Bethlehem.66 Severely beaten on his heels after a failed attempt to escape, the Russian captive eventually managed to sneak on board a Greek ship whose captain accepted him as a sailor. A call on Jaffa allowed Baranshchikov to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where the Greek clergymen branded a crucifix on his right hand as a sign of his liberation from the Muslim faith.67 According to the published account, the Greek ship next took Baranshchikov to Venice where, in the course of four weeks, his story and his Spanish identity papers elicited a certain sympathy on the part of the authorities and the public. Armed with a Venetian passport, Baranshchikov could now leave for Russia, yet he kept his promise to the Greek captain to serve as a sailor until the ship reached Constantinople.68 Upon his arrival at the Ottoman capital nearly six months after the escape from slavery, the penniless Baranshchikov tried to report to the Russian envoy Ia.I. Bulgakov, but was chased away by his subordinates.69 Baranshchikov’s appeal to the Russian merchants for help was likewise futile and besides

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revealed the fact of his prior conversion to Islam to a scheming Russianspeaking renegade named Usman. The latter blackmailed Baranshchikov into reconverting to Islam and entering the ranks of janissaries.70 Forced to marry Usman’s sister-in-law, Baranshchikov became a source of revenue for Usman and his relatives for the next eight months until, with the help of a sympathizing Greek, he managed to escape from the Ottoman capital in late July 1785.71 Former Zaporozhian cossacks helped the Russian wanderer to cross the Danube in early September, even though they rejected his counsel to return to the fatherland. By way of Wallachia, Moldavia and Poland, Baranshchikov reached the Russian border at Vasil’kov, reported to the Kievan governor S.E. Shirkov, and in February 1786 arrived in Nizhnii Novgorod.72 Both the first and the second versions of Baranshchikov’s wanderings in the Mediterranean reveal obvious chronological inconsistencies. If Baranshchikov indeed stayed in Constantinople for only ten weeks, as he claimed during the interrogation, it is unclear in what circumstances he learned Turkish and where he spent more than two years that elapsed between his departure from Venice to Palestine in early 1783 and his arrival to the Ottoman capital. At the same time, Baranshchikov was unlikely to have spent a lot of time in Venice, as his interrogation record implied, for the published account failed to describe this stay in any considerable detail. His knowledge of Italian was apparently due to a three-month service on a Genoese ship that took him from across the Atlantic as well as his peregrinations in the Mediterranean, a region where Italian was a lingua franca. However, the published version is even more problematic. There is no way one can squeeze Baranshchikov’s alleged twenty-month stay in Palestine as Mohamed’s slave, his six-month sailoring on a Greek merchantman and his ten-month service as a janissary in Istanbul into the period between his capture by the Barbary pirates in January 1784 and his escape from the Ottoman capital in late July 1785. A Tunisian pirate was unlikely to have a permanent residence in Palestine, even if one substitutes the inland Bethlehem for a small coastal town of Bethsemes; nor could a pirate remain idle for twenty months. The scarcity of details on Baranshchikov’s supposed slave life in Palestine contrasts with the remarkable concreteness of the accounts of his prior stay in the Antilles or his later sojourn in Constantinople. These considerations led a modern commentator of Baranshchikov’s travelogue

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to plausibly argue that the entire episode of his forced conversion by the Barbary pirates and his twenty-month slavery in Mohamed’s house in ‘Bethlehem’ must have been an invention.73 The reason for this invention was the necessity to justify Baranshchikov’s real conversion to Islam, which in all probability took place in Constantinople. Once the Russian embassy staff chased him away, the penniless wanderer may have found apostasy expedient since, as a new convert to Islam, he was able to collect considerable alms from the rich Ottomans under Usman’s guidance.74 Although Baranshchikov loathed military service, as a janissary, he knew nothing of the Europeanstyle drill, to which the Danish subjected him on St Thomas.75 Similarly, he may have married Usman’s sister-in-law in order to live more comfortably than the unmarried janissaries in the barracks. Baranshchikov’s subsequent decision to escape from the Ottoman capital in summer 1785 apparently owed to the prospect of a new Russian – Ottoman war (which indeed broke out two years later), as well as a chance conversation with a Russian diplomatic messenger, who told him the route from Constantinople to Russia.76 In this context, the story of Baranshchikov’s first forced conversion on board a Tunisian pirate ship allowed him to present his actual and apparently willing conversion in Constantinople as the product of Usman’s blackmailing. It still needs to be explained why Baranshchikov chose to speak of his conversions to Islam at all. It will be remembered that his interrogation record mentioned neither his slavery in the Ottoman Empire nor his forced conversion to Islam. By contrast, in the book, the realm of the sultan became the place where Baranshchikov was captured and forced to convert not once but twice. This drastic change in the narrative was the product of Baranshchikov’s contact with Russian educated society and of his desperate attempts to avoid one more imprisonment upon return to his native land. No sooner had Baranshchikov arrived at Nizhnii Novgorod that he faced the prospect of ending his days in the salt mines following the suit of his creditors and the sentence of the city magistrate.77 The story of forced conversion offered a way out of these desperate circumstances. Whereas the seventeenth-century returnees sought to hide or otherwise downplay the shameful fact of apostasy during the interrogation at the Patriarch’s Office, Baranshchikov soon realized that ecclesiastical penance associated with apostasy could secure him at least a temporary escape from the civil prison. An appeal to the archbishop of Nizhnii Novgorod and the

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Governor-General Rebinder gave Baranshchikov the opportunity to travel to St Petersburg for a ten-day atonement of his sins at the monastery of St Alexander Nevskii. Having received the sacrament and the certificate of St Petersburg’s consistory, Baranshchikov next began to knock on the doors of Russian aristocrats, many of whom responded to his stories with sympathy and interest.78 The Unfortunate Adventures of Vasilii Baranshchikov should be seen in this context. The Russian wanderer could read and write, yet his literacy skills were not up to the task of producing a publishable book-length account of his adventures. Although the reviewers criticized the ‘confused and unpleasant style revealing a sloppy attitude on the part of the publisher’, an unknown representative of the Russian educated public made a major contribution to whatever text Baranshchikov was able to put down on his own. This person, hiding under the initials ‘S. K. R.’, rendered the narrative into the third person and apparently introduced the story of the pirate attack on the Italian ship and Baranshchikov’s first forced conversion to Islam. The problem of the Barbary piracy caught the attention of the Russian state and educated society as a result of the first Archipelago expedition of the Russian navy in the course of the Russian –Ottoman war of 1768– 74.79 In his description of the Barbary Coast, the veteran of this expedition M.G. Kokovtsev wrote of the devastating Tunisian and Algerian raids on the shores of Sardinia, Sicily and Calabria and informed the Russian readers of the centrality of ransom slavery to the economy of the regencies. Not unlike P.A. Levashev, who was scandalized by the indulgent attitude of the European diplomats towards the Ottoman diplomatic practices, Kokovtsev decried the failure of the European powers to punish the ‘insolence’ of the Tunisians. At the same time, Kokovtsev attributed this ‘insolence’ to the ‘abuses of a tyrannical government’ and not to the inherent ‘evilness’ of the people, whose moral qualities he otherwise found praiseworthy.80 The Russian officer pointed to the tendency of the Tunisians and Algerians to view Europeans as natural slaves, yet he also noted the free profession of the Christian and Jewish faiths in the Barbary States.81 Coming out of the same publishing house that one year later would print The Unfortunate Adventures, Kokovtsev’s book may well have been familiar to Baranshchikov’s anonymous editor and co-author, who presented the Russian wanderer as a victim of Mediterranean piracy and slavery.

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However, his treatment of this theme remained imprecise. In a single sentence the pirates are identified as both ‘Tunisians’ and ‘Misir [i.e., Egyptian – V.T.] Turks’, while the residence of their chief in Palestine was thousands of miles away from Gibraltar, in the vicinity of which they had supposedly captured the Italian ship. Finally, the story of Baranshchikov’s forced apostasy finds little confirmation in the description of the Barbary States produced by Kokovtsev, who noted that Tunisians did not force conversion on their Christian captives.82 Despite the evident effort of Baranshchikov and his editor to stir the pity of the reading public, the attitude of the contemporaries towards the protagonist of the Unfortunate Adventures remained mixed. The fact of falling into captivity and escaping from it was in itself insufficient to win the person in question universal sympathy. According to an early reviewer of the book, the attempt of Baranshchikov to ‘find reward for his escapes and wanderings [pobegi i shataniia]’, revealed his ‘poor understanding of the virtue and [the nature of] social connection’. Despite Baranshchikov’s sufferings, society had the right to expect him to be ‘a useful member rather than a drone living at the expense of others’. By contrast, ‘[an] attempt to touch the entire civic society [tseloe gradskoe obshchestvo] and call it inhospitable, ungrateful and unmerciful without any ground and any reason’ was, according to the reviewer, ‘a vile quality’.83 Nineteenth-century opinions on Baranshchikov remained divided. The famous encyclopedia of A.A. Pliushar dismissed Baranshchikov as a repeated victim of his own drunkenness, through which he had lost his merchant business and ended up as a slave in the Antilles.84 N.S. Leskov, who studied the genre of the ‘daredevil tales’, considered Baranshchikov a paradigmatic case of a ‘shoddy individual’, who ‘uses the press in order to present himself as a hero’. According to Leskov, such ‘poetic tramps’ (vdokhnovennye brodiagi), presented themselves as ‘courageous, patient and loyal in order to obtain praise and material support from their audience. People often believed these tales, which were read in place of travelogues; their authors enjoyed glory and received remunerations from the rulers’.85 By contrast, S.A. Vengerov sympathized with Baranshchikov who ‘hoped to obtain protection and help from the Russian embassy in Constantinople, but instead was treated as all the Russians who have the naivete´ of addressing themselves to the Russian diplomatic missions abroad’.86

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Despite the continuous ambiguity of the Russian attitude towards captivity, Baranshchikov’s case marked an important transformation. Just as the seventeenth-century captives, Baranshchikov tried to reinterpret his captivity in a way that would secure his reintegration into Russian society. At the same time, the ultimate verdict upon his case now belonged to the Russian public rather than the ecclesiastical authorities. Baranshchikov’s attempts to evoke Christian compassion in his compatriots tested their tolerance of a non-noble hero. Stained by the ‘mean’ ( podlyi) social origin of the protagonist, Baranshchikov’s tribulations could not appear an ennobling experience at least to some representatives of the Russian educated public. However, the public attitude towards the captive could not be uniformly negative either, if only because considerable numbers of Russian noblemen became prisoners in the course of the Russian– Ottoman wars. In order to make captivity compatible with noble status, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers adopted new discursive devices, which contributed to further transformation of the Russian perspectives upon captivity. One finds a fine example in the writings of the famous eighteenthcentury memoirist Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov, whose seventeenthcentury ancestor Eremei Gavrilovich fell into Crimean captivity during one of Muscovy’s wars against the Khanate. Having lost both of his sons in combat, Eremei threw himself desperately into the midst of the Tatars and killed many before he was captured. For over twenty years, Eremei ‘groaned under the yoke of the cruellest captivity, was a slave of many changeable and unmerciful masters and performed all the duties of a captive and slave’.87 During this time, Eremei made several unsuccessful attempts to escape until his heels were cut and treated with horsehair to make him unable to walk for a long time. Eventually, a Tatar woman took pity of Eremei and his comrade, also a nobleman. She gave them food and some unknown herbs that enabled the two captives to make one final successful escape. After an arduous journey, Eremei reached his native village only to find out that his wife and daughter had fallen victims to robbers several years after his capture by the Tatars. Nevertheless, a warm reception by Eremei’s relatives and local peasants offered the old man some consolation for the remainder of his days. Written in 1789, Bolotov’s account of Eremei’s travails employed sentimentalist aesthetics in order to ennoble the figure of the captive. The episode of Eremei’s return to his native land is particularly

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well-developed and presented as a deeply moving and morally uplifting experience. The reader cold not fail to sympathize with Eremei, when his heart ‘trembled and filled with the sweetest joy’ at the sight of familiar rivulets and hills or when it sank at the news of the death of his wife and daughter.88 Eremei’s tearful sorrow was somewhat offset by the encounter with the former headman of his village, who rushed to Eremei’s feet and effused his love and loyalty to the old master. Before long all the peasants gathered around Eremei expressing their joy and kissing his hands, while he ‘kissed and moistened with his tears’ everyone in return.89 This lord-and-peasant idyll gave way to another effusion of tearful joy as Eremei met his nephews, who now owned his village. The latter dutifully asked Eremei’s pardon for having considered him dead and insisted that Eremei take his village back. In an equally impressive display of noble feelings, Eremei declined the offer since he ‘had forgotten how to govern others’ during the years of captivity and now desired only to end his life in his nephews’ home without interfering into their governance of his properties. Filled with the ‘tenderest gratitude’, Eremei’s nephews surrounded him with all possible respect and care for the rest of his life.90 In contrast to Baranshchikov, Eremei emerged from Bolotov’s account with total moral integrity, which leaves the reader without doubt as to his perfect reintegration into Russian society. The question of Eremei’s religious practices during his life in Crimea is not raised at all, while his ‘performance of all the duties of captive and slave’ did not in the least affect his noble attitudes. Bolotov did not even admit the possibility of conflicts over property between Eremei and his nephews that may have been caused by the former’s unexpected appearance after decades of absence. By contrast, the perfect harmony that had supposedly existed between Eremei on the one hand and his relatives and peasants on the other was immediately restored and even amplified following his return. Although Eremei did not resume his function of a landlord, his captivity and sufferings secured him universal love, respect and care. While lacking a perfectly happy ending, Eremei’s story nevertheless followed the rather typical sentimentalist plot, in which the intrinsic virtue of the noble protagonist is rewarded, after prolonged hardships and travails, by a serene repose of both the spirit and the body. Despite its apparent coherence, Bolotov’s rendition of the story of his ancestor hardly resolved the persistent ambiguity of captivity. The

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temporal distance of a century that separated the memoirist and the protagonist gave the former a great liberty in the presentation of the experiences of the latter. However, a critically minded reader not only could suspect that Eremei’s actual reintegration into Russian society was less smooth than Bolotov would have it; the reader might also want to learn more about the choices that Eremei had to make as he served ‘many changeable and unmerciful masters and performed all the duties of a captive and slave’. Eremei’s religious practices during his stay in Crimea were not the sole area of uncertainty in Bolotov’s account. No less significant for the members of the Russian educated society would be the question of compliance of the captive’s behaviour with the notions of a nobleman’s honour and basic human dignity. Only the positive answer to this question could eliminate the inherent moral ambiguity of captivity and win the captive universal sympathy and compassion.

Russian Noblemen in Captivity In his diary of a secret diplomatic mission to Constantinople undertaken during the war of 1806– 12, A.G. Krasnokutskii mentioned a Russian soldier whom he had encountered in the Rumelian town of Iambol. The soldier turned out to be a veteran of Suvorov’s campaigns, who ‘got seduced’ and ‘betrayed God and faith’. Ever since his Orthodox name Ivan Terent’ev had been changed for the Muslim Suleiman, he ‘bemoaned his misdeed’ and professed to be ready to die for the possibility to see Suvorov’s tomb. The last words that Krasnokutskii attributed to the Turkified Russian prisoners of war clearly reflected his own attitude towards captivity: ‘Tell my compatriots, Your Highness (Vashe Blagorodie), that they should serve Russia and the tsar faithfully (veroi i pravdoi) unless they want to be tormented to death by their troubled conscience’.91 This passage demonstrates that neither the earlier association of captivity with apostasy nor the critical attitude towards the captives had disappeared entirely by the early nineteenth century despite the secularization of the Russian elites. In Krasnokutskii’s presentation, the moral sin of the conscience-stricken soldier consisted in the double renunciation of Orthodoxy and service to the tsar. As an Orthodox believer and a noble serviceman, Krasnokutskii passed his verdict on behalf of the entire Russian public. However, this posture did not help

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those Russian noblemen who, unlike Krasnokutskii, had the misfortune of falling into captivity themselves and had to account for their experience and behaviour upon return.92 In doing so, the noble officers necessarily had to address the moral ambiguities of captivity in a much more direct way than did Bolotov in the story of his ancestor Eremei. Their efforts ultimately helped to further secularize the Russian perspectives upon captivity and, at the same time, prepared the ground for the latter-day nationalist indignation with the lot of the Russian captives in the hands of the ‘Asiatic barbarians’. At least five of the Russian noblemen, who fell into Ottoman captivity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, left accounts of their experiences. One of them was the already mentioned Pavel Artem’evich Levashev, a diplomat imprisoned together with the Russian envoy A.M. Obreskov shortly following the Porte’s declaration of war on Russia on 25 September 1768.93 The other four, Vladimir Andreevich Safonov, Nikolai Mikhailovich Klement, Aleksandr Grigor’evich RozalionSoshal’skii and Aleksandr Osipovich Diugamel’, were officers and veterans of the Russian–Ottoman wars of 1806–12 and 1828–9.94 Four of the five accounts were published during the lifetime of their authors and aimed to attract the Russian educated public to the problem of captivity or else satisfy its interest in the Oriental travelogues.95 Despite generational, stylistic and experiential differences between these authors, their narratives share several things in common. All noblemen’s accounts of captivity portray confrontations between the protagonists and the Muslim population. The sense of hostility and danger that such encounters carried for the captives is particularly clear from Levashev’s book, which renders the explosive atmosphere in the Ottoman capital following the Porte’s declaration of war on Russia. Upon the imprisonment of Obreskov, Levashev, who happened to be away from Constantinople, spent several uneasy days in fear of ‘death or galley slavery’, before he joined the envoy and other members of the Russian mission in Yedikule. Headed by a septuagenarian commander (komendant) of noble countenance, the famous prison in fact saved the Russian diplomats from mob harassment of the kind that the Habsburg internuncio and his family suffered after they had decided to watch clandestinely the ceremony of carrying out of the Standard of the Prophet (Sanjak Sherif).96 Nevertheless, Obreskov and Levashev had their share of unpleasant moments several months later, when they had

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to join the train of the grand vizier’s army marching out north. Placed on exhausted and poorly saddled horses ‘for the greater humiliation’, the diplomats were paraded past the angry crowds who shouted curses and demanded that the captives ‘be cut to pieces’.97 Their travails continued in the Ottoman camp where they had to stand for hours by the grand vizier’s tent in a place customarily reserved for executions under the eyes of a crowd of Ottoman soldiers.98 Recurrent threats of violent death became an important aspect of the captivity experience of Safonov and Klement, two officers from the corvette Flora, which shipwrecked off the Albanian coast in January 1807. Soon after they reached the shore, the Russian seamen became prisoners of the coastal Albanians, who specialized in provoking shipwrecks and plundering ships. For several days, the locked-up Russians could hear stories about the cruelty of their new masters from a captive Greek pilot and had to contemplate severed heads, which Albanians would put on display daily in order to terrify the prisoners.99 The cut-off heads haunted the Russian prisoners of war throughout their subsequent journey through Albania and Rumelia. On their way to Constantinople, they also witnessed the executions of the participants of the Serbian uprising that had erupted several years previously under the leadership of George Petrovic´. According to Klement, the Ottomans deliberately took the Russian prisoners of war through ‘all those places where the Christians have been the object of all sorts of atrocities’, which made the author and his fellow prisoners ‘fear for [their] lives every hour’.100 As Levashev four decades previously, the Flora crew fell into captivity at the moment when the Ottoman Empire mobilized for war against Russia, when both public executions and the parading of the Russian prisoners served to incite the Muslim population to join the grand vizier’s army. As the prisoner caravan travelled to Constantinople, the captives had to endure a violent reception in virtually every Muslim town. According to Safonov, the inhabitants of El Bassan met them with ‘great curses and blows’, and then gathered in crowds in order to see the Russians ‘as some kind of miracle’, which ‘disturbed [Safonov] to death’.101 The same happened again at Monastir, whose numerous Muslim inhabitants threw curses, stones and mud at the prisoners. Placed in ‘disgusting quarters’, the captives would have been continuously harassed by the crowd had it not been for a senior Turk, who pitied them and undertook to chase the

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offenders away.102 Elsewhere the angry inhabitants attacked the Flora physician, whose large tricorn hat they must have found provocative. Scared, the physician’s mule charged forth, yet the crowd chased him down and beat the unfortunate rider half dead threatening to do the same to other prisoners who dared to protest.103 During the party’s entry into Constantinople, the inhabitants of the capital would laugh at the prisoners, spit into their faces and beat them with sticks.104 Even the capital’s prison did not make the captives feel entirely safe from the fanatical assaults. Soon after their arrival at the Ottoman capital, a traditionalist rebellion that overthrew Selim III made Safonov and his fellow prisoners fear that ‘the rebels, who rose against everything European, break into the prison and cut every inmate to pieces’.105 Compared to the narratives of Levashev, Safonov and Klement, those of Rozalion-Soshal’skii and Diugamel’ portray the encounters with the Ottoman Muslim population in considerably less dramatic terms. Unlike the previous three authors, the latter two officers became captives in 1828– 9, after the Ottoman Empire definitely embarked on the path of Westernizing reforms under the guidance of Mahmud II. These political changes manifested themselves, among other things, in a much more humane treatment of the prisoners by the Ottoman authorities, which made the captivity of Rozalion-Soshal’skii and his comrades considerably less onerous than was the case of Safonov and Klement. Nevertheless, Rozalion-Soshal’skii could still witness the vestiges of the traditional attitudes towards the captive as he and his fellow captives passed along the crowded streets of Slivno and Constantinople. On both occasions, the local Muslim men remained reserved, yet ‘children and women made different grimaces, spat and threw stones [at the captives] as well as cursed [them]’. In the words of Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘[the] eyes of the young women sparkled with hatred, the old ones raised their hands and eyes, full of angry tears, and prayed to see all Russians become captives’.106 For his part, Diugamel’, who remained in Shumla throughout his captivity, would rarely venture outdoors, ‘being unwilling to bear the insults of the inhabitants of the city’.107 Levashev, Safonov, Klement and Rozalion-Soshal’skii not only told the readers about their own experience of captivity, but also witnessed the lot of other Russian captives, whom they encountered along the way. In all four cases the fate of others was worse than their own. Thus, Levashev mentioned several parties of Russian prisoners of war that were

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brought to the grand vizier’s camp and decapitated. According to the Russian diplomat, one could find examples of this practice in the earlier Ottoman wars against the Habsburgs, when the grand viziers would order the construction of pyramids of some two or three hundred heads ‘for the pleasure of bloodthirsty spectators’.108 Levashev’s account of the treatment of the captured peasants from Polish Ukraine was particularly soul-wrenching. If one is to believe his testimony, family members were sold separately and ‘the cruel-hearted spectators . . . laughed and mocked’ at the cries of mothers who were separated from their children. This episode convinced Levashev that ‘the Muslims [Agariane] are foreign to the sentiment of goodness [blagonravie] and the feeling of compassion towards the suffering humanity that it inspires’.109 According to the Russian diplomat, even the Ottoman treatment of the animals testified to their inhumanity: the cavalryman who killed a stumbling horse made Levashev fear for his own life as much as the Ottoman soldiers who had earlier dispatched a wounded Russian prisoner.110 Although Levashev complained of intimidation, as a diplomatic agent of a belligerent power he still enjoyed security that the captive Russian officers did not have, especially as they were convoyed from the war theatre to the Ottoman capital. On their way to Constantinople the members of the Flora crew feared lest they should fall ill and share the fate of one of their fellow captives, who became too weak to move along and was killed by the guards. According to Klement, one of the guards cut off the sailor’s head while the others took sabre strikes at his dead body, following which they impaled the head upon a pike and carried it in front of the caravan.111 As Rozalion-Soshal’skii’s party left Shumla for Constantinople, it encountered a beheaded body of a Russian officer, who, according to the Ottoman messenger (chaush), had become too weak to walk on and was killed by the guards. Rozalion-Soshal’skii had little doubt that his own guards would kill him and his comrades if their caravan ever encountered a Russian detachment.112 Alongside the physical danger and the threat of death, captivity caused great psychological stress. Following his capture, RozalionSoshal’skii felt ‘swayed and burdened’ by ‘the loss of freedom, captivity among an ignorant and ferocious people, chains and suffering, both physical and spiritual, painful separation from the family and everything dear to me’.113 The stress of captivity was all the more intolerable in view of the deceptive proximity of the Russian army, whose camp

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appeared ‘so close and so far’ from the road that took the author and his fellow-captives from Shumla to Constantinople.114 On their way to the Ottoman capital the sailors of the Flora approached the Aegean littoral and could see the Russian men-of-war, who successfully operated against the Ottoman navy. However, the sight of the victorious Russian fleet made the prisoners sad rather than joyous.115 Safonov felt particularly upset as he contrasted the triumph of his compatriots, who ‘mastered the seas and inspired fear in Muslims’, with his own ‘abject and lowly situation, fearful to die every minute from hunger and exhaustion or from the hand of the last Turk’.116 Some aspects of captivity could challenge the sense of self-esteem and personal honour of the officer who became a prisoner of war.117 According to Rozalion-Soshal’skii, the ‘Turks’ who captured his comrades-in-arms in an ambush near Shumla put thin ropes around their necks. The author himself avoided this ‘sign of slavery’ only due to the magnanimity of his own captor.118 Even without these humiliating markers, the officers of the Flora were soon in a poor shape since their clothes quickly deteriorated leaving the officers indistinguishable from the simple soldiers or sailors. According to Klement, some of the uniforms of his comrades where sleeveless, others lacked collars and all golden parts, which were torn away by the guards.119 In this state, the captives entered the courtyard of the grand vizier in Constantinople, where the French envoy to the sultan General Horace Sebastiani reportedly witnessed their humiliation.120 The lack of vestimentary markers also blurred the social hierarchy between the noble officers and the non-noble soldiers or sailors. The prison guards in Constantinople did not care to place the Flora officers separately from the rest of the prisoners and even chained some of the officers, including Klement, in pairs with simple soldiers.121 Nor were the Russian prisoners separated from the foremost criminals of the Ottoman state, whose hands and tongues had been cut off in punishment for theft or blasphemy. A generation later, Rozalion-Soshal’skii and his fellow officers were spared the heavy shakles that rubbed Safonov’s and Klement’s feet sore. Even so, Rozalion-Soshal’skii and his comrades had to pass several days together with the common criminals before they were transferred to the more comfortable quarters at the Halki Island in the Sea of Marmara.122 Although Diugamel’ was fortunate enough to avoid the experience of Safonov, Klement and Rozalion-Soshal’skii, he

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also called the Ottoman practice of placing prisoners of war together with common criminals a ‘barbarous custom’.123 Disarmed and powerless, the captive officers parted with their personal items, such as the kerchief, which Safonov was forced to surrender to one of the Ottoman guards at the threat of the scimitar.124 On another occasion, the author had to give up all the copper buttons of his uniform to the guard and use small wooden sticks instead under the contemptuous approbation of the expropriator.125 Twenty years later, Rozalion-Soshal’skii also had to surrender his money, watch and silver uniform buttons to the Ottoman soldier who captured him.126 The author’s attempt to keep his wedding ring nearly turned sour after his captor noticed the colour mark on his ring finger. In his own admission, Rozalion-Soshal’skii had no chance in the ensuing fight for the ring and was saved only by the intervention of the Armenian physician of the Ottoman commander-in-chief (serasker).127 Similarly, Diugamel’, who fell into captivity a year later, had to give away all his clothes and boots as well as money.128 Such episodes made captive officers face a hard choice between life and dignity. Their situation was further complicated by the presence of other captives who were witnesses of each other’s behaviour under duress. The nobleman’s honour and esprit de corps were group phenomena that imposed rigid limits upon one’s behaviour in normal life and were unlikely to disappear entirely in captivity. Thus, in particularly difficult circumstances, the noble officers had to negotiate between physical death and the loss of face, or social death. Their dilemma was in some respect similar to the choices that the early modern captives faced, with the only difference that now the notion of the officer’s honour replaced religious belief. Just like their early modern predecessors, the noble captives tried to negotiate a way out of this painful predicament. The sense of moral ambiguity lingers over Diugamel’s account. Captured at Shumla in early 1829, he met six other Russian officers and 150 soldiers at the fortress. However, the author soon found himself in a privileged situation by virtue of his acquaintance with someone called Frohman, a native of Saxony and a former physician of the Empress Marie-Louise, who converted to Islam and adopted the name of Mahmud. Frohman had escaped to the Ottoman Empire after a sevenyear term in an Austrian prison, into which he had been thrown for passing to the former French empress a message from Napoleon during

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the One Hundred Days. Diugamel’s knowledge of German made Mahmud nostalgic of his motherland and led him to help the Russian officer to get in touch with his relatives and the Russian command. The renegade’s intervention with the grand vizier eventually permitted Diugamel’ to stay in Shumla until release and thereby avoid the lot of the rest of the Russian captives, who had been dispatched to Constantinople. Diugamel’s fortunate escape from the lot of his fellow officers could appear morally dubious to his contemporaries, particularly since it was due to an individual of questionable behaviour.129 Diugamel’ himself recognized the moral ambiguity of his renegade benefactor, who apostatised ‘being full of anger and vengeance at his persecutors’ and ‘mixing up Christians and their faith’.130 One can find even clearer evidence of tensions between the desire to improve one’s lot on the one hand and the officer’s dignity on the other in the account of V.A. Safonov. Forced to surrender the personal items under the threat of death, Safonov tried to ingratiate himself with the aga and the guards of the prisoner caravan by means of an Albanian song, which he had learned for the purpose. The guards appreciated Safonov’s efforts to imitate the nasal sounds of their singing with the phrase ‘ah you infidel dog’, and yet, for the remainder of the journey, they ultimately treated him better than other prisoners.131 However, the role of the entertainer of the caravan guards and the local Muslim inhabitants, which Safonov chose to assume, was hardly compatible with the notions of the officer’s honour. The realization of this fact must have moved Safonov to behave more uncompromisingly after the captives arrived to the town of Serres, which was full of the Ottoman troops poised to attack the insurgent Serbia. When an Ottoman soldier kicked one of his fellow officers, Safonov hit the former in return only to be knocked out by a powerful blow. Safonov’s defence of his fellow’s honour could have cost him his life had it not been for the intervention of a French artillery engineer, who served in the Ottoman troops and managed to calm them down.132 The episode also revealed the importance of a mediator who would be able to diffuse the conflicts between the captives on the one hand and the guards or the local population on the other. Before long, Safonov himself began playing this role. His conduct in this capacity was unbecoming of an officer and a nobleman, and yet, given the circumstances, it apparently won his fellow-officers’ approbation. During the party’s stop

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at the town of Veria, Safonov chose to ignore the fact that one of the local residents called him a ‘dog’ and an ‘infidel’ and instead resorted to his Albanian song in order to make the Turk share with him some tobacco and later a piece of raw meat. In Safonov’s own words, the Turk threw him the meat ‘as if to a dog’, and yet the starved prisoners seized the piece, tore it to bits and roasted it before his eyes.133 By this time, the hardships of captivity must have loosened the notions of propriety among Safonov’s fellow officers, who took a positive view of his efforts to improve their collective lot. By the end of his captivity in Constantinople, Safonov discovered another means to help himself and his comrades. Having obtained paper and paint, he began making small pictures of the Ottoman vessels, which he would then sell to the prison guards. Safonov’s pictures proved to be popular since the Ottoman ships they portrayed invariably defeated and sunk a superior adversary. This brought Safonov money and food, which he would share with the fellow prisoners so that in the end they ‘not only did not experience any privation, but also lived quite gaily’.134 All captivity narratives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century include the figure of a Muslim benefactor who intervened whenever the captives faced danger in their encounter with the hostile Muslim population. In Levashev’s case, this mediator was the Grand Vizier Emin Pasha himself, who hid the captive diplomats from the vengeful eye of Sultan Mustafa III during the latter’s passage through the camp, as well as protected the captives during the clashes with the Ottoman soldiers.135 The Russian diplomats could appreciate the value of such interventions when a mutiny of the janissaries in Moldavia forced Emin Pasha to leave his camp temporarily.136 Even upon the grand vizier’s return, Levashev and his comrades continued to feel insecure as the janissaries, disappointed by a recent Ottoman retreat at Hotin, would now and again fire pistol shots over their heads.137 Levashev’s account illustrates the persistent feeling of insecurity that even the apparent intercession of such a powerful individual as the grand vizier could not fully dispel. Those who were farther away from the centre of Ottoman power necessarily experienced even greater travails. This explains why the captives sought to present themselves before the Ottoman authorities at the first opportunity. Thus, Safonov and Klement tried to catch the attention of an Ottoman aga who happened to be collecting taxes in the region, only to discover with great

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dismay that the Albanians did not pay much attention to the aga’s orders. It took the intervention of the governor of the province Ibrahim Pasha and some 500 troops to redeem the Russians from the Albanian captivity and bring them to the pasha’s headquarters in Berat. Safonov’s and Klement’s accounts of this episode illustrate the effect of literary convention on the portrayal of the Muslim mediator. Both of them presented a more or less developed image of the ‘noble Turk’ that served the European Orientalist writers to counterbalance the sights and sounds of the fanatical Muslim crowds. Thus, Safonov described Ibrahim Pasha as ‘a magnanimous Turk’ who had given the Russian captives fifteen sheep in order to feed themselves.138 According to Klement, the pasha’s magnanimity went beyond this and included the order to the guards to return to the Russian officers their personal items. Moreover, Ibrahim Pasha supposedly invited them daily to his palace in order to inquire about the strength of the Russian fleet, the highest state offices and the tsar. If one is to believe Klement, he even shed tears when the time came for the Russian prisoners to proceed towards the Ottoman capital.139 Rozalion-Soshal’skii’s narrative also contained the image of the ‘noble Turk’, personified by the Serasker Hussein Pasha, to whom the author and three other Russian officers were presented soon after their capture near Shumla. This time, the trope of the ‘noble Turk’ structured the encounter between the captives and the serasker even before it helped the author to describe this meeting retrospectively. To Hussein Pasha’s question why he decided to fight with a vastly superior Ottoman force, the commander of the captive Russian detachment Major N.F. Shatov responded that he had not expected to encounter such a magnanimous winner. Pleased by Shatov’s reply, the serasker conformed to the role that the Russian captives wanted him to play. He prohibited his subordinates from putting the officers in chains, dispatched his own physician to treat their wounds, sent them money and food from his own table as well as provided rugs that helped them to stay warm during the night.140 Although the ‘noble Turk’ usually emerges as the benefactor of the Russian prisoners of war, in some cases he could be a captive himself. In his account of the Second Archipelago Expedition of the Russian Navy of 1805–7, P.P. Svin’in portrayed in this way the Ottoman admiral Bekir Bey, who was taken prisoner in a naval battle in June 1807. According to Svin’in, he was ‘a strong and prominent [vidnyi]

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man’, whose actions displayed ‘dignity’ (vazhnost’) and whose eyes ‘sparkled with a remarkable intellect’. Bekir Bey spoke Greek, English and French and was always the ‘soul of the company’ of the Russian officers (byl dushoi nashikh zabav i obshchestv) so much so that his eventual departure brought tears to their eyes. Before he left the Russian ship, Bekir Bey put down the names of all the officers and pledged friendship to everyone whom he would happen to meet again. As if to recognize that the distinction between the captive and the captors was not absolute, Svin’in noted that ‘it was good to have such friends in Constantinople and Egypt’ for ‘one can never know one’s fate, particularly under the present circumstances’.141 The trope of the ‘noble Turk’ is one of the persistent aspects of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Orientalist writings about the Ottoman Empire. It constituted the symbolic counterpart of the equally persistent figure of the Oriental despot. In the eyes of the European observers, the two corresponded to, respectively, the positive and the negative aspects of the Oriental society. The moral rectitude of the ‘noble Turk’ balanced the viciousness of the political organization of the Ottoman Empire that served as the primary example for Montesquieu’s theory of Asiatic despotism. At the same time, the figure of the ‘noble Turk’ became a variant of the ‘noble savage’, whose unadulterated sense of right and wrong served the European writers to criticize certain aspects of their own society. The Russian authors used the figure of the ‘noble Turk’ in much the same way as did their European counterparts, yet they endowed it with an additional function. For Safonov, Klement and Rozalion-Soshal’skii, the ‘noble Turk’ was not so much the opposite of the despotic sultan, whom they never encountered anyway, as the tamer of the violent crowds that threatened the captives with humiliation and death. The figure of a benevolent pasha served to cast into sharper light the ignorance, fanaticism and ferocity of the Muslim population whom he commanded. The pasha’s ability to rein in the violent crowds and his magnanimity towards captives testified to the ultimate supremacy of reason and humanity over barbarity and allowed the educated captives to regain their sense of dignity and noble countenance after much physical suffering and humiliation. The military and diplomatic action of the Russian state had the same effect on the condition of the captives, or so they argued. According to

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Levashev, following the Ottoman defeat at Hotin in 1769, the Ottoman soldiers ‘changed their ferocity to meekness [krotost’]’, and began to sympathize with the Russian diplomats. Levashev attributed this compassionate attitude to the severe reversal that their army had suffered, which apparently made them fear falling into Russian captivity and ‘being treated equally cruelly in revenge for us’.142 Indeed, the janissary guards eventually ‘asked humbly’ the captive Russian diplomats to take care of their comrades-in-arms who had become prisoners of war.143 Even the Muslim population no longer appeared as hostile as it had at the beginning of Levashev’s account. As he and Obreskov were convoyed back to Adrianople, the inhabitants of Pazardjik, known for being the ‘rudest and cruellest of all the Turks who live along the road to Constantinople’, provided the Russian diplomats accommodation and treated them ‘politely’.144 At Pravadi, many Turkish women would inquire Levashev and Obreskov about the fate of their husbands, who reportedly fell into Russian captivity. Similarly, the crowds in Adrianople no longer hurled curses upon the Russian diplomats, but rather watched them in deep silence.145 Once again, Levashev attributed this change of attitude to the successes of the Russian arms, which ‘contributed to the transformation and softening of the most severe mores’.146 Unlike the seventeenth-century captives or even his contemporary Baranshchikov, Levashev did not do anything in order to extricate himself from captivity. An improved attitude towards the members of the Russian mission as well as their eventual release was the result of the victories of the Russian armies and the diplomatic pressure that the Habsburg Monarchy and Prussia applied on the Porte in order to prompt the peace negotiations. Incredulous at first about the news of their upcoming release, Levashev soon recognized that ‘the Porte tried to please us as much as it earlier had tried to depress our spirit and insult us’.147 According to the author, the unfurled banners with which the Ottoman town governors received the pompous train of the Russian diplomats on its way to the Austrian border at Semlin testified to the ‘humility, which the courage of the Russians instilled in the hearts of their proud and cruel adversaries’. They also demonstrated ‘what gratitude the Russian people owed to its great monarch and heroine, who had destroyed the bragging of the enemies who remained fearless of the victor of Charles XII’.148

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Safonov and Klement likewise owed their release to the diplomatic interventions of neutral powers on behalf of the Russian government. In the words of Klement, ‘the tender fatherly heart of Alexander I penetrated into the inferno’ of their prison in the form of sums of money transmitted through the Danish envoy Baron Antoine von Hubsch, which the captives used to buy coffee and tobacco from the Ottoman guards.149 Meanwhile, the prisoners’ own efforts to improve their condition remained futile. In response to the appeals of the captives to secure the lifting of their heavy chains, the representatives of the neutral powers declared their powerlessness and suggested that the petitioners turn to the all-powerful French envoy Sebastiani. Since France was at war with Russia at the moment, Sebastiani rejected the request for protection rather rudely calling the Russian officers ‘the foremost enemies of his state’.150 The unexpected liberation of the captives had nothing to do with their petitions and was instead due to a change in the diplomatic situation. The Franco–Russian peace of Tilsit of June 1807 led to the conclusion of the Russian–Ottoman armistice at Slobozia, following which the envoy of France, now Russia’s ally, secured the release of the captives.151 If Levashev, Safonov and Klement felt the benevolent effect of the Russian arms or diplomacy only by the end of their captivity, RozalionSoshal’skii and his fellow officers were lucky to enjoy it from the very beginning. Even before the transfer of the prisoners from Shumla to Constantinople, the Russian command, apprised of their capture, transferred a hefty sum of money to the Serasker Hussein Pasha, who magnanimously passed it over to the Russians.152 This money smoothed many rough corners on their way to the Ottoman capital and helped Rozalion-Soshal’skii and his comrades to avoid the travails of Safonov and Klement. In Constantinople, the Danish envoy Cazimir von Hubsch, acting as his father on behalf of the tsarist government, immediately got in touch with the Russian officers and eventually obtained for them the freedom to walk around the island of Halki that served as their prison.153 During the year that they spent on the island, Rozalion-Soshal’skii and his comrades consumed avidly any news that could herald the end of their captivity, yet, unlike the seventeenth-century captives, they did little to bring it about. Similarly to Levashev, Safonov and Klement, RozalionSoshal’skii owed his liberation to the conclusion of the peace treaty and the force of the Russian arms that induced the Ottomans to sign it. Diugamel’ stands somewhat apart from this company inasmuch as he ably used his

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connection to a Saxon renegade in order to remain in Shumla, unlike some 150 Russian prisoners of war who had been sent to Constantinople. Nevertheless, even Diugamel’ owed his release from captivity to the personal intervention of the Commander-in-Chief I.I. Dibich following his victory at Kulevcha in late May 1829 and the crossing of the Balkans by the Russian army.154 The five authors were the first (and the only) Westernized Russians who spent a period of time in Ottoman captivity and told their stories upon return. Unlike the early modern captives who responded to questions about their religious practices in a foreign land, the diplomats and officers themselves chose to write their accounts. Unlike Baranshchikov, the noble authors did not try to capitalize on their captivity in order to clear off the past crimes and misdemeanours. They were entirely free to reveal some aspects of their captivity experience and remain silent about others. And yet, inasmuch as it strained the noblemen’s notions of honour and selfesteem, captivity continued to be an ordeal of sorts. Even devoid of its erstwhile religious meaning, captivity still posed the question of the individual’s behaviour and the conformity of this behaviour to the norms of conduct adopted by his class. One way of resolving the underlying tension consisted precisely in deemphasizing the actions of the protagonists at the expense of the external circumstances. Much more articulate than any of the early modern captives, Levashev, Safonov, Klement, Rozalion-Soshal’skii and Diugamel’ also emerge from their accounts as much more passive than their predecessors. As if to avoid disturbing questions about their behaviour and choices during the captivity, the noble authors presented themselves as victims of extraordinary circumstances, in which they could do little but condemn the barbarity and fanaticism of the Muslim crowds, praise the magnanimity of the noble pashas and celebrate the benevolent influence of the Russian arms and diplomacy that had secured their release. Portrayed as being unable to act and thereby absolved of responsibility, the captive could now serve as an ideal object of collective compassion. *** Modern Europeans viewed captivity as being fundamentally at odds with the human condition. Public reaction to stories of captivity in the last two centuries has ranged from nationalist indignation at the suffering of

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compatriots in the hands of ‘barbarians’ to the humanist condemnation of this gross violation of an individual’s freedom. Both approaches emphasize unnatural external conditions imposed upon the captured individuals and deemphasize the behaviour of the captives or the choices they make. This chapter demonstrates that Muscovite society had a completely different perspective on the captivity of its subjects in the Ottoman Empire. While the Muscovite authorities spent considerable sums to extract their subjects from the Crimean Tatars, their ability to redeem those Russians who were sold into the Ottoman Empire proper remained limited as long as ransom remained the only means to do so. More importantly, the Muscovite religious authorities expended considerable time and effort to determine the religious practices of those few of their subjects who managed to escape the Ottoman bondage and return to the Orthodox land. Captivity was viewed as a divine ordeal of sort and those who failed to endure it deserved penitence rather than compassion. The captives themselves could hardly be happy with this perspective. All of the returnees interrogated at the Patriarch’s Office tried to minimize their sins and some went so far as to reinterpret captivity as the continuation of their service to the tsar. This necessarily undermined the dominant association of captivity with apostasy. The integration of stories of religious pilgrimage into captivity narratives had the same effect as did the incorporation of the theme of captivity into accounts of journeys to the Holy Land. Different strategies of valorizing the captivity were paralleled by the secularization of the Russian elite culture. As a result, by the end of the eighteenth century, the educated Russians no longer perceived captivity as a religious experience par excellence. Captivity did not immediately lose its inherent ambiguity. Baranshchikov’s case demonstrates that the captives still had a lot to hide from their compatriots. Like his seventeenth-century predecessors, Baranshchikov manipulated his own biography in order to secure a more or less comfortable reintegration into society. Unlike the seventeenthcentury returnees, he enjoyed the support of at least some representatives of the Russian educated public, who took an interest in his exotic story and helped him to construct an elaborate narrative. At the same time, the reaction to Baranshchikov’s story proved to be mixed and it took some time before the mere fact of having been a captive could win

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universal sympathy for the individual in question. No longer suspected or accused of apostasy, the former captive was still expected to prove that he had managed to retain his honour and human dignity during his ‘misadventures’. Captivity challenged the social notions of the post-Petrine Russian noblemen as is clear from the accounts of Levashev, Safonov, Klement, Rozalion-Soshal’skii and Diugamel’. In order to deemphasize the question of their own compliance with the behavioural norms, all five authors focused on the extraordinary conditions of captivity, as if reminding their audience that the situation of a noble captive was radically different from that of a noble diplomat or traveller. Descriptions of encounters with the violent and fanatical population helped to occlude the question of what the captives did in order to save their lives. By contrast, portrayals of magnanimous pashas served to ennoble the experience of captivity, while the saving intervention of the tsarist government made unnecessary the morally questionable choices that the earlier captives had had to make in order to regain freedom. The writings of the captive noblemen complete the evolution of the Russian narratives of captivity in the Ottoman Empire. Between the early seventeenth and the early nineteenth century, the phenomenon of captivity gradually ceased to be perceived in strictly religious terms, and after a certain point the captives were no longer necessarily suspected of apostasy. An analysis of the captivity narratives testifies to the gradual shift from the figure of the captive and his or her (mis)behaviour to the external conditions of captivity. The latter ceases to be an ordeal, which tests the firmness of the individual’s attachment to faith or his compliance with the social norms. Instead, captivity emerges as an extraordinary situation that imposes unnatural limitations on one’s freedom and thereby provokes indignation and condemnation. As a result of this change of perspective, captivity lost the air of moral ambiguity that had characterized it initially. Henceforth, the sufferings of the Russian captives would command universal compassion among the increasingly nationalist educated public, which soon began to use this theme in order to justify imperial expansion in Asia.

CHAPTER 3 `

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Frightful howls, cries of ‘Allah’ encourage the Mussulmans, frighten the Christian, and with addition of a few chopped-off heads, have a really terrible effect.1 On 15 June 1711, a large Russian army crossed the boundary of the Ottoman vassal principality of Moldavia and began its first campaign against the Ottoman forces in the territories that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans called ‘Turkey in Europe’.2 The Russian troops were the proud product of the military reforms of Peter the Great: two years previously they had proven their worth in the victorious battle of Poltava against the formidable Swedish war machine commanded by the brilliant, if erratic Charles XII.3 The quarrel over the extradition of the Swedish king, who in the wake of his defeat took refuge in the Ottoman fortress of Bender, was the immediate cause of the Russian – Ottoman hostilities. In this way, Russia’s war with Sweden for access to the Baltic that began in 1700 became directly intertwined with its struggle against the Ottoman Empire for the supremacy on the Pontic steppe and the Black Sea littoral. Peter the Great seized the Ottoman declaration of war in November 1710 as the pretext to build upon his conquest in 1696 of the Ottoman fortress of Azov in the mouth of the Don. By means of a rapid march to the Danube, the tsar intended to prevent the Ottoman army’s crossing of that river, whereupon he expected to raise the Orthodox subjects of the sultan for a struggle to end the latter’s dominance in Southeastern Europe and Constantinople.

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To reach this ambitious objective, Peter committed over 60,000 of regular infantry and almost 20,000 of dragoons in six divisions, five of which were commanded by the ethnically German generals of Livonian, Saxon or Prussian extraction. He also concluded an alliance with the Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir, who promised supplies and a militia force in return for a wide autonomy under Russia’s protectorate. In parallel, the tsar counted on the hospodar of the neighbouring Wallachia, Constantin Braˆncoveanu, whose long-term secret liaisons with Russia inspired confidence. Finally, Peter dispatched emissaries to the inhabitants of Montenegro who traditionally defied the Ottoman authorities as well as to the Serbian inhabitants of the Habsburg military border in southern Hungary. This bold plan was opposed by three of the five German division commanders, who counseled the tsar to remain on the Dniester in order to meet the sultan’s forces at this northernmost limit of Ottoman power. The proponents of an offensive war with the support of Russia’s coreligionists prevailed, yet almost everything went wrong from the beginning. An army of locusts consumed Moldavian crops, which made a foraging expedition of the Russian cavalry largely ineffective and prolonged the stay of the main army on the Dniester until the onset of oppressive summer temperatures. After the infantry forces crossed the river and began the march across Moldavia, many soldiers became ill, fell behind and even committed suicide, under the burning sun. After the army reached the Pruth opposite the Moldavian capital Ias¸i six days later, Dimitrie Cantemir faithfully joined the tsar, yet the cavalry militia he brought was poorly armed with bows and pikes, while the 30,000 soldiers promised by the Wallachian hospodar never materialized. In the meantime, the Ottoman army under the Grand Vizier Baltadji Mehmet Pasha had crossed the Danube and headed north in order to meet the Russian forces, already shaded by the numerous Crimean Tatar cavalry. Following a clash between the overwhelming Ottoman forces and a vanguard division of Russian dragoons, the tsar’s army, halved by disease, desertions and dispatches of several units, began a fighting retreat along the right bank of the Pruth, yet soon found itself pressed to the river by the Ottoman troops, three times as numerous. In the course of several days of intermittent fighting, the Russian infantry and dismounted dragoons repeatedly repelled the fierce attacks of the janissaries, yet their ammunition was rapidly diminishing and they faced

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starvation. On 9 July, the arrival of the Ottoman artillery placed the Russians in a desperate situation, yet the refusal of the janissaries to continue fighting made the grand vizier accept the tsar’s offer for peace. The negotiating skills of the Russian Vice-Chancellor P.P. Shafirov and copious bribes to the grand vizier and his subordinates extricated the remaining Russian army from the Ottoman and Tatar encirclement; it gave the tsar a chance to withdraw across the Pruth and the Dniester and to continue a much more successful war against Sweden. Such was the end of Russia’s first venture into ‘Turkey in Europe’ that cost the tsar some 37,000 soldiers, cancelled his earlier conquests in the south and made him abandon the attempts to gain access to the Black Sea for the rest of his reign. Peter’s defeat in 1711 had great consequences for Russia, its relations with the Ottoman Empire and other European powers. Having failed to force the Sublime Porte, the tsar famously focused his efforts on ‘opening a window on Europe’. St Petersburg was declared Russia’s new capital in 1713, the year of the official conclusion of the Russian – Ottoman war, the outcome of which was decided two years previously on the banks of the Pruth. While Russia’s contacts with the ‘Christian East’ stagnated for decades, its involvement with the ‘Christian West’ intensified. Meanwhile, the memories of Peter’s bold challenge to the Ottoman sultan motivated subsequent Russian rulers to seek success where the reformer tsar had suffered defeat. In the course of the five Russian – Ottoman wars that followed, they managed to bring the fruits of the Petrine reforms to bear upon the Ottoman Empire. The campaign of 1711, however ill-fortuned for the Russians, anticipated many of the aspects of their victorious wars against the Ottomans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The disagreements between the tsar’s ‘German’ and ‘Russian’ generals as to what constituted the best strategy in 1711 prefigured later uncertainties of the Russian officers about the applicability of the precepts of the European military science to a war against the Ottomans. The Pruth campaign revealed the overwhelming numbers of the enemy, the clear superiority of their cavalry, the fierce, yet chaotic attacks of the janissaries and their unstable mood, all of which attracted the attention of the Russian officers in later campaigns. The losses to adverse climate and lack of supplies in 1711 likewise proved to be a persistent

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predicament for the Russian army in the wars against the Ottomans. Finally, the first venture of the tsar’s troops into ‘Turkey in Europe’ occasioned cultural encounters with the local Christians and their Ottomans masters, which recurred in the later ‘Turkish campaigns’, and made them a unique experience for the Russian officers. The present chapter seeks to reconstruct this experience and highlight its role in the mental outlook of the Russian officer corps of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. First, the chapter examines the reflections of the Russian commanders and military writers on the peculiarity of the Ottoman way of making war. It demonstrates both their tendency to assume the superiority of the Western ‘art of war’ and their awareness of the necessity to adapt their actions to the irregular warfare of the enemy.4 Second, the chapter examines Russian accounts of immediate encounters with the troops of the sultan. It shows how the notions of ‘civilized’ warfare led Russian officers to portray the appearance, morale and behaviour of the Ottoman soldiers as ‘barbarous’ and, at the same time, made them uneasy about certain practices of the Russian army itself. Third, the chapter highlights the distinctiveness of the broader experience of the ‘Turkish campaigns’, which presented great climatic and logistical challenges and yet offered the Russian officers an opportunity of the escape into the exotic. Overall, the ‘Turkish campaigns’ contributed to the process of redescribing the Ottoman Empire as the Orient, a process that was crucial to the articulation of modern Russian identity. Just as the tsar’s diplomats, his officers confronted a rival whose principles and practices were markedly different from their own from the very beginning. The Russian imitation of the European ‘art of war’, which intensified during the reign of Peter the Great, further accentuated this difference. A series of victories that the post-Petrine Russian army scored over its Ottoman counterpart led the tsarist officers to reinterpret this difference in terms of European supremacy and Oriental inferiority. Their growing familiarity with European military literature greatly fasciliated this process inasmuch as it allowed them to relate Russia’s ‘Turkish campaigns’ to the earlier Habsburg – Ottoman wars. At the same time, the Russian accounts of these campaigns posed the question of direct applicability of the precepts of the European military art to the ‘Oriental war’, while the practices of the tsarist troops revealed the limits of Russia’s military Westernization.

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The Ottoman ‘Way of War’ in Russian Military Writing ‘Turkish tactics immediately amazes the observer, as it does not have anything in common with the tactics of the nations which we call civilized’, wrote the Russian military engineer Aleksei Ivanovich Martos in his memoirs of the Russian –Ottoman war of 1806– 12.5 His words capture nicely what other Russian officers thought about the geographically southern, but imaginatively eastern, rival empire, with which Russia was so often at war during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.6 In the late 1700s and the early 1800s, a growing number of Russian officers came to reflect on the Ottoman manner of making war in the light of the Western military art. They placed the objective differences that existed between the Ottoman and Russian ways of war into a general interpretative frame that contrasted the ‘civilized’ model and its ‘barbaric’ opposite. Whereas the Western European authors spoke about the Ottoman military decline already in the seventeenth century, there is little indication of any perceived military inferiority of the Ottoman Empire in the Russian works of the period. In his description of the first Russian – Ottoman war of 1677 – 81, the author of the famous Kiev Synopsis Innokentii Gizel’ wrote of ‘various military devises, interminable assaults, sapping, grenades and endless shooting’ that the Ottomans employed in order to capture Chigirin in 1677 and 1678.7 Although Gisel’ presented these rather inconlusive campaigns as the victory of the Russian troops and the Ukranian cossacks loyal to the tsar, he attributed this outcome to divine intervention rather than to the military sophistication of the victors.8 In fact, the Chigirin campaings, just as the Crimean campaigns of 1687 – 9 of Prince V.V. Golitsyn or even the first Azov campaign of Peter the Great in 1695 revealed above all the inadequacies of the Russian troops and their strategy and made Russian officers speak respectfully about their rivals. Thus, a participant of the Crimean and Azov campaigns, A.I. Lyzlov, paid tribute to the Ottomans for their large numbers and ‘being always ready for war’, their ‘singular promptness on assault’, the sultans’ personal leadership of their armies, and their attention to ‘armor and military weapons’.9 Similarly, a late seventeenth-century description of the Ottoman Empire composed by a captive Russian military man described the janissaries as ‘strong for war’ (na voinu

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krepki), even though the author noted that their ‘ways of war are not in accordance with the science’ (a voina ikh ne po nauke est’).10 Over the next century, the systematic adoption of European military institutions and practices conditioned the Russian perception of the Ottoman way of war.11 Although Peter’s defeat at the Pruth in 1711 revealed that the sultan was still a formidable rival, the subsequent wars gradually convinced the Russian military men of the inferiority of the Ottoman military organization. The author of the first Russian victory over the Ottoman army in a field battle, Field Marshal Burkhard Christoph von Munnich could boast in his memoirs that the war of 1735–9 ‘made the Turks and Tatars respect the Russian army’.12 Thirty years later, a new encounter with the Ottomans led the battalion commander and later the Russian ambassador to Great Britain S.R. Vorontsov remark that ‘the Turks are no longer what they used to be in the times of Anna Ioannovna, or else we have since changed for the better’.13 According to the veteran of the war of 1768– 74, Lieutenant-General Prince A.A. Prozorovskii, ‘the rules that [defined] the regular war [had] no currency’ among the Ottomans, whose army showed ‘neither formation nor order’ (ni stroiu ni poriadku net).14 Having ‘tested the Turkish strength’ at Larga and Kagul in 1770, G.A. Potemkin claimed that he ‘knew what to avoid and how to defeat them’. In the formula of Catherine the Great’s famous favourite, ‘one [had] to seek them in the field and, having defeated them, not let them recover’. Since the Ottomans were ‘strong in the defence of the fortified places, . . . one had to avoid storming them, particularly since the state [of these fortifications] is such that they have to fall by themselves’.15 The Russian officers soon came to realize that numerical strength was less important in confrontation with the Ottomans than in the European wars. ‘Had they been able to defeat our corps of 25,000, an army double that size would have met the same fate’ noted Field Marshal P.A. Rumiantsev in the wake of his victory at Kagul in 1770.16 As if to prove these words, an 80,000-strong Russian army could not achieve decisive success in the campaign of 1809– 10 against the Ottoman Empire gripped by a severe political crisis. After a much reduced Russian force scored a clear victory against the grand vizier at Slobozia in 1811, the author of that victory, M.I. Kutuzov, argued that ‘success against the Turks depends not upon the great numbers, but upon the deftness and vigilance of the commander’. Kutuzov reflected the already

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established perception of the Ottomans as lacking in both strategy and tactics when he advised not to act against them ‘with the mass of the entire army as against the European troops. By their nature the Turks are not enterprising enough in order to defeat our separate detachments by rapid movement of their combined forces’.17 Kutuzov was speaking on the basis of participating personally in three Russian– Ottoman wars. Rumiantsev, Potemkin, Suvorov, and Prozorovskii had each served as corps commanders or commanders-inchief in two of the four Russian confrontations with the Ottoman Empire that followed in close succession in the last third of the eighteenth and the first third of the nineteenth century. Not limited to the ‘Turkish campaigns’, the careers of Rumiantsev, Suvorov, Kutuzov and a host of lesser commanders and officers included the wars against Prussia (1757– 62) and France (1799–1800, 1805–7, 1812– 14). This alternation of adversaries stimulated reflection on their differences and was a crucial factor behind the discussion of the Ottoman way of war in the writings of the Russian military elite. The period when the Ottoman and European wars figured prominently in the biographies of many Russian noblemen was also the time of considerable Westernization and theoretical sophistication of the officer corps. This tendency manifested itself, among other things, in the publication of a growing number of translated Western and Russian military studies that addressed different aspects of war in general and contrasted the tactics and strategies of different nations. Already in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the Russian officers could learn about the Habsburg experience of the wars with the Ottomans by reading the translations of Raimondo Montecuccoli’s Memoirs (1704) and Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s The Military State of the Ottoman Empire (1732).18 Later, a growing familiarity with the European languages gave Russians a possibility to reflect on their experience of the ‘Turkish campaigns’ in the light of the accounts of Russian –Ottoman wars produced by Western authors, some of whom wrote on the basis of their temporary service in the Russian or Ottoman armies.19 The assumptions that structured this reflection are illustrated by the writings of the adjunct professor of military history at the Moscow University Iakov Ivanovich de Sanglen. Despite the contemporary humanist critique of war, de Sanglen considered the art of war an aspect of enlightenment necessary to ‘protect the security of nations, punish

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the insolent disturbers of quietness and affirm peace and well-being of societies’.20 According to the author, the civilizing aspect of the military science found its best example in the figure of Peter the Great who ‘completely transformed the Russian military organization’ and ‘raised his people to the highest degree of enlightenment and glory’.21 The centrality of science for success in modern war found a negative confirmation in the example of the Ottomans who, despite their natural bellicosity, ‘were unable to fight against the civilized nations of Europe’.22 ‘If the Turks had been as capable of self-formation (obrazovaniiu sebia) as the Russians’, argued de Sanglen, ‘they would long have understood that a reform of their military art in accordance with the European model is the only means to save their fatherland that is going to fall’.23 The assertion of the superiority of the European military science went together with the idea that every people, east or west, had its own manner of making war, and that the failure to take it into consideration could lead one to defeat. Field Marshal von Munnich who commanded the Russian army in the war against the Porte of 1735–9 claimed that ‘the strategy and tactics employed against Swedes cannot be exactly the same as against the Turks and the Persians’.24 Seventy years later, de Sanglen argued that although ‘the military art is essentially the same in Russia, Germany, France, England etc. . . its application can vary in different places’.25 De Sanglen compared an army to a ‘travelling nation’ and argued that manifestations of the national character were necessarily stronger in the military art, the performance of which required hundreds of thousands of people, than in the work of individual painters, poets or musicians. Peculiarities of the national character and local conditions made different nations excel in different aspects of warfare yet ‘there was no nation that would not need to learn anything from its adversary’. In order to be successful in war one therefore had to follow the example of the Romans, ‘who viewed the war as a school and the enemy as a teacher’.26 The tension between universalizing and relativizing definitions of the military art observable in de Sanglen’s writings, manifested itself in the critical engagement of the Russian officers with the ideas of the Swiss military theorist Antoine-Henri de Jomini. Napoleon’s advisor in 1806–13, Jomini came to serve Alexander I in 1813, whereupon his works became a reference for several generations of Russian officers.27

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Jomini’s defence of the ‘eternal and unchangeable’ principles of military art incited polemics among the Russian officers, some of whom questioned the applicability of his theory of operational lines and the principle of the grand battle to the Ottoman wars. Thus, during the 1820s, the staff offices of the 2nd army, quartered in southern Russia, advocated an alternative ‘empirical’ approach in the planning of the future war against the Ottoman Empire, which rested on their thorough historical investigations of the previous ‘Turkish campaigns’.28 The reaction of the Russian military elite to Jomini’s ideas and other European military literature reflected their growing appreciation of the importance of national military history. From the early 1800s, the educated Russians could learn the history of the ‘Turkish campaigns’ from the increasingly numerous biographical and anecdotal accounts of Munnich, Rumiantsev, Potemkin, Suvorov and Kutuzov.29 Over the next century, these publications helped to create a veritable pantheon of Russian national commanders, whose actions against the Ottomans – the rejection of the linear tactics, attack in small squares and columns, encouragement of the bayonet charge and active use of artillery – anticipated the post-1789 transformations in the European art of war.30 Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 gave another impetus to the development of military historiography as it challenged the Russian authors to write the ‘true’ history of the campaign of 1812, supposedly falsified by the French historians. Although the confrontation with revolutionary and Napoleonic France remained central to the interests of Russia’s military historians for the rest of the nineteenth century, the valorization of the nation’s past led many of them to recognize the crucial role of the ‘Turkish campaigns’ in the emergence of a particularly Russian art of war.31 Such was the intellectual background of the two Russian military writers who offered particularly pointed discussions of the Ottoman way of war in the first half of the nineteenth century. The first of them was Andrei Nikiforovich Pushkin, an artillery captain and a veteran of the war of 1812, who published An Overview of The Military State of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the Russian– Ottoman war of 1828–9. Pushkin contrasted ‘the military art of the Enlightened nations [that] was almost everywhere the same’, to the ‘peculiarity of the Ottoman military organization established by centuries’.32 Well-versed as he was in the principles of European military science, the author nevertheless

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believed that ‘the ways of war of different peoples result from mores, way of life and the character itself’.33 This Montesquieuian premise served Pushkin to explain the differences between European and Oriental warfare. He claimed that the people of Europe ‘are less passionate and strong, the objects of human action are more diverse and the very softening of mores makes one respect the natural rights of man in war’. As a result, the European way of war was ‘based on art rather than on brutal force so that the most intense attacks were the results of rational calculation rather than spontaneous emotions’.34 Conversely, the Ottoman warriors demonstrated ‘a mixture of military virtues and vices, lack of military education and blind fanaticism’. According to Pushkin, these qualities produced ‘a completely different way of war, no less dangerous [than the European one] and requiring greater caution’ on the part of their adversaries.35 ‘Endowed by nature with strong constitution and courage and guided by unbridled superstition’, wrote Pushkin, ‘the Turks are frightening in their first onslaught into which they rush with a lot of shouting and clamour under numerous banners and ensigns’. However, upon the first failure they ‘demonstrate pusillanimity’ and ‘flee as precipitously as they had previously advanced’. In Pushkin’s opinion, such an outcome was the product of the chaotic manner of their attack that was often undertaken in disregard of the local setting and the enemy’s disposition.36 A general formula of success against the Ottomans was therefore a combination of rational calculation with the steadiness in the first encounter. In Pushkin’s words, it was necessary ‘to act so that it could be possible to say that ignorance and ferocity of the Asians shatter against the art and cold-bloodedness of the Europeans’.37 Despite his emphasis on the chaotic character of the Ottoman actions in the field, Pushkin did not believe their military qualities to be inferior in every respect. The Russian author mentioned accomplished horsemanship as ‘the general quality of all Oriental peoples facilitated by their way of life, upbringing and superiority of horses’. The cavalry thus constituted one of the strengths of the Ottoman army that neither Russian nor European horsemen could match. Pushkin therefore endorsed M.I. Kutuzov’s advice ‘to beat Turkish cavalry by infantry and Turkish infantry by cavalry’.38 The Ottomans’ desperate defence of their numerous fortresses combined with courageous sorties partly compensated for the inadequacies of these fortifications and the general weakness

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of the Ottoman army in the field.39 Since the systematic siege and capture of these fortresses greatly slowed down the progress of the Russian armies, Pushkin suggested blockading them in the future by reserve forces and using the main army for a rapid advance into the Ottoman interior.40 Finally, Pushkin recommended using dragoons and mounted rangers in small-scale warfare aimed at inciting the local population for a general rebellion against ‘the Ottoman military despotism’.41 According to Pushkin, the use of such measures was the necessary consequence of the fact that the Muslims were all ‘foreign soldiers’ who kept the ‘true inhabitants of Turkey, the Greeks and the Bulgarians’, under ‘military rule’. As Baron Franc ois de Tott before him, the Russian author considered the Ottomans ‘an army encamped in Europe rather than a nation’, which could not be subjugated precisely because ‘one could not subjugate an army’.42 At the same time, Pushkin insisted that ‘it was always possible to defeat the Turks and chase them out of Europe’.43 Pushkin did not participate personally in a campaign against the Ottomans prior to the publication of his essay and formulated his ideas under the impact of Western discussions of the Ottoman warfare. One finds an even greater immersion in the Western literature on the Ottoman Empire in the case of Ivan Petrovich Liprandi. Another veteran of 1812, Liprandi began amassing a library of European publications about the realm of the sultan upon his settlement in Bessarabia in 1818. The war of 1828–9 gave Liprandi a chance to add personal experience to his extensive reading, on the basis of which he wrote a monumental Lexicon of the Ottoman Empire (1836) that remained unpublished, as well as a series of smaller pieces that came out at the time of the Crimean War.44 Liprandi’s study was meant to deal with the failure of the Europeans, Russians included, to build upon past experience in the wars with the Ottoman Empire during the previous century and a half. According to him, the bitter experience of the first campaigns in these wars helped the Europeans to acquire the necessary knowledge, but only for the duration of the given war, whereupon it was lost again.45 Needless to say, Liprandi’s work was meant to preserve the essential knowledge and make it readily available. In his recommendations, Liprandi proceeded from the assumption that military strategy should reflect the moral and psychological characteristics of the enemy. He implicitly contrasted the universal

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principles of modern military strategy, which were deemed to be universally applicabe, to the original Greek and Roman meaning of ‘stratagem’ as a particular ‘war ruse’ employed against a particular enemy.46 According to Liprandi, Jomini’s theory of strategic lines and advantage points could lead to success only on condition of ‘a perfect understanding of the enemy’s qualities’, which characterized the famous ancient and early modern commanders.47 This principle held particular importance for Russia, which bordered on the nations that were ‘completely opposite to one another’.48 Having to confront the adversaries that were as different as the Swedes and the Turks, Russia needed ‘special rules of war with each of the neighbouring peoples that would reflect its character and customs’.49 Liprandi concurred with Pushkin in that ‘the war against the Turks represented the opposite of the European war in all respects’, and attributed this contrast, among other things, to the peculiarities of the Ottoman army.50 According to the Russian officer, the Ottoman infantry, cavalry and artillery did not represent a single whole, as was the case with all the European armies.51 If the attack of the infantry was successful, their cavalry would eagerly pursue the retreating enemy. In all other cases, argued Liprandi, the Ottoman cavalrymen would keep as far as possible from the infantrymen out of fear that the defeated foot soldiers would dismount them and seize their horses in order to flee from the battlefield as happened many times in the wars against the Austrians and the Russians.52 Nor would the Ottoman infantry or the cavalry assist their artillery; instead the latter’s failure to stop the enemy’s attack usually served as the signal for the entire army to leave the battlefield.53 Paradoxically, these glaring inadequacies of the Ottoman troops did not make the ‘learned principles of the military art’ a guarantee of success in a war against them. In the absence of the context specific skills, these ‘learned principles’ were ‘as useless as the thrusts of an accomplished swordsman, who calculates every strike, against an adversary who attacks frenziedly without any rules’.54 According to Liprandi, ‘[the] most experienced and skilful commander in wars against the French will at every step be dumbfounded when fighting against the Turks; he will be stopped by trifling obstacles, upset by movements, which, in his opinion, are incorrect, and so forth’.55 By contrast, successful operations against the Ottomans often included conscious deviations from the rules of the regular warfare that would be unthinkable in a war against a

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European army.56 In particular, the history of Russia’s ‘Turkish campaigns’ suggested that one had to avoid besieging the Ottoman fortresses, notwithstanding the principles of military science.57 Not unlike Pushkin, Liprandi believed that siege warfare was both costly, because of the desperate bravery that the Ottomans displayed in any constrained space, and useless, because of their reluctance to venture from the walls far enough to create real complications for the advancing army.58 The wars of other European powers against the Ottomans, and, especially, the Austrian and Hungarian campaigns, demonstrated that the local population was never neutral and joined the enemy unless co-opted by means of volunteer detachments. According to Liprandi, the lack of such detachments exposed the army to the small war on the flanks and in the rear, for which the European soldier was unfit: ‘Communications would be disrupted, the horse patrols and small parties threatened and the villages, whether Turkish or Bulgarian, deserted’. Conversely, by forming volunteer detachments ‘in accordance with the spirit of the people and using them skilfully’, one could ‘favourably dispose the local population and keep it quiet and peaceful’.59 Liprandi wrote from experience: early in 1829, he obtained the permission of the Russian Commander-in-Chief I.I. Dibich to create such a detachment and helped to neutralize both the Muslim and the Christian population in the rear of the Russian army that was advancing towards Adrianople.60 It is remarkable that both Pushkin and Liprandi were the veterans of the war of 1812, who developed an interest in the history of Russia’s ‘Turkish campaigns’ before they had the chance to participate in one of them personally. This circumstance testifies to the reflective impetus of the Napoleonic wars just as it reveals the familiarity of the Russian officers of this period with the military literature necessary to undertake a more or less systematic comparison between the European and Ottoman warfare. The writings of Pushkin and Liprandi also illustrate the universalist and relativist approaches that informed the reception of the Western military theory in Russia as well as the Russian representations of the Ottoman way of war. Whereas Puskin tended to embrace the universalist vantage point and asserted the superiority of European military art over the elemental energy of the Ottoman assault, Liprandi adopted a relativizing perspective and stressed above all the limited use of Western strategy and tactics in a war against the Ottomans. Despite this difference, the two authors shared the assumption that the

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Ottoman manner of war making was entirely sui generis, an assumption that was common to the Russian military writers of the Catherinian, Alexandrian and Nicholavean eras.

Spectacle and Horror of Oriental Warfare Discussions of the Ottoman tactics were not the only and perhaps not the most important site of the Orientalization of the enemy. No less significant were the accounts of the direct encounter with the Ottomans that focused on the way they looked and acted. The physical appearance of the sultan’s army occasioned Orientalizing representations as early as the Pruth campaign of Peter the Great. The Ottoman and Tatar forces that confronted the Russian troops at Sta˘niles¸ti fascinated one of the Russian commanders, a French soldier of fortune named Jean Nicole Moreau de Brasey, by their ‘sunlit bright vestments, the glitter of weapons shining like diamonds, majestic headwear and their light enviable horses’. Forming a semicircle around the Russian army, they offered ‘an ineffable picture’ making Moreau de Brasey conclude that ‘no army is more beautiful, majestic and splendid than the Turkish one’.61 The Ottoman troops fully retained their spectacular quality in battle. According to Martos, ‘their cries, unfurled banners and bright clothes offered a majestic picture to the eye and an unpleasant, scary music to the ear’.62 The Russian artillery officer P.N. Glebov, who had the chance to observe an Ottoman sortie against the Russian troops besieging Silistria in 1829, found the picture even more fascinating. As the Ottoman infantry engaged the Russian line, the ‘Ottoman horsemen, their clothes shining with bright colours, would ride out of the fortress gates galloping, caracoling and cheering up the foot soldiers and make random shots out of their long pistols before retreating behind the fortress walls’. All this time the Russian line would remain in its place ‘paring the fury of the wild attack with an indifferent steadiness, this distinct quality of a European formation’. In the words of Glebov, the confrontation between the flamboyant Ottoman troops and the regular formations of the Russians turned the battle into a ‘wonderful spectacle’ that contained ‘a lot of pure poetry’.63 The Ottoman camp, too, offered a remarkable sight. In the words of one anonymous Russian eighteenth-century writer, the numerous tents

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of the pashas stood out by their ‘magnificence, comfort and spaciousness’ that rendered them an aspect of ‘a beautiful palace’. The contents of such tent palaces were similarly impressive: ‘Their shafts are covered in silver or gilded, their fabrics are of the best quality, the embroidery, carpets, pillows – everything represents luxury combined with opulence’.64 The veteran of the 1806–12 war, I.O. Otroshchenko, reported ‘a lot of expensive weaponry, rose oil and opium’ in the Ottoman camp when captured during M.I. Kutuzov’s decisive manoeuvre at Rustchuk in November 1811.65 Even a smaller Ottoman camp occupied after the battle of Ba˘iles¸ti in Little Wallachia in 1829 was full of proverbial riches. In the testimony of F.F. Tornau, it contained several thousand horses and many expensive sabres, pistols, scimitars encrusted with silver, pipes embellished with amber, carpets, shawls and ‘all the whims of Oriental luxury’.66 According to A.N. Pushkin, since the reign of Mehmed IV (1648– 87), ‘an enormous number of servitors and multiplication of workmen became an indispensable property of the army that no longer engaged in raids as the Tatars used to do’. As a result, ‘the Turkish camp, usually established on the shape of a crescent and filled with wives, slaves and men of different ranks, trains, numerous tents and pavilions constituted a second army, which was perhaps more numerous than the first’.67 Whereas Pushkin attributed this taste for luxury to certain ‘permanency and graduality’ (nepremennost’ i postepennost’) that the Ottoman troops acquired over time, Georg Friedrich von Valentini, a Prussian general and military theoretician who joined the Russian army on the Danube in 1810–11, considered ‘the desire of taking riches and valuables into the field’ a manifestation of ‘military despotism’.68 With time, the theme of disorder and chaos that reigned in the Ottoman army started to overshadow the images of opulence and luxury. This change reflected a more general transformation in the Western perception of the Orient, whereby the stark poverty was revealed behind the fac ade of fairy-tale riches. When the outbreak of the Greek crisis in 1821 made the new Russian –Ottoman war imminent, the Russian journal Messenger of Europe presented its readers with an excerpt from Franc ois Pouqueville’s Travels to Greece (1820–2), in which the French author compared the troops of the sultan to the ragtag crowds of Catholic pilgrims that plundered the Hugenots on their way to Santiago de Compostella.

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Instead of pilgrims with rosaries around their necks, the clamorous crowds are here preceded by Calenders. . . atop of donkeys. . . with banners in hands shouting ‘Allah’ at the top of their lungs. They are followed by Delii, i.e. irregular cavalrymen, who bolt in various directions and rob anyone they see. After these heroes come the Timariots, or cavalry on horses, donkeys and mules, for the most part stolen, with ropes instead of stirrups. Then follows the infantry, the worst in the world. . . the soldiers, carrying rifles without bayonets as well as long pistols and daggers, proceed without any order in a thick cloud of dust; they look like sheep flocked to pasture. After that wonderful infantry follow the Topchi or gunners, whose guns are drawn by oxen or by Christians hurried by the whips. This polyglot meˆle´e of barbarians, some of whom shout songs while others shoot in the air to pass time, is finally followed by opulently dressed commanders, surrounded by crowds of slaves, whose only function is to disperse with long sticks the curious on-lookers, who failed to keep the respectful distance.69 Although the Russian periodical was convinced that ‘the line regiments of enlightened nations’ would scatter such an army ‘in the first attack’, not all Russian soldiers were so dismissive of the adversary. Some of them continued to regard the Ottomans as serious and even formidable rivals. As late as in the second decade of the nineteenth century, A.I. Martos had to ridicule those amateurs of the military art who, unlike himself, had never participated in the ‘Turkish campaigns’ and thought that fighting the Ottomans was easy because of their ignorance of military tactics and lack of good commanders. Pointing to the bitter lessons that the Ottomans gave to various European powers, Martos spoke highly of their ‘ardent courage and spirit of unparalleled valour’ and confessed that ‘from the very first time, one could not help feeling horror and shudder looking at the ferocious enemy rushing upon you with their banners and ensigns, which no Muslim ever abandons’.70 Whether scornful or respectful, Russian authors agreed that the behaviour of the Ottoman soldiers in the field made them different from Europeans and therefore had to be taken into consideration. In his diary of the war of 1787– 92, Major M.L. von Raan argued that in the ‘Turkish campaigns’ one had to do everything in order to be successful in the first battles. Should the Ottomans manage to resist the attack, argued von

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Raan, ‘their courage increases greatly and one has to expect strong assaults from them. By contrast, if the Ottomans encounter staunch resistance in the very first engagement, they become not nearly as dangerous as the experience of the previous war demonstrated countless times’.71 Von Raan’s opinion was endorsed by F.F. Tornau who argued that ‘in the war with Turks and other Oriental peoples one has to advance boldly not fearing the numbers of the adversaries. . . To retreat is to inflict upon oneself shame and defeat since the Asians (aziatsy) pursue the fleeing enemy with irresistible fury’.72 Observers who took a more skeptical view of the Ottomans stressed above all the instability of their mood in battle. A participant of the 1829 campaign, Doctor K.K. Zeidlits, noted that ‘when fortune favours him, the Turk is arrogant and cruel, but as soon as the victory is not on his side, he becomes cowardly and acts meanly’.73 According to the more sympathetic Glebov, the lack of ‘coldhearted, prosaic bravery, this distinct characteristic of a regular [military] order’ made the Ottomans ‘bad soldiers, even though each of them is a warrior in the best sense of this word’.74 In the opinion of Liprandi, who added theoretical reflection to combat experience, catastrophic reversals that the Ottomans suffered against the Austrians and the Russians resulted from the failure of various parts of the Ottoman army to support each other in the battle and their singular ability to transmit the panicking mood to one another.75 The sudden transition from bravery to panic that supposedly characterized the Ottoman soldiers was sometimes seen as the quality distinguishing the Asians from Europeans. According to Liprandi, ‘no one was more prone to such fear than the Turks, with the only qualification that it usually took its effect when the danger was still at a distance. Conversely, when the Turk faces the danger, he falls into frenzy and displays the most desperate courage’.76 A general of the Caucasian army, M.Ia. Ol’shevskii, argued that fear and panic, while common to all nations in all climates, had an especially devastating impact upon the people of the South and East. Whereas the Northerners could recover from fear an hour or a day later, ‘in the South and the East. . . the entire organism gets so struck by horror that a man becomes ill and for months cannot walk or do anything consciously’.77 Ol’shevskii’s colleague on the Caucasian front in 1854 – 5, N.N. Murav’ev-Karskii explained the unstable performance of the

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Ottoman troops by the seasonal character of the Oriental warfare. In his opinion, ‘the Asian is closer to nature than the European and more than the latter resembles an animal in material life. He burns out, freezes for the period of winter and gains new life with the return of warm days and renaissance of nature’. This, according to Murav’ev, was equally characteristic of Turks, bashi-bazouks and Kurds, who ‘fade away for winter only to come back with the appearance of new pasture with new forces, on fresh horses and with fresh hopes’.78 Liprandi concurred with Murav’ev’s opinion and recommended to besiege the Ottoman fortresses in winter, among other things, because ‘in wintertime the Turk completely degenerates and is much easier induced of capitulation’. To support his argument, the author contrasted the cases of Ochakov (1788) and Ismail (1790), both of which were captured in December, to the unsuccessful summer sieges of Ibrail and Rustchuk, in 1809 and 1810 respectively.79 Besides the military qualities of the Ottoman soldiers, the most important marker of difference attributed to them by the Russian authors was undoubtedly their (mis)treatment of the prisoners and the dead. Since the late eighteenth century, Russian memoirs contain graphic descriptions of the ‘barbarous’ practices of the Ottoman warfare. One of the earliest illustrations of that can be found in the account of captivity by the Russian charge´ d’affaires in Constantinople P.A. Levashev. After a period of imprisonment in Yedikule, Levashev, it shall be remembered, ended up in the train of the grand vizier’s army operating against the Russians in Moldavia. At one point, the diplomat reported thirteen cut-off heads that the vizier’s cavalry brought on their pikes to the camp after a battle with the Russians. ‘A great multitude of people were attracted by the spectacle of these heads from the camp and from the Bender fortress. Some would spit on them, others would curse the heads as if they could hear, still others would imitate the cries of the people whose heads are being severed, from which everyone can see how blind and mean this people is [koliko slepotstvuiushch i podl sei narod]’.80 Two decades later, the diarist of the war of 1787– 92 R.M. Tsebrikov portrayed the Ottoman treatment of the prisoners of war and the dead as totally foreign to the practices of civilized peoples. According to Tsebrikov, the ‘philosophical reason’ convinced European nations that ‘the wretched victims, who escaped fire and sword, do not have to feel their sad lot in captivity and therefore should not be deprived of

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livelihood’. By contrast, ‘the rude and ignorant Turk [took] revenge upon the captured valiant soldiers by starving and outraging them’.81 In Tsebrikov’s testimony, during G.A. Potemkin’s siege of Ochakov in 1788, the Ottomans not only killed the Russian soldiers wounded in an unsuccessful assault ‘in the most torturing way’, but also cut off their heads and ‘impaled them upon stakes along the city walls’.82 The practice of carrying this ‘beastly revenge upon. . . the most wonderful member of the human body’ disturbed Tsebrikov, particularly since it proved to be contagious. When a successful Ottoman sortie from Ochakov carried away the head of a Russian general, the furious Potemkin ordered to behead the Ottoman corpses that filled the moat and bring them to the Russian camp for display. According to Tsebrikov, as severed heads were carried around the camp, people would run up from all directions to see them and feel the ‘aching abhorrence’: ‘The soldier would shout “storm!”, the peasant would cry “infidels!” while the civil official would say “what a disgust!” and all would shudder and turn away quickly’.83 Although the severed heads were not always Russian, the practice itself was definitely offensive to the Westernized officers. Symbolizing the ‘barbarity’ of the Oriental warfare, the severed heads separated the tsarist military elite not only from their ‘Asian’ enemies, but also from the occasional ‘Asian’ allies. In his memoir of the war of 1806 –12, A.F. Langeron tells about the ‘ovation’ that the Wallachian auxiliaries (arnauts) offered to the Russian general M.A. Miloradovich at the time of his entry in Bucharest in 1807 after a bold manoeuvre that saved the Wallachian capital from devastation by the Ottoman forces. Having learned that the general was going to reside at the house of Prince Grigore Ghica, they collected all the heads of the enemies that they had previously chopped off and arranged them along the main stairway, at the doors as well as along the gallery and fixed a torch near each of them.84 Accompanied by the arnauts on a triumphal evening procession along the streets of Bucharest, Miloradovich became elated when he saw the illumination in the distance. However, after he entered the courtyard and saw the terrible sight, the valiant general momentarily fainted and, upon recovering his senses, ordered to ‘wash thoroughly this bloodstained palace’.85 The sight of the Ottomans severing heads of their vanquished enemies in the very midst of a battle constituted the most horrible and,

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at the same time, the most spectacular aspect of the accounts of the ‘Turkish campaigns’. In his memoirs, F.F. Tornau offers a graphic description of the sad lot that befell an unfortunate quartermaster who ventured to join the Russian sortie against an Ottoman fortress, but was lightly wounded and fell behind. Engaged in street combat, Tornau suddenly heard a desperate cry and, upon turning around, saw the quartermaster kneeling between two enemy soldiers who were hurriedly severing his head. Even though the Russian infantrymen ‘leaped at them in fury and momentarily turned them into a sieve’, it was too late as the head of the quatermeister was already ‘rolling in the dust, with its teeth clasped and its open eyes reflecting all the force of the mortal suffering’.86 The unsettling sight of a dismembered human body could be encountered in any modern war. However, Tornau and other Russian officers were terrified to see the Ottomans do with their own hands what elsewhere was the effect of the cannon balls hitting a military formation. Russian authors found the custom of cutting off noses and ears no less appalling than the severed heads. In the account of his captivity, A.G. Rozalion-Soshal’skii reports being placed together with other Russian officers in a tent where they found several caskets of salted ears.87 In the words of Zeidlits, ‘the faithful Turks still thought that it was easier to enter Paradise with such trophies’.88 According to him, during the battle of Kulevcha in 1829, the Ottomans, who had a temporary advantage, ‘found the time to give vent to their beastly bloodthirstiness disfiguring the dead and torturing in the most horrible way those whom they captured alive’.89 Similar things were reported from Shumla by the young diplomat F.P. Fonton, whose pen ‘refused to describe this horrible, frightening sight’ he witnessed in the Russian redoubt temporarily captured by the Ottomans, who ‘were not ashamed to perform their atrocities even on dead bodies’.90 The trope of the ‘Turkish barbarousness’ persisted despite considerable transformations that the Ottoman army and Ottoman society underwent by the middle of the nineteenth century. Thus, a participant in the 1853–4 campaign on the Danube P.V. Alabin reported the Ottoman soldiers’ scalping and cutting off noses and ears of the Russian prisoners in the battle of Oltenit¸a. Alabin used this episode to illustrate the supposedly unchangeable character of the enemy, which is one of the central characteristics of the Orientalist discourse. The Russian officer argued that ‘[neither] the Turkish people nor its regular

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troops, abandoned their hatred towards Christianity, their fanaticism, their barbarous way of treating the captives and the wounded’. Alabin affirmed that ‘in their relation to enlightenment [the Turks] remain the same as they used to be in the time of [the conquest of Constantinople by] Mehmed II’.91 The reaction of the Russian diarists and memoirists to the Ottoman ‘barbarities’ reflected their assumptions about the acceptable forms of violence in war. These assumptions emerged in Europe towards the end of the early modern period and reflected the process of subordination of the fighting bodies to the dictates of the rationalistic military art. The condemnation of the extreme forms of bodily violence was the obverse side of the transformation of soldierly bodies into automata obeying the commands of the educated, often aristocratic officers. Increasingly sophisticated manoeuvring, avoidance of battles, and efforts to minimize the destructiveness of war upon the civilian population constituted other aspects of the eighteenth-century sublimation of warfare.92 These Europe-wide tendencies had some influence on the Russian officers, whose participation in the Seven Years War as well as the wars against the revolutionary and Napoleonic France translated into an attachment to the principles of ‘civilized’ warfare. This attachment not only led the Russian officers to Orientalize the Ottomans, but also made them uneasy about certain practices and actions of their own army in the ‘Turkish campaigns’. Thus, in 1769, the Russian infantry general of Livonian origin Georg Ernst von Strandman witnessed a Russian cossack detachment massacre some 1,500 Budjak Tatars who were the vassals of the Crimean khan. In the testimony of Strandman, the cossacks cut up and devastated their villages and tilt carts (kibitki) despite the fact that the Tatars had already sent the deputies to negotiate their passage under the sovereignty of the Russian empress. According to the diarist, the cossacks ‘committed the most repulsive cruelties and killed everyone they saw, including women and children’, but were soon severely punished for their atrocities by a superior force of Tatars.93 The episode recounted by Strandman reminded of the similar excesses of the Russian auxiliaries in Eastern Prussia at the beginning of the Seven Years War of 1756– 63.94 The veteran of that war A.T. Bolotov spoke about the cossack ‘destructions, incendiaries and plunder’ or else ‘atrocities and robberies’ as well as ‘utter liberties and insults with respect to women’. In Bolotov’s own

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recognition, these cossack practices were ‘contrary to all the rules of war’. They harmed Russia’s image among the European peoples, who ‘started thinking that this was the habit of our entire army’.95 A similar concern about Russia’s image in Europe must have led another participant of the Seven Years War, the favourite of Catherine II G.G. Orlov to alert the Russian Commander-in-Chief Rumiantsev to the inappropriateness of irregular warfare, in particular, the burning of villages around the Ottoman fortresses of Giurgiu and Ibrail by the troops of the ColonelGeneral I.I. von Stoffeln in the winter of 1769–70. A veteran of the Seven Years War, Rumiantsev admitted in his letter to Orlov that burning villages was ‘the custom of barbarians rather than Europeans’. At the same time, the Russian commander argued that ‘the present war [differed] in character from the wars in other parts of Europe’. The benefits of sparing settlements were lost when one operated against the Ottomans, who ‘destroyed the villages themselves’ whenever they were unable to ‘leave with all belongings’. Unless the empty villages were destroyed, argued Rumiantsev, the ‘inhuman enemy’ (ne znaiushchii chelovechestva) could ‘poison them with a deadly pestilence as they often did in the past to the ruin of the humankind’.96 In his reply to Catherine’s personal inquiry about the incident, Rumiantsev likewise admitted that the war on the Danube represented a return to the ‘barbarity’ that characterized the Russian ancestors and ‘all savage peoples’. According to him, the Russians abandoned these old customs after the Prussian war had revealed the disadvantages of burning and plundering the territories that constituted the theatres of military operations, yet the ‘ferocity and inhumanity’ of the present enemy made it difficult to ‘follow the principles of goodness’. The sight of the ‘Ottoman barbarities’ infuriated the Russian troops so much as to make them ‘forget all forbearance’ in the treatment of the enemy. Rumiantsev further pointed to the military expediency of burning the villages as it deprived the Ottomans of the possibility of entrenching themselves on the left bank of the Danube and secured the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The commander also assured the empress that the Christian inhabitants of the burned villages were notified in advance and had the time to carry their belongings into the principalities, while the Muslim inhabitants, who constituted the majority of the villagers, fled beyond the Danube at the approach of the Russian troops.97

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In later wars against the Ottoman Empire, the Russian commanders continued to follow the enemy in the policy of scorched earth. Thus, in 1806–12 the belligerents practiced resettlements on such a wide scale that by the end of the war Danubian Bulgaria remained practically depopulated.98 The reader can sense the actual attitude of the Christian inhabitants towards such measures in A.I. Martos’s account of the Russian burning of Rustchuk in 1811. Part of a retrograde manoeuvre that permitted M.I. Kutuzov to win over the vastly superior Ottoman forces, the Russian destruction and abandonment of the Rustchuk fortress came as a tragedy to the local Armenian and Bulgarian population. The former refused to leave their homes at the risk of perishing in flames. The latter for a long time did not believe the news of the upcoming destruction, yet switched from incredulity to anger as the Russian troops began their ‘predatory operation’ (grabitel’noe predpriiatie). Martos had to admit that Bulgarians were ‘entirely right’ to ‘pour their curses upon the [troops]’ as he saw their pale faces and heard the cries of children and women capable of bringing ‘the iron hearts into horror’.99 Martos’s criticism was not limited to those actions of the Russian army that harmed Orthodox co-religionists. A year prior to the burning of Rustchuk, he witnessed the Russian troops plunder the Muslim town of Kuzgun ‘in the most pitiful way’, desecrating the mosques, taking away the lead roofs as well as burning the best houses, the palace of the Ottoman commander and the villages around the town. Martos remained skeptical about the attempts of some of his fellow officers to justify these practices by references to war necessities and argued instead that devastations angered the locals and complicated the Russian campaign. The army experienced hunger and thirst in a country deserted by the ‘poor, unfortunate inhabitants who fled at the sight of the soldiers and cossacks to the woods and hid there with the wild animals from the barbarous hands of the predatory soldier’.100 Martos was not alone to speak about the suffering of the Muslim population in the ‘Turkish campaigns’. Another veteran of the war of 1806 – 12, the future head of the Russian political police A.Kh. Berkendorf, likewise sympathized with their sad lot as the Russian army rode roughshod over their neat houses ‘carefully surrounded by gardens and vineyards’. According to Berkendorf, ‘only with misgivings one could chase these happy people and destroy their homes that delight the eye’.101 The scorched earth strategy tended to

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turn the ‘Turkish campaigns’ into a war against the population, which made the Russian officers feel uneasy. Thus, in 1828, RozalionSoshal’skii similarly wrote about the ‘heavy impression’ created by the sight of a devastated country whose inhabitants ‘left in order to escape from you and await you with an irritated heart in some ambush in order to kill you in revenge for their disturbed peace’.102 The excesses that accompanied the capture of the Ottoman fortresses also disturbed some of the tsarist officers. According to the French soldier of fortune Roger de Damas, who stormed Ochakov in 1788 as Potemkin’s adjutant, the Russian soldiers put to sword 11,000 Ottomans, many of them already after the fortress was effectively taken. An even more ‘horrible carnage’ accompanied the Russian capture of Ismail in 1790, when, in addition to the 24,000 armed Ottomans, ‘even women and children fell victims to the rage and revenge of troops’.103 Violence against the Muslim civilians was apparently a reaction to the participation of the latter in the defence of the fortresses as well as the brutal means they employed. Thus, during the unsuccessful Russian assault on Rustchuk in 1810, Martos saw the male defenders throw logs down the walls and pour boiling water and melted metal upon the climbing Russians; in the meantime, women loaded and fired muskets, while children used scythes and stakes to throw the wounded Russian grenadiers into the moat.104 For all his criticism of the scorched earth strategy of the Russians, Martos clearly viewed such means of self-defence as illegitimate. And yet, the storming of Ochakov and Ismail revealed the disturbing reversibility of the Orientalizing discourse, which made some authors adopt alternative rhetorical strategies and view what happened as an expression of the inhumanity of war or else an illustration of the soldier’s lack of noble self-mastery. An example of the former strategy is offered by Tsebrikov’s description of the captured Ochakov, in which the earlier images of the Russian soldiers beheaded by the Ottomans during the siege receded before thousands of corpses of the fallen defenders and assailants filling the moats and streets of the destroyed fortress. As many of the Ottoman prisoners of war began to die in the winter cold, Tsebrikov no longer spoke of their prior mistreatment of the Russian captives. Instead, the ‘disgusting sight’ of the devastated homes made him think of the ‘harmful invention of cannons, bombs, mortars’, and regret the ‘cruelty that humanity caused to humanity’.105

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Whereas in Tsebrikov’s account denunciation of Oriental savagery evolved into Rousseauistic critique of modern warfare, Armand Emmanuel du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu attributed the excesses of the Russian soldiers in Ismail to their lower-class lack of the noble sang froid. A French royalist, who joined the Russian army on the eve of the siege and spent the next twenty-five years in the service of the tsars, Richelieu refused to attribute the ‘barbarities’ he witnessed to the ‘particular character of the Russians’ and argued that ‘no other troops in Europe would have behaved with greater humanity in similar circumstances’. According to Richelieu, ‘the great majority of human beings’ were incapable of ‘containing the feeling of anger’ towards the enemy who laid down the arms, particularly if the surrender came after the kind of fight that the Ottomans had put up. As a result, ‘the rage of a soldier increased in proportion to the resistance that he encountered’ to such a degree that, ‘despite the subordination that reigned in the Russian troops’ neither the Commander-in-Chief Potemkin nor Catherine II herself would have been capable of ‘saving the life of Turk whom the soldiers sought to kill’.106 Richelieu dismissed the assumption that the greater enlightenment of the European nations could make a difference in this case and pointed to the ‘British cruelties’ during the American War of Independence as well as the ‘barbarities of all kinds the one can often see in France since the revolution’. The representatives of the Westernized Russian officer corps produced the discourse of the Oriental war through systematic comparison of their experience of the European and ‘Turkish’ campaigns. The European military art, with its calculated character of actions in the battle, contrasted with the violent spontaneity of the Ottomans as the ‘civilized’ warfare and its Oriental opposite. Similarly, the ‘Ottoman barbarities’ figured in the war diaries and memoirs as the symbolic opposite of the ‘legitimate’ forms of violence in war. The severed heads and cut-off noses reflected the sheer brutality of the combat and even they did not provoke all the horror they could. Langeron’s story of Miloradovich fainting at the sight of severed heads reads almost like a funny episode, while Rozalion-Soshal’skii’s account of his captivity in 1828 – 9 is clearly modelled on an adventurous travelogue despite, or perhaps even due to, the salted ears. Just as the spectacular appearance of the Ottoman armies in the field, their savage excesses constituted a titillating aspect of war that was sometimes

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viewed as an Oriental adventure. At the same time, the Orientalization of the enemy had its limits, as is clear from the uneasiness of some diarists and memoirists of the ‘Turkish campaigns’ about particular practices and actions of the Russian army. At these moments, the Turks would cease to be the perpetrators of illegitimate violence and become instead its victims. Although some officers would still attempt to justify the violation of the rules of ‘civilized’ war by references to the barbarities of the enemy, others would view such excesses as manifestations of the inhumanity of war as such or else attribute them to the soldiers’ lack of the noble self-mastery.

Exotic Campaigns In a review of Russia’s ‘Turkish campaigns’ published on the eve of the Crimean War, a 20-year-old officer and future ambassador of the tsar in Istanbul N.P. Ignat’ev argued that ‘[in] the wars with Turkey, it is not the enemy who is scary, but the deadly climate, lack of supplies and diseases, which take away thousands of lives during every campaign’.107 Eighteenth-century military memoirs indeed contain multiple references to the challenging character of the North Pontic and Danubian war theatres. The excessive heat and ‘the great shortage of food’ experienced by the Russian army on the banks of the Pruth in 1711 anticipated the difficulties of the later campaigns.108 During von Mu¨nnich’s invasion of the Crimea in 1736, ‘the soldier was greatly exhausted by the oppressive heat and bad food’ and eventually, ‘by all sorts of diseases, fever, agues and bloody diarrheas’.109 The Turks and Tatars who killed only 2,000 Russian soldiers that year presented, according to the veteran of this war Christoph Hermann von Manstein ‘the smallest threat to the Russian army’. By contrast, ‘hunger, thirst and long marches during the hottest period of the year’ constituted a much more formidable enemy that claimed up to one half of Munnich’s men.110 Later in the century, Gustav von Strandman spoke of ‘malign fevers, diarrheas, oppressive heat and disgusting snakes’ that afflicted his regiment in Azov during the war of 1768 –74.111 On the other side of the war theatre, in Moldavia, P.A. Rumiantsev complained of a succession of ‘pouring rain and excessive heat’, which the soldiers, particularly the rookies, could not tolerate. According to the Russian commander, the sunrise was almost immediately followed by the

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sweltering heat, whereas the nights, by contrast, were unusually cold for the summer.112 In von Raan’s testimony, the military operations in Moldavia in 1788– 90 likewise took place in conditions of ‘unbearable heat which caused many diseases’, lack of food and forage as well as poor quality of water that was stagnant and full of insects.113 Nor could the Russian soldiers expect mild winters after oppressively hot summers: the freezing cold in the Moldavian winter quarters of the Russian army made soldiers stay in the dugouts, which facilitated the spread of disease.114 According to Liprandi, even a temporary sojourn in that country shook the strength of the Russian soldiers, whereupon they crossed the Danube ‘with the fallen spirit in order to meet the enemy who was numerous, accustomed to the local climate, fresh and healthy’.115 In the lowlands of the Danube, the Russian troops were plagued by exhausting and sometimes deadly fevers. ‘Bitter, sulphurous, salty and oozy water combined with malign air, poisoned by many factors, affects the local population and is outright perilous for anybody else’.116 The diet and clothing that supported the health of Russian soldiers in other climes became a risk factor in conditions of the great diurnal fluctuations of temperature in the Danubian valley.117 The authors of the military statistical survey of Moldavia composed in the wake of the war of 1828–9 stressed the man-made character of the bad climate in the principality, in particular the huge expanses of fallow land covered by wild grass, bulrush and slime, as well as dung-heaps and numerous graveyards with shallow graves in the towns. According to the authors of the survey, the sickly constitution of the local inhabitants testified to the negative impact of ‘bad air, unhealthy food, laziness and ignorance’.118 Malign air, poor water, unusual food and bad dwellings made of clayed wattle combined to produce ‘sickly disorders’ among the Russian troops.119 The Russian observers of Moldavia and Wallachia unanimously spoke of their abundant nature and fertile soil that permitted crops of 1:10, 1:20 and even 1:100 for particular kinds of cereals. And yet, with each new war against the Ottoman Empire, the tsarist troops that occupied the principalities depended upon the delivery of supplies from Russia which were uncertain because of the poor roads and the difficulty to obtain the requisite number of oxen without driving the local peasants to despair.120 During the wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the scarcity of local supplies was explained by the predatory Phanariot administration in Moldavia and Wallachia that discouraged

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the peasantry from undertaking intensive farming. However, the situation had not changed substantially by the time of the Crimean War that occurred a quarter of a century after the peace treaty of Adrianople (1829) abolished the Ottoman commercial monopoly in the principalities and made them an important competitor to Russia’s southern provinces on the European grain market. The Russian soldiers that occupied Moldavia and Wallachia in July 1853 continued to depend upon the deliveries from Russia, as their stomachs, used to rye bread, were not accustomed to one made from the wheat or corn flour produced in the principalities. Nor did the principalities offer as much oats as was necessary to the Russian cavalry.121 The perceived adversity of the environment was further exacerbated by the failure of the Russians to accumulate ‘local knowledge’. The nineteenth-century military writers pointed to the fact that, in their wars against the Ottoman Empire, the Russians, as different European nations before them, hardly learned from the past experience. Thus, M.K. Marchenko argued that the Russians every time began a war with an insufficient number of troops, a mistake that they tried to correct (not always successfully) in the later campaigns of the war by committing greater contingents.122 Although the Russian– Ottoman wars followed one another at an interval of 15 to 30 years, Liprandi complained that ‘Turkey in Europe’ each time looked to the Russian officers and commanders as a terra incognita.123 Villages situated on the right bank of the Danube were indicated on the Russian maps as located on the left bank of the river, while the veterans of the earlier ‘Turkish campaigns’ sometimes failed to recognize the towns they had entered decades earlier.124 Similarly, the head physician of the Chief Staff of Russia’s Danubian army in 1828– 9, Dr Christian J. Witt claimed that his colleagues rarely profited from the experience of the previous Russian – Ottoman confrontations and at the beginning of each new war they had to study anew the climate and diseases characteristic of Moldavia and Wallachia and repeatedly experienced difficulties in identifying adequate treatments and medical police measures.125 An emphasis on the adverse conditions of the war theatre at the expense of strategic and tactical prowess of the enemy is a widespread means of denigrating the latter. In this sense, an emphasis on the sickly climate, dangerous epidemics, obscure geography and logistical difficulties was crucial to re-describing both the Ottomans and the

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wars against them as Oriental. The importance that ‘General Winter’ acquired in the French descriptions of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia offers a paradigmatic example of the rhetorical strategy that one also finds at work in the Russian complaints about the hardships of fighting in the realm of the sultan. And yet, the Russian perceptions of the territories that constituted the theatre of the ‘Turkish campaigns’ were significantly different from the ways in which Napoleonic officers perceived Russia. Whereas the interest towards the Russian way of life and culture occupied quite a modest place in the French diaries and memoirs of 1812, the Russian officers tended to perceive the nature and inhabitants of ‘Turkey in Europe’ as exotic, which added brighter colours to their experience of the ‘Turkish campaigns’. However difficult the climatic and logistical conditions of the war theatre were, the Russian officers viewed the wars against the Ottoman Empire as an escape into an exotic, sometimes almost fairy-tale world. Such perception was provoked by the physical setting, in which the hostilities took place. Thus, in his diary of the Russian – Ottoman war of 1787 – 92, von Raan used the phrase ‘paradisiacal country’ to describe the part of Moldavia along the meandering and murmuring river of the Pruth and the high hills covered by endless vineyards.126 As he looked at the environs of Silistria in 1810, A.I. Martos could not help contrasting them to the stern nature of the North: ‘What a blessed sky in comparison with the place in which Russia’s new capital is founded!’ The vineyards, cherries, apricots and centennial walnuts made him consider even Kiev to be ‘the poorest prison in comparison with places near Silistria’.127 The exotic quality of the landscape was in part the product of human activity, references to which attenuated the negative image of the Ottomans that denunciations of their ‘barbarities’ helped to create. In 1806– 12, A.Kh. Berkendorf especially praised the ‘wells arranged with care and luxury and inviting one to make a pleasant stop’. In the words of Berkendorf’s contemporary, the naval officer V.B. Bronevskii, ‘the fountains, bridges and inns [caravan sarai] built along the roads, where the tired traveller finds shade and repose free of charge, were the monuments to the goodness of soul [of the Ottomans] that was worthy of imitation’.128 Another participant of the war of 1806–12, P.I. Panafidin went as far as to consider the Muslim practice of donations for the purpose of creating wells along the roads worthier than the ancient

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Russian custom of endowing the monasteries.129 It is true that many authors dismissed the exaggerated idea of the ‘Oriental luxury’ of the Ottoman cities and did not fail to remark on the disappointing contrast between the spectacle that they presented from afar and their shabbiness and poverty revealed by a closer observation.130 Nevertheless, references to the marble fountains, to baths and mosques (especially Selim II’s djamia in Adrianople), could not fail to produce in the readers an impression of an exotic Oriental setting.131 An astonishing diversity of local population constituted another component of exoticism that both provoked curiosity and challenged the communicative skills of the Russian officers and diplomats. Obviously, no Russian campaign in the European part of the Ottoman Empire ever quite matched Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition in terms of mobilization of expert knowledge for the purpose of conquest. Nevertheless, the Russian commanders recognized that an ability to communicate with the adversaries and the local population had always been crucial for the success of the invaders. The polyglot character of the region made it necessary to include in the diplomatic chancellery of the Russian army in the war of 1828–29 the experts in Oriental and Slavic languages as well as Armenian, Georgian and Greek. In the words of the young diplomat F.P. Fonton, the chancellery resembled ‘the Balkan peninsula in miniature’ and was capable of ‘constructing a new tower of Babel’.132 Important as it was, the ability to reach different subject peoples of the Porte was not a guarantee of success in itself. According to Liprandi, military intelligence in Ottoman domains required a particular approach to defectors, deserters and prisoners of war depending upon their ethnic origin. He argued that ‘one cannot interrogate the Turk as one interrogates the Greek, nor question a Bulgarian as one does an Armenian, a Jew – as a Gypsy, a Serb – as a Romanian’. No less important was the ethnicity of the interrogator himself. Thus, ‘a Turk would tell more to an interpretor (dragoman) of Perote or Phanariot origins than to a Morean Greek. By contrast, a Serb, Romanian or Bulgarian would confide more to a [Morean] Greek than to a Phanariot or a Perote’.133 Amidst this abundant nature and diverse population, the Russian commanders would indulge in ostentatious display of grandness that further added to the peculiarity of the Russian – Ottoman wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such displays were a burden for the soldiers and the local population, but they could make

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life pleasant for the officers. In his memoirs of the war of 1806 – 12, A.F. Langeron confessed that he never had ‘such an enjoyable war as this one’. Many veterans of the ‘Turkish campaigns’ of the late eighteenth and early ninetieth centuries could agree. According to L.N. Engel’gart, Potemkin’s headquarters in Moldavia in 1789 – 91 were particularly splendid: ‘there were constant feˆtes, balls, theatre performances and ballets’. The wives of the Russian officers were entertained by a choir of 300 singers conducted by Giuseppe Sarti and accompanied by a battery of ten guns.134 Although the vice-royal opulence of Potemkin’s ‘court’ remained unmatched in later days, the taste for gallant pastimes persisted. During the war of 1806 – 12, the commander of the Moldavian Army, Field Marshal Prince A.A. Prozorovskii, would dine at a table laid for sixty persons and his subordinate generals followed suit.135 In Langeron’s testimony, during the siege of Ismail in 1807 – 08, General A.P. Zass ordered to construct a belvedere, where he would smoke a pipe and enjoy the view of the fortress, alone or in the company of the officers. The bullets and cannon balls did not spoil to Langeron the pleasures of living: ‘There were beautiful women in our camps, and everything was in abundance’. One could purchase luxuries in numerous shops, drop by a coffee house or play billiard in billiard rooms. ‘There were dinners, balls, people exchanged visits, in a word, the life in the camps was quite urban’.136 The testimony of Engel’gart and Langeron is corroborated by the Russian memoirs of the wars of 1828–9 and 1853–4. Even after the splendour of the Catherinian and Alexandrian epochs became a thing of the past, the ‘Turkish campaigns’ continued to be memorable to their participants. Thus, the Russian commander-in-chief in 1829, I.I. Dibich, marked the ratification of the peace treaty of Adrianople in October 1829 by a military parade and fireworks that presented before the Russian troops and the crowds of the local inhabitants a triumphal chariot, a range of trophies, and a temple of peace with two imperial monograms between its columns.137 In contrast to the army life in Russia, with its ‘boring quarters in the villages, endless drill and all the “charms” of garrison service’, the winter quarters in Bucharest and Ias¸i provided the Russian officers with plenty of opportunities for distraction.138 Away from the upright world of St Petersburg, they could enjoy local parties where women freely engaged men for dances

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and the atmosphere was imbued with a ‘southern, passionate liberty’.139 While the Moldavian and Wallachian boyars were losing their fortunes at cards, the Russian officers flirted with their daughters and wives, who, in the words of A.I. Martos, found it ‘easier to love a hero than a bearded Moldavian’.140 The romantic pursuits of Russian commanders during the ‘Turkish wars’ were famous and sometimes quite scandalous. Thus, the hero of 1812 P.I. Bargration, who commanded the Danubian army in 1809–10, married into the ancient Wallachian boyar family of Va˘ca˘rescu, while Major-General I.M. Garting, the head of the army’s engineers and later the military governor of Bessarabia, became a brother-in-law of the future hospodar Grigore IV Ghica. More scandalously, the commander of the Russian vanguard Lieutenant-General A.I. Miloradovich became romantically involved with the daughter of the Wallachian boyar Constantin Filipescu, who used this liaison in order to transmit to the Ottomans the information about the disposition of the Russian troops.141 A teenage spouse of the boyar Gouliani became the ‘favourite sultana’ of the Russian commander-in-chief M.I. Kutuzov’s in 1811–12, a liaison that the girl’s mother used in order to place her people in lucrative positions in the Wallachian administration.142 Contemporary Russian readers could learn about the moral laxity of the officers of the Danubian army from the historian D.M. Bantysh-Kamenskii, who passed through the principalities on a diplomatic mission to Serbia in 1808. In a description of his journey, the author recounted an anecdote about a general, who, in addition to a wife in Moscow, took a second one in Bucharest.143 The recurrent appearance of the Russian officers in Moldavia and Wallachia contributed to the transformation of the social and sexual mores of the local upper classes. In the 1770s, a major-general of the Russian army in Wallachia F.W. Bauer still found the boyars ‘keeping their wives under lock like the Turks’ and ‘trying to hide them away from the covetous eyes of a foreigner’.144 Half a century later, F.F. Tornau could already tell a joke about a boyar wife (cucoana) playing cards in the Ias¸i club with her current and two former husbands.145 As a result, by mid-nineteenth-century there had emerged a stereotype of Romanian women as ‘naturally careless’, lacking ‘rigid moral upbringing’ and ‘always pursuing the sole goal of sensual pleasures’.146 Besides amorous relations with Moldavian and Wallachian boyar wives and daughters, the ‘Turkish campaigns’ contained the promise of

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erotic encounters with Muslim women. The stories of these adventures represented the symbolic continuation of the accounts of fighting with Muslim men. Thus, the surrender of Rustchuk after a fierce resistance in 1810 presented A.I. Martos with a chance of meeting with a ‘Turkish girl’, arranged by an old procuress, whom the author took for a Serbian. The twenty-year-old Russian officer exerted all the powers of his pen in order to render the excitement of the encounter with the ‘now passionate, now tender, now languid Asian girl’, which happened to be his first sexual experience. While the candidness of Martos’s narrative is exceptional, his story was not unique in those ‘Turkish campaigns’ that brought the Russian army to the Muslim populated territories of ‘Turkey in Europe’. Thus, George Thomas Keppel, Earl of Albemarle, reported that during the Russian occupation of Adrianople in 1829, ‘the meetings between the Turkish ladies and the Russian officers were the common talk of the town’. According to the British observer, ‘the infidels. . . surrounded by the pomp and trappings of war have made such a sad havoc among the hearts of the fair’, that some of the latter, including a disgraced wife of the Ottoman governor, ‘had determined to quit the country with the army’.147 The encounter between the Russian officers and the Ottoman Muslim men off the battlefield was likewise structured by a number of Orientalist tropes, such as the image of the ‘noble Turk’. The latter appeared in a number of war memoirs as a rescuer in a difficult situation, just as he did in the early nineteenth-century accounts of captivity. Thus, F.F. Tornau described in his memoirs a moment, when, wounded, he fell behind the hospital train and found himself, together with an accompanying cossack and a Bulgarian interpreter, ‘in an open field, in the midst of the night, in a foreign country filled with all kinds of riff-raffs, the Turks, the Serbs, the Albanians, the Greeks, ready to plunder and kill indiscriminately friend and foe’.148 When the party entered a Muslim village by mistake, an encounter with the ‘noble Turk’ in the person of the village elder helped Tornau out of this alien and hostile environment. Seeing the wounded Russian officer as a Godsend, the elderly Turk treated him with the Muslim hospitality, kept him hidden from other villagers and later personally helped him to find the hospital train. An even more classical representation of the ‘noble Turk’ can be found in Rozalion-Soshal’skii’s story of a prisoner of war. As the remains of his squadron surrendered to an overwhelming force of the enemy, the author

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imagined Ottoman captivity as ‘similar to the enslavement by the filibusters’ and thought that he was already ‘a property of some pasha and will be working in chains over the flower gardens meant to entertain his odalisques’ or, worse still, destined to row away at the galleys.149 These apprehensions were dispelled when the author and other captive Russian officers were brought before the eyes of the Serasker Hussein Pasha who was reclining on a sofa in an open pavilion overlooking Shumla. Soshal’skii and his fellow officers ‘were surprised at the humanity and care’ with which the serasker treated them and ‘saw in him a man above Turkish prejudices’.150 A textbook image of the ‘noble Turk’ can be found in the Notes of the Russian Officer written by V.B. Bronevskii, a participant of the Mediterranean expedition of the Russian navy in 1805 –10. The systematicity with which Bronevskii treats the character of the Turks belies his indebtedness to the written sources besides personal observation. Still, the passage merits to be considered here if only as an illustration of how much the Russian encounter with the Ottomans was shaped by the pre-existing modes of description.151 Bronevskii singled out courage, valour and magnanimity as the qualities that allowed the Ottomans to found their empire. ‘A quiet, pensive and noble character, occasionally perturbed by passions, makes them suspicious and cruel with the enemies’. The author attributed the contempt of the Ottomans for their Christian subjects to the vices of the latter rather than the precepts of Islam, which otherwise made them ‘magnanimous, compassionate and hospitable’. Bronevskii also praised moderation, patience and godliness of the Ottomans, to which only the avarice and cupidity of the high officials made exception. Even these, however, commanded the author’s admiration by their firmness and lack of despondency with which they met the news of their disgrace. In Bronevskii’s opinion, ‘the unselfishness of the Turks, their generosity towards the poor, their faithfulness to the word they had given and especially gratefulness, despite their complete lack of education, are such virtues that would make honour to the most enlightened nations’.152 Another common trope that was also frequent in the Western writings on the Ottoman Empire was the image of Muslim resignation before the power of destiny. A belief that a northern power will eventually spell the end to the Ottoman dominance was one of the manifestations of this fatalism. The Muslim legend about the eventual fall of the Ottoman state

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was recorded by Catherine II’s envoy Bulgakov and first published in Russian in 1789.153 Multiple editions of this text during the nineteenth century testify to the popularity of such legends among the Russians, who obviously liked to see themselves as the accomplishment of the enemy’s fate. As the Russian troops entered Adrianople in 1829, the local Muslims, in the testimony of N.V. Putiata, met them smoking their long pipes ‘plunged in a kind of indifferent stupor’. To Putiata ‘[it seemed] as if, after our crossing of the Balkans, their fanaticism and hatred towards the ghiaurs, and especially the Russians, have yielded to the power that fatalism [held] over their minds and as if they [saw] in our coming an event equally subordinated to it’.154 The Turks’ solemn acceptance of their fate was not only widely commented upon, but also elicited a measure of respect on the part of the Russians. One can discern in some of the accounts a certain degree of openness to communication with the vanquished enemies, as a result of which the Russians adopted, at least temporarily, some of their cultural practices. If one is to believe F.F. Tornau, he and his fellow officers tried to make their ‘uncalled-for presence [in Adrianople] less burdensome for the Turks and avoided violating their customs or insulting their beliefs: in the coffee-houses we smoked pipes in deep silence, spared the mosques, turned away our eyes when we saw women on the streets and did not bring dogs into living quarters’.155 In the testimony of A.N. Murav’ev, who likewise ended the war of 1828 –9 in Adrianople, this reconciliatory mood was not limited to the educated officers fascinated with the Orient, but also applied to the rank-and-file. As a result, in the three months that the Russian troops passed in the ancient Ottoman capital, ‘not a single quarrel has appeared’ between the ‘two hostile nations that had become accustomed to hate each other’.156 Instead, the sight of the Russian soldiers socializing with the Muslim shop owners and coffee-house masters could make one think that the Turks and Russians ‘have fought each other in order to trade at the Adrianople fair’.157 Such professions of good feeling towards the Ottoman Muslims were conditioned upon their resignation before the power of destiny or else their ability to fit the image of the ‘noble Turk’. Both tropes inscribed the Muslim population into an exotic landscape and made encounters with them part of the unique experience of the ‘Turkish campaigns’. Appreciation of the exotic is a mental attitude, which in the course of

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Russia’s ‘Turkish wars’ fulfilled several functions. Fascination with local nature and peoples helped to brighten the experience of the wars, which were otherwise full of hardships. The pursuit of the exotic represented a symbolic continuation of the military conquest, which could motivate the officers alongside the pursuit of glory. An opportunity to observe the nature of ‘Turkey in Europe’ and encounter its peoples made the wars a substitute for travel, the possibilities of which were otherwise limited for the military men. Accordingly, the Russian accounts of the ‘Turkish campaigns’, which became increasingly numerous as the nineteenth century progressed, assumed the function of alternative travelogues in response to the widening demand of the Russian reading public for works of this genre. The tendency to exoticize the country and its inhabitants constituted the flipside of the complaints about the perilousness of the war theatre and the denunciations of the Ottoman barbarities in combat. As has already been noted earlier, the focus of the Russian authors on the climatic or logistical difficulties served to deny the worth of the Ottoman army, which resembles similar attempts of the French memoirists and historians to explain the defeat of Napoleon in his Russian campaign. The Orientalizing effect of this rhetorical device is undeniable; it negated the subjectivity of the adversary and treated him as an element of a landscape. However defiant this landscape could prove for the time being, it would ultimately be mastered through the accumulation of geographical, medical or logistical knowledge. References to the ‘illegitimate’ forms of violence that the Ottomans practised in combat represented an even more evident means of portraying them as Oriental. The habit of cutting off heads, noses and ears of the enemies indeed served as the strongest possible marker of the Ottoman difference in combat, promptly re-described as their foreignness to the principles of the rules of the ‘civilized’ war. A product of the Westernization of the tsarist officer corps, the commitment to these rules not only made the veterans of ‘Turkish campaigns’ view the Ottoman troops as barbarians, but also explained the embarrassment of some diarists and memoirists about certain practices of the Russian army itself. The limits of the Orientalizing representations of the Ottomans are evident in the uneasiness of some of the officers about the scorched earth strategy practiced by the Russian troops or the massacres that followed their storming of the enemy fortresses.

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Reflections of the Russian officers on the Ottoman way of war likewise reveal discursive tensions and ambiguities. Whereas some authors saw in the sui generis character of the Ottoman warfare the reason for celebrating Western military superiority over the Orient, others questioned the applicability of the principles of the ‘regular’ war to the ‘Turkish campaigns’. Participation of the Russian officers in the European wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries served as a catalyst of both tendencies. On the one hand, confrontations with the Prussia of Friedrich the Great or with the revolutionary and Napoleonic France stimulated the interiorization of the principles of the European ‘art of war’ by the Russian officer corps. On the other hand, strong nationalistic sentiments that the tsarist officers developed in the wars against France led them to re-appreciate the military history of their country in general and the history of Russia’s ‘Turkish campaigns’ in particular. One can therefore speak about the fundamental contrariness of the representation of the Russian– Ottoman wars in the writings of the tsarist officers. Their awareness of the necessity to tailor the principles of Western military art to the peculiarities of the Ottoman warfare qualified their assumption of superiority of the former over the latter; their uneasiness about the devastating practices of the Russian troops moderated their criticism of the abhorrent habits of the Ottomans such as beheading, scalping and otherwise disfiguring the wounded and the dead Russian soldiers; and their experience of the exotic places and peoples balanced out the hardships related to the sickly climate, dangerous diseases and difficulty of securing supplies. And yet, despite their inherent ambiguity, the Russian portrayals of the ‘Turkish campaigns’ represented a major site of discursive construction of the Oriental war as the symbolic opposite of the normative war experience in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Inasmuch as they helped to substantiate this dichotomy, the ‘Turkish campaigns’ constituted a major chapter in the cultural Westernization of the postPetrine officer corps and of Russia’s educated class more broadly. By the same account, representations of the warfare of the Ottomans, their behaviour in battle and the character of the war theatre constituted an important aspect in the Russian ‘discovery of the Orient’. The Russian accounts of the ‘Turkish campaigns’ thus represent an important instance of Orientalism in the sense of a style of thought

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structured around symbolic opposition between the Orient and the Occident, which served tsarist officers to articulate their own identity. An intellectual engagement with the challenges of these campaigns also led some tsarist officers, most notably A.N. Pushkin and I.P. Liprandi, to develop a set of alternative precepts, the application of which, in their mind, could secure the best results in the wars against the Ottomans. However, this loosely defined body of knowledge never played the same role with respect to the practices of later Russian –Ottoman wars as did the Orientalist disciplines with regards to the Russian rule in the Caucasus and Central Asia in the late imperial period. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the reforms of the sultans reduced the difference between the Ottoman and the European armies and rendered the observations of Pushkin and Liprandi less relevant. Knowledge of Ottoman warfare was also of limited usefulness in the Russian conquest of other parts of Asia. Unlike the Ottoman political system which served as the principal point of reference for Western theories of ‘Asiatic despotism’, Ottoman war organization was ultimately too unique to be taken for a prototype of all Asian military forces. For this reason, Russia’s encounter with the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries played a marginal role in the formation of the military branch of academic Orientalism that would assist the Russian empire-buiding in Asia. Although late Imperial Russia could boast many officers who were also experts in Oriental languages, history, politics, statistics or geography, these military Orientalists focused on the Caucasian highlanders or the Central Asian nomads, whose warfare had very little in common with that of the late Ottoman Empire.158

CHAPTER 4 `

THE SICK MAN'

The affairs of Turkey are in a very disorganized condition; the country itself seems to be falling to pieces. . . We have a sick man on our hands, a very sick man.1 Reported in the Blue Books of the British Parliament, Tsar Nicholas I’s comparison of the Ottoman Empire to a ‘sick man’ articulated an already established perception of Russia’s southern neighbour as moribund.2 This perception of the ‘Other’ did not emerge overnight. Instead, it crystallized gradually in the context of the Russian elite’s conscious and systematic search for models of diplomatic action and military organization, which had to help the country overcome its perceived marginality. This quest for models constituted the basic political and intellectual context in which the peculiarities of the Ottoman diplomacy and warfare were discovered and reinterpreted as manifestations of their inferiority to the European nations. This reinterpretation took place in the context of recurrent Russian–Ottoman wars and the Russian elite’s growing familiarity with Western accounts of the Ottoman Empire. The wars demonstrated the superiority of the European military models adopted by Peter and his successors, while translations of French and British Orientalist texts into Russian provided the educated subjects of the tsar with the means of articulating their perceptions of the rival empire. This chapter examines the representations of the Ottoman Empire in Russian literature before the middle of the nineteenth century and their role in the articulation of modern Russian identity. Translated Western

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and Russian travelogues and statistical descriptions contained the quasitotality of Russian knowledge about the rival empire before the (remarkably late) appearance of osmanistika as a separate branch of Orientalist science. Aimed at a wide audience, these materials can plausibly be taken as evidence of more or less widespread assumptions that educated Russians held about the Ottoman Empire.3 By virtue of their sheer number, these publications constituted the basic horizon for those who engaged in highbrow intellectual discussions as well as for those who limited themselves to the passive reading of ‘thick journals’ and newspapers. Through them, the Ottoman Empire emerged as an element of the mental background against which Russian intellectuals later discussed their country’s relation to Asia and Europe.4 Although they followed Western European intellectual models, Russian authors made their own contribution to the growing currency of Orientalist discourse – one that was distinct not so much because of Russia’s special historical relationship to Asia as due to its persistent marginality within the symbolic geography of Europe.5 Continued references by Westerners to Russia’s ‘semi-barbarous character’ were merely one manifestation of this marginality.6 Another, no less important, aspect was a certain distance from the Western nations that Russians maintained in their role as both ‘apprentices’ and ‘critics’ of European civilization. Through their manipulation of Western Orientalist idioms, Russian observers of the Ottoman Empire both asserted their membership in this civilization and questioned its meaning. As a result, their diatribes against the traditional Ottoman system came to be paralleled by implicit or explicit disapproval of the Westernization policies that the sultans eventually began to pursue. In this sense, Russian Orientalism was simultaneously a manifestation of Russian Occidentalism. The fact that Russia was the first country whose rulers consciously pursued Westernization constituted a major peculiarity of its relations with the Ottoman Empire if not with Asia as a whole. This became especially important for the Ottomans after successive defeats in wars with their northern neighbour induced the sultans to emulate Petrine policies of military modernization. As a result, the position of the Ottoman Empire with respect to Russia became not unlike Russia’s position with respect to other European nations. Although the Ottomans started to adopt European models, they were following the Russian example in doing so. On the one hand, this process threatened

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to eliminate Russia’s military superiority and undermine the Orientalizing representations that had cast the Ottoman Empire as stagnant and decaying. On the other hand, the Ottoman Empire was embarking on the same path about a century later than Russia, and the resulting historical gap that separated Petrine and Ottoman Westernization allowed Russian observers to present the Ottoman policies as always lacking in one or another crucial respect. Their strategy was to turn the benefit of historical hindsight into a ‘positional superiority’ that ‘puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand’.7

The Theme of Ottoman Decline and its Reception in Russia Much like the portrayals of the Ottoman manner of conducting diplomacy and waging war, Russian representations of the general state of the rival empire illustrate gradual Orientalization of the latter. Initially defined by religious enmity, the early texts about the Ottomans hardly contained any criticism of their political system per se, while the sultans’ striking successes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could even turn their policies into models to follow for Russian rulers. Taking Nestor Iskander’s ‘Tale of the Capture of Tsar’grad by the Turks’ as his basis, the sixteenth-century writer Ivan Semenovich Peresvetov offered an unorthodox interpretation of the fall of Byzantium and the rise of the Ottoman power.8 In his ‘Great Petition’ to the young tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible), Peresvetov portrayed the event as not only God’s punishment, but also a lesson of what might happen in case a ruler failed to instill ‘truth’ in his country, which in Peresvetov’s interpretation meant suppressing the boyar opposition and strengthening the army. Speaking through the person of the contemporary Moldavian Prince Petru Rares¸, Peresvetov praised Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, ‘who, although not an Orthodox tsar, arranged what God wills’: he appointed salaried judges across his country, collected all judicial fees and other revenues into the treasury, and used the latter to ‘gladden the heart of the soldiers’. He also ‘endowed the merchants’ commerce with a general code’.9 This policy, according to Peresvetov, contrasted with the practice of the last Byzantine emperor and the Russian tsar, both of whom let the nobles grow rich and idle. The implication was clear: to avoid the sad lot of Constantine IX, the young Ivan had to follow Mehmed’s example.

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Peresvetov’s ‘Great Petition’ represents a singular invocation of the sultan’s policy as an unambiguous model for the Russian tsar, written at the high tide of the Ottoman power and, no less importantly, presaging the anti-boyar policies of Ivan the Terrible.10 At the moment of its incorporation into the Russian Chronograph of 1617, Peresvetov’s account of the ‘anti-boyar’ reforms of Mehmed turned into deeds of ‘the godless Turks’, which was more in accord with the canonical version.11 This ‘editing’ is explained not by the onset of the Ottoman decline detected by contemporary European writers, but by Russian internal politics, which in the wake of the Time of Troubles were defined by cooperation between the first Romanov tsar and the boyars. Well before the reign of Peter the Great, Russian knowledge about the Ottoman Empire owed a lot to Western and Central European sources. The painstaking research of Daniel Clarke Waugh revealed that despite its perceived marginality, Muscovy was in fact surprisingly well exposed to the European pamphlet literature about ‘the ‘Turk’.12 Such pamphlets, however, had little in common with the changing realities of the Ottoman political organization and primarily helped to mobilize the Christians for the anti-Ottoman struggle or else served to articulate their conflicting religious beliefs and political attitudes.13 In particular, this was the case of the apocryphal letters of the Ottoman sultan to various European rulers that circulated in Europe since the early sixteenth century and were translated into Russian at the Ambassadors’ Office in Moscow during the 1600s. Such letters stressed the Ottoman might and threatened Christian rulers and their subjects with death, rape, torment and slavery in revenge for their scheming against the sultan. Some of the sultans’ letters were followed by the similarly apocryphal replies of the Christian rulers, in which the latter defied the Ottoman threats, as was the exchange between Mehmed IV and Leopold I of 1683.14 It is noteworthy however, that Leopold’s reply to the sultan envisioned the latter’s defeat and destruction as the consequence of God’s wrath rather than the secular decay of the Ottoman political system. Instead, reports of Ottoman military and political weakness reached Muscovy by a more direct route. Already in 1592, Russian ambassador G.A. Nashchekin wrote that ‘everything has changed in Turkey. The sultan and the pashas think only about gain. . . There is no order or justice in the state. The sultan plunders the officials and the officials plunder the people. Robbery and murder is everywhere and there is no

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security for travellers on the roads or for merchants in trade’.15 The high representatives of the Greek Church hierarchy who visited Russia carried the same message.16 In 1649, the patriarch of Jerusalem, Paisios, sent a message to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich with an invitation to join the Moldavian and Wallachian princes in a campaign to take Istanbul, ‘for now the strength of the Turk is exhausted’.17 After the first Muscovite successes in the war against Poland over the Hetmanate (1654– 67), a Greek scholar whom Russians knew as Nikolai Moritskii put forward the idea of an alliance between tsar and hetman to liberate the Christians, ‘since at present the Turks are weak and have internecine struggle’.18 The Greek clergy propagated the idea of Ottoman decline later in the century, when the archimandrite of St Paul’s monastery on Mount Athos, Isaiah, brought messages to Moscow from the former patriarch of Constantinople Dionysios, Wallachian prince S¸erban Cantacuzino, and Serbian Patriarch Arsenije III. On their behalf, Isaiah summoned the Russian tsars Ivan and Peter to a holy war for the liberation of the Orthodox Church and declared that ‘at present the whole Turkish state has received a harsh punishment from God and the great Muslimhood [busurmanstvo] is coming to utter ruin’.19 One finds similar attempts to get the Russian tsars involved into antiOttoman struggle on the part of the Orthodox clergy of the Hetmanate, who developed a pro-Muscovite attitude in the context of the civil war that enveloped Ukraine during the 1660s and the 1670s. The abbot of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves Innokentii Gizel’ concluded his historical exposition of the unity of the Great and Little Russian peoples in the Kiev Synopsis (1674) with the prayer that the courage, valour and force of the Christians will one day ‘conquer the infidels’ and will ‘turn their pagan State under the secure rule of His Tsarist Majesty’.20 Several years earlier, the archbishop of Chernigov Lazar’ Baranovich had hoped that the Russian and Polish eagles will one day trample the Muslim crescent, while his disciple Ioannikii Galiatovskii argued in the wake of the Russian –Ottoman clash at Chigirin in 1677–78 that ‘now Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Bosnians, Moldavians, Wallachians and other Christian peoples that serve the Turks can agree among themselves and unite, when God wills, can break out from under the Turkish yoke, turn the Turks into their slaves and return the Holy Sepulchre’.21 It is noteworthy, however, that, in contrast to the Greek clergymen, their Ukrainian counterparts did not connect such projects to the onset of the

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Ottoman decline. Instead, they were thinking within the early modern tradition of the anti-Turkish pamphlet literature, which attributed the strength of the Ottomans to the sins of the Christians and conditioned victory over them upon the ability of the Christians to regain unity. At the same time, reassuring reports and bold political visions of the Greek and Ukrainian Orthodox clergy were not enough to shake the traditional Muscovite appreciation of the Ottoman strength. In 1641, the Assembly of the Land (zemskii sobor), specially convoked by Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich, advised returning Azov, which had been captured by the cossacks, to the sultan. Highly conscious of their military inferiority, the Muscovites hesitated before deciding upon the alliance with the Hetmanate that Patriarch Paisios energetically advocated. The difficulties they encountered in the subsequent war with Poland and the Ottoman Empire only confirmed their fears. It was for this reason that Russian writers of the period were far from concluding that the Ottoman Empire had attained a state of irreversible decline and noticed only the ‘unorthodox’ character of Ottoman internal policy. Thus, A.I. Lyzlov wrote that the sultans’ exclusive concern with the army led them to abandon their population to the mercy of the soldiers, whose plundering deprived that population of the incentive to cultivate land. Writing of ‘many vast deserts and emptied territories without number’ in the Ottoman domains, Lyzlov specifically contrasted such scarcity of population with the populousness of the German lands. Anticipating the physiocratic doctrines of the eighteenth century, Lyzlov argued that ‘the cultivation of land and related activities form the basis of the arts and the latter provide the foundation of commerce; when cultivators are few, everything else is lacking’. The domination of commerce by Jews and European Christians is mentioned by the author as another reason for the scarcity in the Ottoman state. Nevertheless, Lyzlov’s account is restrained in its criticism of Ottoman policies, for although ‘the revenues of the Turkish sultan are not as great as [what] the greatness of his state. . . could produce’, the system of timars (conditionally held estates), of which Lyzlov apparently approves, ‘provides him with a revenue more important than silver’.22 Whereas Peresvetov considered the sultans worthy of imitation by the Russian tsar, eighteenth-century observers found their internal policies to be incompatible with the ideals of a reforming monarchy and of the emperor as serving the state and the well-being of his or her subjects.23

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Referring to the unwillingness of the Ottomans to engage in war in the wake of the 1699 treaty of Karlowitz, Peter the Great’s envoy P.A. Tolstoi noted that the sultan desired peace for the sake of his own ‘private amusements’ and not because of his ‘care for his subjects [and] concern for their peaceful living or state-building as befits the sovereigns’. Similarly, all his ministers ‘cared more about their [own] wealth than about state government’: they stole a third of the taxes that were collected, so that only a third of the revenue reached the treasury. (The remaining third traditionally went to religious establishments.)24 Reflecting upon the political instability of the Ottoman Empire, Tolstoi wrote that high-ranking dignitaries ‘make advances to the simple people not out of love but out of fear that they might riot’, since the Turks are ‘prone to state disturbances and rebellion’ and ‘call themselves a free people’.25 In a remark that was bound to make Peter the Great recall the recent Musketeer (strel’tsy) rebellion of 1698. Tolstoi mentioned the janissaries, who ‘care neither about the sultan, nor about the vizier or any minister’ and obeyed only their elected commanders.26 From a positive political model in the time of Ivan the Terrible, the polity of the sultans by the early eighteenth century had turned into an anti-model, the very nightmare that the Russian ruler had just escaped but that nevertheless continued to haunt his successors until the end of the century. Tolstoi’s successors in Constantinople during the 1720s and the 1730s, I.I. Nepliuev and A.A. Veshniakov, were even more convinced of the internal weakness of the Ottoman Empire. The ‘revolutions’ of 1730 and 1731 that put a violent end to the ‘Tulip age’ of Ahmed III and the Grand Vizier Ibrahim illustrated both the unruliness of the janissaries and the instability of the sultan’s power.27 Remarkably, however, Veshniakov’s report from this period stresses the loss of valour amidst the enjoyments of the ‘Tulip age’ rather than the violent perturbations as the main cause of the Ottoman weakness: ‘the former vizier [i.e. Ibrahim – V. T.] has shown the way towards sensual enjoyment of being’ whereupon ‘after years of peaceful and relaxed existence’, the Ottomans ‘lost the will to fight’. Many experienced commanders ‘have either died or were killed and the sultan has practically no war-seasoned soldiery’. The same apathy, according to Veshniakov, struck the non-military part of the Ottoman ruling class. Able individuals avoided raising voices in order not to be appointed and thereby lose this peaceful repose, from which the Russian envoy concluded that the Ottomans were ‘internally very weak’.28

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Several months after the Russian declaration of war in 1735, Veshniakov, still in Constantinople, wrote to assure his government that the Ottomans have ‘neither political, nor military, nor financial leaders’, so that, as a result, ‘there is no order in the political, military or financial government’. According to the Russian envoy, worthy and capable individuals had perished and only unworthy ones remained so that ‘there is no concern for common good in Turkey’. Veshniakov dismissed the traditional fear of the Ottomans as purely legendary: ‘In present they are as pusillanimous and cowardly as they once were glory-seeking and ferocious and everyone seems to apprehend the end of their unlawful power, may God inspire Your Imperial Majesty to put an end to it!’ Veshniakov was so convinced of the approaching collapse of the Ottoman Empire that he even interpreted the failure of the Ottomans to imprison him in Yedikule as yet another manifestation of their weakness: ‘The Porte has renounced its erstwhile barbarous customs and tries not to worsen the situation by the least provocation, which clearly reveals its weak state’.29 In the eighteenth century, educated Russians could encounter references to Ottoman decline in Western sources such as published reports by French diplomats about the janissary rebellions and descriptions of the Ottoman Empire by Paul Rycaut and Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, both of which were translated into Russian.30 Even more important was the influence of Peter’s ally in the unfortunate Pruth campaign, Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir, whose posthumous History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire received wide European acclaim and remained unsurpassed until the beginning of the nineteenth century.31 Although a complete Russian translation of this work made in 1719 remained unpublished, Cantemir, who spent the last twelve years of his life in Russia, had ample opportunity to share his views with the tsar and the Russian elite.32 However, the idea of Ottoman decline that was transmitted through these works arguably had little practical influence, as the 1735–9 Russian–Ottoman war failed to bring decisive advantage to Russia, whose internal state in the decades following Peter’s death was far from stable. It took a long time before the general awareness of disorders in the Ottoman state evolved into a perception that the Ottomans were weak relative to the Romanov Empire. A Russian description of the Ottoman Empire published at the end of this war picked up on the familiar theme that the realm of the sultan

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‘is not as powerful and rich’ as its huge size may suggest.33 This arguable weakness resulted from the tenuousness of the Ottoman control over numerous protectorates, whose rulers were ready to fight for the Porte only when paid handsome sums of money. The big tribute delivered by Moldavia and Wallachia went not so much to the Ottoman treasury but to the local pashas and their garrisons.34 The author contrasted the splendidness of the sultans’ title to the ‘poor authority’ of these monarchs, and found ‘pitiful’ the life of the Ottoman sultans, in which external splendour and magnificence covered a constant fear for the throne and life.35 In contrasting the external appearance to the hidden reality, the Russian author employed a rhetorical device that was frequently used by the European observers of the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, there was still no attempt to place this dialectics of pretended strength and actual weakness into historical perspective and argue, as some of the contemporary European authors did, that the Ottomans had become perceptibly weaker over the recent decades or centuries. Whereas the Petrine Russians were interested above all in the condition of the sultan’s army and navy as well as the internal administration of the empire, their mid-eighteenth century heirs drew attention to the more general aspects of culture, such as the state of enlightenment among the Ottomans. This transformation undoubtedly reflected the broadening of Russia’s own Westernization, which under the rule of the female successors of Peter the Great increasingly included the imitation of European fashions and behavioural practices alongside the military and administrative technologies. From this point of view, the Ottomans could appear to ‘lack enlightenment whatsoever for laziness and debauchery (slastoliubie) have burdened them so much that they are incapable of executing any sort of function [nikakuiu dolzhnost’ polozhennuiu deistvitel’no ne mogut pravit’]’. The author of this remark, M.I. Prokudin-Gorskii, a gentleman of the Russian embassy, reduced the Ottoman education to the study of Arabic and noted that the Ottomans ‘are ignorant of the liberal arts and sciences’.36 After the three decades of peace in the mid-1700s, the military and strategic implications of the Ottoman ‘lack of enlightenment’ became manifest in the course of the war of 1768– 74. Already before the crucial land and sea victories over the Ottomans in 1770, the first Russian novelist A.F. Emin, himself a native of the Ottoman Empire, wrote that

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‘the glorious arms of Catherine’ made the proud sultan ‘tremble’ and predicted to him as many defeats ‘as are the kingdoms, provinces and cities in his possession’.37 Following a review of the spectacular ascendance of the Ottomans, Emin argued that their ‘excessive pride’ turned into the ‘lack of self-control and a taste for luxury that was inimical to their erstwhile military virtues’. According to Emin, contemporary Ottomans displayed an ‘ardent ambition’ ( pylkoie zhelanie) for glory, yet lacked other important preconditions of success, such as ‘reason, art, constancy, patience, reasonable courage and nerve commensurate with the situation and available forces’.38 The former Ottoman subject argued that the Porte made a great mistake of following the false representations of the French ally and interfering into the European affairs, of which it could get only confused notions from the Phanariot Greek secretaries and interpreters.39 At the same time, Emin’s criticism of the adversary closely related the latter’s political ineptitude to the moral vices of ‘envy, avidity, intemperance. . . ignorance, discord, inability to distinguish good and evil’ that supposedly ‘imprisoned human hearts’ in the Ottoman realm and were leading it to ruin.40 Although the Russian victories of 1770 seemed to confirm Emin’s argument, there still was some way to go before apparent Ottoman weakness was interpreted as a long-term and irreversible decline. Characteristic of this transitional stage were the Considerations on the Truly Critical State of the Ottoman Porte by Eugenios Voulgaris (sometimes written as ‘Bulgari’ in Russian), a Greek scholar and educator invited to Russia by Catherine II in 1770.41 According to Voulgaris, one could hardly imagine that the Ottoman Empire, ‘[which was] so formidable and had the power to decide the fate of all Christendom, could so easily be brought to the brink of ruin’.42 Writing about Ottoman contempt for the sciences, military art, agriculture, and commerce of the Europeans, Voulgaris nevertheless immediately relativized Ottoman inferiority by pointing out that the better part of the European peoples had been in a similar state only a few centuries earlier. Pre-Petrine Russia had itself been ‘a nation torn by riots, drowning in cruelty and barbarism’ that ‘in a short time adopts a wondrous image, a perfect order and regularity in military affairs, and finally ascends to the highest degree of glory and might, whereby we see that Scythians have acquired the greatness of the Greeks and Romans’.43 Voulgaris questioned rhetorically whether ‘the

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Turks cannot undergo the same transformation’. According to this author, the Ottomans had noticed the change in the Russian Empire and ‘consider it a model worthy of imitation that motivates them to reform’.44 To prove his point, Voulgaris cited a recently published Russian translation of Ibrahim Mu¨teferrika’s Treatise on Tactics, in which the author argued for the necessity of borrowing European tactics and pointed to the example of Russia under Peter the Great.45 Although Ottoman successes in ‘the military art, agriculture, and commerce’ could improve the lot of their Christian subjects, such a transformation was not in the best interests of European states. According to Voulgaris, if peace prevailed, ‘all the wealth of Europe would flow to Turkey’, while war ‘would make Europe feel the heavy weight of a modernized [obuchennoi] Turkey more than ever’.46 In light of such a prospect, the author was scandalized by the support that some Christian powers offered to the Ottoman Empire instead of helping to destroy this ‘awful colossus’. Striking at the heart of the issue, Voulgaris questioned whether ‘the [commercial] interests of France should be considered beneficial to all of Europe’ and called for a coalition of European states to expel the Ottomans from the continent.47 Such apprehensions notwithstanding, the victory in the war of 1768 – 74 clearly showed that the Russians had regained their composure after a string of failures or ambiguous successes in the late seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century. In the wake of new successes of the Russian arms in 1788 – 9, P.A. Levashev was able to claim with certain plausibility that the Ottoman state ‘is no longer in the same condition as it was in the time of the glorious sultans Suleiman, Bayezid, Amurat, and Mehmed’. The author compared the empire of the sultans to ‘the great hulk of a deteriorating building that some time ago astonished and frightened spectators by its mere appearance’, but which had recently been nearly destroyed by ‘the Russian Boreas’, i.e., the north wind. The deterioration was all the clearer, according to Levashev, when it was compared to the situation of Russia, which since the beginning of the eighteenth century ‘incessantly ascends to a higher level, while the Ottoman Empire declines hour by hour’. Hence Levashev concluded that a new campaign could complete the destruction of the Ottoman Empire that had been started by the previous and the current war.48

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As perhaps befits a period opened by the ‘querelle des livres’, Levashev’s thesis rested on a distinction between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ Turks. In a manner reminiscent of Peresvetov’s treatment of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, Levashev offered a favourable characterization of the ancient Turks, who ‘amidst their very cruelty displayed examples of the best civic virtues and greater reason than the Europeans expected from them’. The ancient Turks had been ‘magnanimous, courteous, merciful, just, and could easily put an army of half a million in the field’. By contrast, their modern descendants, according to Levashev, were ‘foreign to all that, being predominantly pusillanimous, coarse, cruel, and deceitful’. The sultan’s revenues were limited, and the army not as numerous as it once had been, having become ‘riotous and disorganized’.49 Levashev treated with skepticism the belief of ‘one foreign envoy’ to Istanbul that the Ottomans would have conquered Europe if only they had reorganized their army. 50 According to the Russian diplomat, such reorganization would have negated the value of the Turks’ personal courage and turned them into ‘animated machines’: ‘Discipline would have taken the place of the fury that arises from their excessive religious zeal and would have weakened [that zeal]. Besides, their laws, the [geographic] situation of their land, and their way of life may prevent the introduction of either political or military changes, neither of which can be effected without the other’.51 When he claimed that the laws and religious zeal of the Ottomans would prevent them from adopting the European military organization, Levashev essentially anticipated the latter-day perception of Islam as incompatible with modernization and progress. However, such an attitude towards the Muslim religion was not necessarily the mainstream one in the late eighteenth-century Russia. In her efforts to colonize the steppe region, Catherine the Great proceeded from the assumption that Muslims stayed higher on the scale of civilization than the pagans and thus turned a blind eye to the conversions of the latter into Islam. She discontinued Empress Elizabeth’s policy of forced conversions to Orthodoxy and was known for her tolerant approach towards the empire’s Muslims, whose religious elites she tried to integrate into the state structures.52 Catherine he Great and her educated subjects still did not see Islam as completely inimical to civilization. Admittedly, the empress could be virulently anti-Ottoman and, in her ‘Greek project’, in

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fact envisioned chasing the sultan out of Europe. Nevertheless she and the majority of her contemporaries would not have attributed the success of such a plan to the fatal influence of Islam upon the Ottoman Empire’s ability to modernize its institutions. There was another, more general reason why Levashev’s perspective upon the realm of the sultan, pioneering though it was, could not be a dominant one in the late 1700s. The discourse of the irredeemable decline required a vision of history predicated on progress, in which the modern epoch was celebrated in its own right rather than as some sort of restoration of classical virtue. Before the progressivist philosophy of history acquired some currency among the educated Russians during the nineteenth century, their perception of time was more likely to be determined by the classicist notion of history as a theatre, in which praiseworthy virtue and regrettable passions caused the rise and fall of the individuals and states. From this perspective, the predicament of the Ottoman Empire consisted above all in the lack of moral reserve demonstrated by its rulers. ‘The state governed by authority that is dominated by passions cannot enjoy calm and stability’, wrote P.P. Ostrogorskii in the preface to Madeleine Ange´lique de Gomez’s Anecdotes or Remarkable Historical Secret Deeds of the Ottoman Court (1787), which he translated from the French. According to him, the Ottoman history offered examples of rulers who ‘catered to their passions’ and ‘neglected public needs’. Despite the great valour of the Ottomans, this following of passions many times brought the Porte within the danger of ruin by way of an external or internal war’.53

Borrowed Idioms Eighteenth-century Russian perspectives upon the Ottoman Empire reveal gradual Westernization of the tsar’s subjects, at least the elites. The nature of this process is best reflected by the ‘arts and sciences’, which the authors of the Catherinian period found lacking among the contemporary Ottomans. Besides imitating with ostensible success the European manner of conducting diplomacy and making war, the upperclass Russians of the post-Petrine period were also increasingly appreciative of the European (especially French) belles lettres as well as the broader philosophical and historical knowledge. Catherine II’s interest in and relations with the French philosophes resulted in an ambitious

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programme of translating into Russian the literary, philosophical and historical works of Western European authors. Although the educated Russians in the second half of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century were likely to know French, foreign books were more difficult to obtain than the Russian translations. Already by the end of the eighteenth century, these translations included a considerable number of French, English and German works on the Ottoman Empire, which continuously fascintated the Europeans. Following the outbreak of the war of 1768– 74, the Russian Academy published translations of Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia articles on the Ottoman Empire as well as a volume on ‘Turkey in Europe’ taken from the geographical compendium by Anton Friedrich Bu¨sching.54 The period after the war witnessed the publication of the Oriental travelogues by John Bell, Nicolaus Ernst Kleeman and Frederick Calvert, Lord of Baltimore.55 The war of 1787–92 likewise raised the interest in the European descriptions of the sultan’s realm, regardless of the genre. A translation of the run-of-the-mill Prussian statistical compilation that came out at the beginning of the war was followed by the Russian edition of Ignace Mouradja d’Ohsson’s magisterial General Description of the Ottoman Empire.56 In the last years of the eighteenth century, the Russian lovers of Oriental travelogues could choose between the entertaining letters of Lady Elizabeth Craven and the scholarly journey to Egypt and Syria by Constantine Franc ois Chaussebeuf de Volney.57 Translations greatly facilitated the access of the wider Russian reading public to the Western literature on the Ottomans by lifting the commercial and linguistic barriers. Although these barriers hardly existed for the representatives of the Russian political elite and the diplomats, translations became an important vehicle for the formation of a particularly Russian perspective on the Ottoman Empire by virtue of their inevitable selectiveness.58 The development of academic Orientalism in Russia likewise involved borrowing from Western Europe. The early foundations of Oriental studies were laid during the reign of Peter the Great, and bore the impact of Gottfried Leibnitz. The latter solicited the tsar’s attention with a project of establishing an academy of sciences, which would enable Russia to become an intermediary between Europe and China, in whose philosophy and science Leibnitz was greatly interested. Established in 1725, the St Petersburg Academy included two notable

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German specialists in Oriental languages, Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer and Georg Jacob Kerr, who confirmed their credentials by publishing or translating sources on Chinese, Persian and Central Asian history. However, the Petrine beginnings of Russian Oriental studies remained in many respects a false start since neither Bayer nor Kerr left any significant disciples or otherwise influenced the Russian society with their Orientalist work. The same applied to the already-mentioned Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir, who died a year before the establishment of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences and likewise did not leave any disciples.59 Early in Alexander I’s reign, the educational reform led to the establishment (or reestablishment) of four universities, all of which were to have chairs in Oriental letters. Although the first appointees (most of them Germans) were rarely effective teachers, real schools of Oriental studies did eventually emerge at Kazan and St Petersburg. The rise of the Kazan school during the 1830s and 1840s is associated with the figure of A.K. Kazem-bek, who taught Turco-Tatar letters since 1826 and left important disciples, namely V.F. Dittel’ and I.N. Berezin.60 The St Petersburg school bore the influence of S.S. Uvarov, the President of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1811– 28 and the Russian Minister of Enlightenment in the 1830s and 1840s. As a young secretary of the Russian embassy in Vienna in 1809, Uvarov fell under the influence of the German Romantic thinker Friedrich Schlegel, who played a crucial role in the ‘Oriental Renaissance’ of the early nineteenth century.61 Inspired by Schlegel’s idea of regeneration of Europe through Oriental wisdom, Uvarov argued that ‘among all European nations Russia is best qualified to study Asia’ and proposed to establish an Asian academy to that effect.62 Although this project remained on paper, Uvarov did invite two disciples of Silvestre de Sacy to teach at the University of St Petersburg. The St Petersburg school also received a strong impetus from O.I. Senkovskii (Jozef Se˛kowski), a graduate of the Vilno University, who returned from a two-year trip to Levant in 1819–21 with a masterly knowledge of Arabic and Turkish.63 Despite the considerable development of Oriental studies in the first half of the nineteenth century, this development did not focus on osmanistika, or the discipline devoted to the Ottoman Turkish language and the Ottoman Empire. To be sure, Turkish was taught continuously at the University of Kazan by Kazem-bek and Berezin, and somewhat

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intermittently at St Petersburg University by Senkovskii, Dzhafar Topchibashev and Dittel’.64 From the mid-1820s on, Ottoman Turkish was also taught to prospective staff of Russian diplomatic missions at the Education Section of Oriental languages of the Asiatic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.65 However, none of the Russian Orientalists of the first half of the nineteenth century had the Ottoman Turkish language, history and politics as their primary fields of interest.66 Apart from the important textbooks of the Turco-Tatar language published by Kazem-bek and Berezin, the most significant work on the Ottoman Empire was Senkovskii’s translation of an Ottoman account of the Russian– Ottoman war of 1768 –74.67 Even more importantly, Russian Orientalists in the first half of the nineteenth century had little invovlment in imperial policy making. The most notable practical service that Senkovskii, Topchibashev and Kazem-bek rendered to the tsarist state consisted in teaching at the Asiatic Department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.68 After 1830, their students began to replace Phanariot and Perote Greeks as dragomans at the Constantinople embassy and the consulates. Otherwise, none of these Orientalists participated in formulating Russian policy with respect of the Ottoman Empire in the same way in which V.V. Grigor’ev and N.P. Ostroumov later influenced Russian policies in the Orenburg region and Central Asia respectively.69 For this reason, the primary Saidian meaning of Orientalism as a Foucauldian nexus of Western knowledge about the Orient and Western power over it does not apply to Russia’s encounter with the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century.70 Instead, Russian publications about the southern rival give ample evidence of Orientalism in the second sense identified by Said, namely, a style of thought based on an essentializing binary distinction between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’ that helped to shape European identity. Russian Orientalists contributed to this process by discussing different aspects of the Ottoman Empire in the widely read ‘thick journals’ of the first half of the nineteenth century. The development of the Russian periodical press in the early 1800s played an important part in the process of Orientalizing the Ottoman Empire in two respects. First, unlike the sporadic reporting on the Ottomans in the previous century, the Messenger of Europe, the Son of the Fatherland, and later the Moscow Telegraph gave their readers a continuous close-up view of events in the neighbouring empire just as its relative

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stability gave way to a deep crisis in the early years of the nineteenth century. This crisis was marked by the revolts of Pasvanog˘lu Osman Pasha and Bayraktar Mustafa Pasha, the janissary rebellions, the deposition of Selim III, the Wahhabi wars, the exploits of Ali Pasha of Janina, the Greek uprising, and Mahmud II’s desperate struggle to hold the empire together. Whereas the defeats of the late 1700s in wars against Russia validated the old idea of the Ottoman decline, the dramatic events of the early 1800s led many contemporary Russians to make the next logical step and assume, together with N.M. Karamzin’s Messenger of Europe that ‘the Ottoman Empire has truly lived out its lifespan’.71 Instead of the unabridged translations typical of the earlier period, the nineteenth-century periodicals often published selected excerpts from Western travelogues and scholarly works.72 This substantially increased the number of foreign authors accessible to Russian readers, and at the same time introduced a new element of political considerations into the process of selecting particular fragments for publication. Western perceptions of the Ottoman decline were thus refracted through a Russian filter. The borrowing of Western Orientalist idioms was a highly ambiguous practice. On the one hand, it constituted an important source of rhetorical devices and arguments that helped the Russian authors to assert civilizational distance between themselves and the Ottomans. On the other hand, the Western accounts of the Ottoman Empire occasionally demonstrated to Russian readers that their own country was only incompletely recognized as a European power. Orientalist idioms could be used not only to carve out a space for a Russian ‘civilizing mission’ but also to articulate Russia’s own persistent marginality. In this sense, the Orientalization of the Ottoman Empire revealed the limits of Russia’s own integration into the ‘Occident’. The autocratic character of Russia’s own political system explains why the critique of the formally unlimited power of the sultans played a minor role in representations of Ottoman civilizational marginality during the early1800s. If anything, the picture that Russian readers could form on the basis of the selected fragments from Western Orientalist authors published in Russian journals suggested that the Ottoman decline resulted from the limitations imposed on the sultan’s power by the weight of tradition. Thus, a piece called ‘On the Present

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Situation of the Turkish State’ in the Messenger of Europe compared the sultan to a ‘soulless figure brought into motion by hidden springs’, whose every word and motion is prescribed and ‘whose every action, down to the least important, has to be in conformity with the rules’. Following ‘the law codes and the advice of the clergy and the janissaries in all his actions’, the sultan, according to this journal, was ‘a slave like no other in the world’.73 Far from having any ‘positive consequences for the nation’s liberty and well-being’, the power of the ulema and the janissaries, according to a fragment from Antoine Juchereau de St Denys’s Re´volutions de Constantinople en 1807 et 1808 (1819) that was published in the Son of the Fatherland, was ‘the main and perhaps the only cause of the empire’s decline as well as of the ignorance and barbarism of its people’. The ulema rejected ‘enlightenment and science out of fear that it could inspire contempt for the Qur’an’, whereas the janissaries ‘are accustomed to idle service and loathe strict European discipline’. Together, the two groups ‘[prevented] the Ottoman Empire from joining the ranks of the European powers and adopting their useful discoveries and military institutions’.74 Failing to recognize the true reasons for their military defeats and to adopt the military organization common among European peoples, ‘the sultans’, the translation continued, ‘will soon see their armies annihilated, Rumelia occupied, Constantinople threatened, and the Greeks armed against them’.75 At the same time, the picture of the limitations on the power of the sultans painted by the Western authors was nuanced enough. Some of them, such as Napoleon’s ambassador to Constantinople Count Antoine-Franc ois Andre´ossy, gave this idea a positive meaning by speaking of a ‘Turkish constitution’. In an enthusiastic review of Andre´ossy’s work, the editor of The Spirit of Journals K.I. Arsen’ev, known for his constitutionalist sympathies, followed the French author in tracing the growing limitation of the sultan’s authority since the reign of Ahmed III in the early eighteenth century.76 No longer in command of the Ottoman army, the sultan, according to Andre´ossy, established ‘whole estates of public officials’, surrendered the running of state affairs to the Divan presided by the grand vizier and established the grand mufti as the religious head of Muslims. Although none of these assertions was historically accurate, they provided a useful corrective to Montesquieu’s perspective upon the Ottoman Empire as a

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paradigmatic case of Oriental despotism, which Arsen’ev and other avid Russian readers of the Spirit of Laws were too quick to internalize. Andre´ossy also departed from Voltaire’s disparaging view of the clerics by arguing that, in the Ottoman case, the widely respected ulema moderated the arbitrary authority of the sultan and upheld the principle that ‘no citizen is to be punished without trial’.77 Although the sultan still retained the unlimited power over life and death of his own officials, this remnant of Asiatic despotism must have been a positive thing from the perspective of a Russian liberal constitutionalist like Arsen’ev, concerned as he was with the problem of limiting the arbitrary authority of Russian officialdom. Western authors also differed in their interpretation of Ottoman decline. Indicative of the variety of opinions is Conrad Malte-Brun’s An Overview of the Greatness and Decay of the Ottoman Empire, excerpts from which were published in the Messenger of Europe in 1822.78 For MalteBrun, the Ottoman decline resulted not from the character of Islam, which his contemporary Louis de Bonald deemed ‘at variance with nature and human society’, but rather from the failure of the sultans ‘to introduce the spirit of the Qur’an into their institutions, where the military aspect has always suppressed the political’.79 This failure rendered the military despotism that had brought Ottoman power to its height internally unstable and explained its current weakness. MalteBrun’s work also shows that the perspectives of French writers on the future of the Ottoman Empire could be as different as their explanations for its sorry present state. In a passage that was omitted in the Russian translation, Malte-Brun claimed that ‘the Ottoman Empire is still capable of a long and even imposing existence’, especially if the weakness of the separatist pashas and the enmity among its Christian subjects could be exploited by an able administrator like Peter the Great or Frederick the Great.80 Russian press coverage of the destruction of the Janissary corps by Mahmud II in 1826 provides an interesting illustration of how selectively Russians cited Western Orientalist texts. Following an already established practice, the Son of the Fatherland published fragments from Charles Deval’s Deux anne´es a` Constantinople et en More´e (1827) to inform its readers about the dramatic events unfolding in the Ottoman capital and in rebellious Greece. Deval referred to the event as a ‘terrible massacre’ and compared it to the extermination of the

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musketeers (strel’tsy) by Peter the Great and the more recent destruction of the mameluks by Mahmud II’s Egyptian vassal Muhammad Ali.81 The Russian translation, however, omitted Deval’s characterization of these cases as ‘great coups d’e´tat that could not be executed among civilized peoples [chez des peuples police´s], and that could only take place among barbarous nations, where the orders of the prince, just or unjust, are implemented on the spot with blind submission’.82 As this and the previous example demonstrate, Russian translators and editors were aware that the rhetorical devices they had adopted to Orientalize the Ottoman Empire could also be applied to Russia with the same goal. In these conditions, an implicit contrast between a declining realm of the sultan and an ascendant Tsardom structured the Russian discourse, along with the censoring of any explicit comparisons between the two empires that could be advantageous to the Ottomans and disadvantageous to Russia. By rendering a new Russian – Ottoman war imminent, the Greek uprising of 1821 contributed to the further Orientalization of the Ottoman Empire and, at the same time, revealed the ambivalence of Russia’s position in Europe. Translated Western commentaries on the Greek crisis fed into the general image of the Ottoman Empire as a stagnant despotic power. Thus, the Messenger of Europe published the opinion of Louis de Bonald, otherwise a leading legitimist writer, about the illegitimacy of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It had failed, he wrote, ‘to bring peace, civic freedom and political equality between the people who rule and the people who are ruled’, and, as a result, one could see ‘neither that benevolence’ on the part of the Turks, ‘nor that assurance of their rights’ on the part of the Greeks, ‘nor that mutual affection on both sides that after three and a half centuries of living under the same government should link the two peoples and turn them into a single nation’.83 For de Bonald, the Ottoman Empire was therefore not a ‘legitimate society’, but a ‘military camp’ in Europe, which justified an intervention by the Christian powers on behalf of the Greeks. The Russian translation omitted, however, de Bonald’s point that one did not need to fear the prospect of a Russian capture of Istanbul in case of such an intervention, since the Russian rulers who established themselves on the Bosphorus, would soon, by the very nature of things, become independent of St Petersburg. (De Bonald had in mind the

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‘Greek project’ of Catherine II, which proposed the appointment of her second grandson Constantine as emperor of a new Greek empire with a capital in Constantinople.) What seems to have motivated this omission was de Bonald’s thesis that ‘Russia, while strong by its climate, its [large] population, its deserts, the enlightenment of its government, and even the ignorance of its population, can today be contained, like all great empires, like the great empire of Bonaparte, only by itself, and like an immense river it can only grow weaker by extending itself’.84 The comparison with the Napoleonic empire shows the limits of Russia’s integration into the European system of great powers that became apparent in the course of the Greek crisis. It is remarkable that the comparison served not to illustrate ‘Russia’s menace to Europe’, but to predict the eventual results of its expansion. Eight years later, when the Russian troops marched to Adrianople, the same idea was stated even more explicitly by Charles MacFarlane in his Constantinople in 1828. A resident of the Ottoman capital during the Russian– Ottoman war of 1828– 9, MacFarlane argued that ‘the vast empire of the Czars, – a collection of the multitudinous parts rather than a great whole – feels already within itself the symptoms of disseverance’. According to the British author, such an outcome would be the result of ‘improvement, which, however slowly it advances, is advancing already in its semi-barbarous domains’.85 Anticipating its inevitable reduction ‘to a discreet and compatible size’, MacFarlane argued that the Russian conquest of ‘Turkey in Europe’ would only hasten this process. To prove his thesis, MacFarlane pointed to the attempt by Louis XIV to unite the French and Spanish domains under the rule of the Bourbons: despite Louis’s strenuous efforts to secure the Spanish throne for his grandson Philip, ‘[in] a few years the Bourbon prince was identified with the Spanish nation, his descendants became intrinsically Spanish’.86 Needless to say, this passage was not among those published by the Messenger of Europe soon after MacFarlane work’s appeared in both English and French editions.87 The years leading up to the Russian– Ottoman war of 1828–9 witnessed a proliferation of Russian descriptions of the Ottoman Empire. Making abundant use of Western sources, these descriptions articulated a characteristically Orientalizing perception that combined the idea of the Ottomans’ cultural marginality within Europe with a belief in the inevitability of their expulsion into Asia. Implicitly or

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explicitly concerned with the cultural marginality of their own country, the Russian authors took every opportunity to stress the marginality of the Ottomans and cited or plagiarized Western writers to that purpose. Thus, I.G. Gur’ianov, the author of unsophisticated descriptions of the Ottoman Empire, spoke of it as the creation of ‘wild Asiatic peoples that, having no settlement, considered every country their own and went from one place to another’.88 The author of A Historical and Political Description of the Ottoman Porte, Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka, cited Herder’s diatribes against the Ottomans, in which the German philosopher bemoaned the destruction of numerous works of arts and the reduction of the Greeks to slavery. Agreeing with Herder, Glinka compared the Ottoman Empire to ‘a vast prison for all the Europeans who dwell in it’ and expressed the conviction that it would fall eventually, ‘for what business do foreigners have in Europe, who, after a lapse of a thousand years, are still determined to remain Asiatic barbarians!’89 In another work, Glinka cited the extremely popular travelogue by Robert Walsh, who, upon seeing ‘the actual state of this fine country – its resources neglected, its fields lying waste, its towns in ruins, its population decaying’, came to the conclusion that the ‘sleeping lion’, to which he compared the Ottoman Empire, ‘did not sleep, but was dying, and after a few violent convulsions will never rise again’.90 Plagiarizing from de Bonald, the anonymous author of A Historical, Statistical and Political Overview of the Ottoman Porte stressed the failure of the Turks to absorb European influences despite centuries of presence on the continent: ‘Only these barbarians, despite having conquered many enlightened peoples, could mix with their captives without adopting their language, faith, enlightenment, and customs’.91 The fact that the ‘descendants of Leonidas, Themistocles, and Epaminondas suffer from the yoke of an unknown people’ in the ‘sacred homeland of faith and freedom’ appeared to the author all the more unnatural at a time when ‘the European has established his glory and might, has spread enlightenment and education on the banks of the Ganges and the Anadyr, the Rı´o de la Plata and the Mississippi, on the Cape of Good Hope and beyond the Blue Mountains of [New] South Wales’.92 Unambiguously inscribing the Russians among the Europeans, the author of the Description expressed a firm conviction that the Ottoman strongholds ‘will not be able to resist the valiant Sons of the North for any length of time’.93

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An Ottoman Peter the Great? A special stress on the Ottoman marginality in Europe was not the only peculiarity of the Russian discourse on the empire of the sultan in the early nineteenth century. Besides the desire to stress autocratic Russia’s ‘europeanness’, the Orientalization of the southern rival was also conditioned by the latter’s internal political transformations. The Russian portrayal of the Ottoman decline as a manifestation of perennial Oriental immobility and stagnation in fact coincided with the early attempts by Ottoman rulers to follow European models. These policies placed the Ottoman Empire in essentially the same relation to the West as was the case of Petrine Russia, which could not fail to draw the attention of the Western observers. Before long, the latter began comparing Selim III’s Nizam-i Jedid (New Order) and Mahmud II’s destruction of the janissaries to the ‘play regiments’ of Peter the Great and his crushing of the musketeers’ (strel’tsy) rebellion in 1698.94 Plausible as they appeared, such parallels threatened to relativize the civilizational gap between the two polities that the Russian descriptions sought to create. The reaction of Russian observers was to stress the futility of any attempts at Westernization undertaken by the sultans and to underline the superficiality of their results. Meanwhile, the growing uncertainty about Russia’s own relationship with Europe introduced ambiguity into the Russian discourse about the Ottoman reforms. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the idea of the corruption of popular mores by the vices of civilization increasingly supplanted Russian criticism of Ottoman hostility to enlightenment. The Orientalization of the Ottoman Empire now entailed a condemnation of the pernicious moral consequences of the country’s Westernization. Russian writers were not unanimous in their assessment of the attempts by Mahmud II to transform the Ottoman Empire and imitate European institutions and practices. A sympathetic assessment of these reforms came from the Orientalist O.I. Senkovskii, who enjoyed a broad audience as the editor of A Library for Reading, the most popular Russian ‘thick journal’ of the late 1830s and the early 1840s. In a critical review of Western European Orientalist travelogues, Senkovskii hailed the destruction of the janissaries, who ‘have always been the first to rebel and obstruct the actions of the government’.95 According to him,

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Mahmud II ‘just executed the capital sentence that the people had passed with respect of this cruel host’.96 The Orientalist even reproduced the official Ottoman argument, according to which the reforms of Mahmud II had ‘the same spirit’ as the Greek struggle for independence. In this scheme of things, the final break-away of Greece owed to the ‘pernicious influence of the janissaries’ until 1826.97 Senkovskii also praised the destruction of the derebeys (lords of the valleys), ‘many of whom had appropriated considerable priviledges and have made their authority hereditary’. By putting an end to the abuses of the derebeys, the Ottoman government ‘demonstrated the intention to return to the erstwhile principles of popular government [narodnogo pravleniia]’.98 According to Senkovskii, the absence of aristocratic lineages and social classes rendered Ottoman society easily malleable and gave the reformer complete freedom of action. The only danger to be avoided in this situation consisted in ‘too close a friendship with the European systems’ that could ‘affect the national character and spirit’ of the Ottomans.99 A similarly sympathetic attitude was expressed by the Russian consul in Syria and Palestine, K.M. Bazili. In his opinion, ‘a great revolution is being accomplished in a great neighbouring empire: a monarch with an iron will shakes off prejudices that lie like soot on his obsolescent empire and avidly searches for the elements of new life’.100 This author compared the sultan to Samson, who sought to destroy ‘a whole edifice of popular beliefs’, despite the risk of perishing under its debris. Leaving it to history to judge Mahmud II’s deeds, Bazili argued nevertheless that the sultan exhibited all the main qualities of a reformer – ‘willpower, self-renunciation, and noble intentions’. His description of the titanic struggle of Mahmud II against traditionalism could not fail to remind Russian readers of Peter the Great. The destruction of the janissaries in 1826, which ‘opened the way for popular well-being’, indeed looked very much like the suppression of the musketeers (strel’tsy) rebellion by the Russian reformer tsar. In a retrospective glance upon the reign of Mahmud II several years after the latter’s death in 1839, the Picturesque Review of Constantinople noted that the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into a European state constituted the main goal of Mahmud II. This goal manifested itself in all the sultan’s decrees: the organization, uniform and drill of the army, acceptance of foreign officers, artists and craftsmen into the Ottoman service, the abolition of redundant Ottoman court ranks, the

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change of the way of life, the abolition of the Oriental luxury, the building of factories, colleges, printing presses, the construction of new edifices, the efforts to spread useful information among the subjects and to eliminate ignorance and superstition.101 Without evaluating the success of Mahmud’s policies, the book nevertheless drew a parallel between them and the transformations effected in Russia by Peter the Great by mentioning that the sultan particularly liked to be compared to the Russian reformer tsar.102 The relevance of the Petrine approach to modernization to the policies of Mahmud II was apparent not only to Western or Russian commentators, for there is some evidence that the Ottomans were themselves looking at Russia as a model. Ibrahim Mu¨tteferrika’s Treatise on Tactics may have been a lonely voice in the desert at the moment of its publication in the mid-eighteenth century. However, by the 1830s the sultan had no other option than to learn from the enemy. Russian visitors to Istanbul knew this and did not hesitate to flatter the Ottomans on their achievements in order to gain their favour, while confining criticism to their writings. Thus, to obtain an audience with the sultan and satisfy his curiosity, the traveller N.S. Vsevolozhskii told the Ottoman governor-general that the main goal of his visit to Istanbul was ‘to see the great sovereign, reformer of this nation, who follows the example of Peter the Great’, after which he was immediately received by Mahmud II.103 This anecdote is indicative of the degree to which mimicry of Occidental models came to structure the encounters between Russians and Ottomans in this period. As a consequence, the critique of such mimicry emerged as an important strategy for Orientalizing the Ottoman Empire in Russian descriptions.104 One finds the best illustration of this pattern in Nikolai Nikolaevich Murav’ev-Karskii’s memoirs of the diplomatic mission to Constantinople and Alexandria, undertaken at the height of Mahmud II’s confrontation with Muhammad Ali in 1832– 3. Seeking to support the faltering power of the sultan and secure Russian influence in the Ottoman Empire, Murav’ev met with a number of Ottoman dignitaries and was able to observe the new troops created by the sultan after the destruction of the janissary corps. Murav’ev’s first audience was with the Serasker Mehmed Hu¨srev Pasha, who met him dressed in a soldier’s frock-coat and an overcoat. The Russian envoy did not fail to remark that ‘while introducing regularity [reguliarstvo] among their troops, the Turks

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have failed to note that officers do not wear soldiers’ overcoats and frockcoats’.105 The serasker’s behaviour during the conversation only confirmed Murav’ev’s impression of the clumsiness of Ottoman ‘Westernization’. When he noticed the Russian envoy’s interest in the weapons hanging from the walls, the serasker boasted of his knowledge of the manual of rifle practice and twice presented arms. In Murav’ev’s words, ‘one could not imagine anything funnier than the figure of this ugly old man standing at guards’.106 On his way back from the serasker, Murav’ev entered a guardhouse, where he found a dozen poorly shod soldiers whose filthy firearms were hanging on the walls. After the Russian general asked the Ottoman officer to demonstrate the soldier’s knowledge of the manual of rifle practice and drill, ‘the slovenly wretches were made to stand at attention and presented arms’. Although there were some inaccuracies as well as ‘uncleanliness of hands, shoes, and weapons’, Murav’ev noted the soldiers’ skill at handling their arms and concluded that ‘one could not expect more from a young army’. As he pointed out their mistakes to the officer, simultaneously offering generous words of praise, the Russian envoy relished the idea that his visit would be reported to the serasker and the sultan and would produce a positive impression on them.107 Murav’ev ended another day of his visit by showing the Ottoman officers and soldiers the correct balance step. He had them stand for a long time on one foot while waving the other and was surprised to see that ‘this preoccupies them as though it were an important affair of state’. The Russian envoy found strange this ‘wondrous disposition of the most intelligent Turks to study personally the details of parade-ground drill as though it were a life preserver in their present dire straights’.108 Murav’ev’s amazement at the sight of Ottoman dignitaries learning to march and present arms was not unlike the amusement of the European observers at Peter the Great’s personal engagement with carpentry and smithery.109 Yet there was a fundamental difference: the Westerners may have found Peter’s craftsmanship unbefitting his monarchical status; by contrast, the preoccupations of the Ottomans appeared to Murav’ev inopportune because of the critical condition of their entire state. The tsar’s envoy doubted that the solution to the Ottomans’ troubles lay in learning recent military technologies; instead, he stressed the importance of traditional moral qualities. This represents an important shift in the Russian critique of the reforms. In response to the Porte’s

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request for several hundred Russian artillerymen in Ottoman uniform to protect Istanbul from the advancing Egyptian army of Muhammad Ali’s son Ibrahim Pasha, Murav’ev told the Ottoman representative that it was ‘not a time for guns. Instead, you need to act with the scimitar and the sword; you need soul, courage, and loyalty to your sovereign’.110 Murav’ev’s account of his encounters with the Ottoman commanders and officers in 1832–3 represents an important reversal of the Russian perspective upon the southern rival. While the eighteenth-century authors attributed the decline of the empire of the sultan to the Ottoman ignorance of the European arts and sciences, the latter-day observers argued that Western borrowings were untimely and incompatible with the traditional sources of the Ottoman might. Thus, according to the Russian periodical Moscow Telegraph, the destruction of the Janissary corps was necessary, but it was accomplished at a most inopportune moment: ‘In time of peace, [Mahmud II] could have unswervingly pursued his goals, but amidst war that had to be a national and religious one. . . the reforms only sapped the moral strength of the people without increasing its military capacities’.111 According to the head physician of the Russian army K.K. Zeidlits, a participant of the 1828– 9 war, the Ottomans were defeated not because of ‘their ignorance of European military science, but [because of] their loss of valour. The latter was killed by modern military exercises that were imposed on them, and which they consider senseless and unnecessary’.112 Superficially comparable to the early reversals of Peter the Great in the war against Sweden, the defeats of Mahmud II in the late 1820s and early 1830s did not contain within themselves the seed of future victories. According to Vsevolozhskii, the string of victorious Russian commanders from Mu¨nnich to Paskevich was a product of the systematic invitation of foreigners into the tsar’s service.113 However, in the Ottoman case, this practice was precluded by the requirement of religious conversion as well as the usual contempt with which the Ottomans treated renegades.114 For this reason, the Russian traveller doubted the eventual success of the new Ottoman army, which he described as a crowd of poorly dressed and sometimes barefooted adolescents who knew ‘neither cleanliness nor training’.115 According to the Russian Orientalist V.V. Grigor’ev, the new Ottoman troops suffered defeats at the hands of the Egyptian army of Muhammad Ali because the French and Prussian instructors hired by

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Mahmud II had to cede the command to the Ottoman officers during the battles. In Grigor’ev’s opinion, the young lads conscripted as rank-andfile soldiers totally lacked bellicosity and ‘looked like prisoners rather than defenders of the fatherland’ by virtue of their ‘timid and quiet appearance, clumsiness and uncleanliness’.116 The Russian Orientalist admitted, however, that the youngsters had better chances to become decent soldiers than the old warriors who ‘would never be able to get accustomed to the new order’. Dressed in Russian-style uniforms, which looked ‘loose, wrapped and ridged’ on them, the ‘invincible troops’ of Mahmud II reminded Grigor’ev of the ‘amusement regiments’ of Peter the Great. It remained to be seen, he wrote, ‘whether these children will grow up fast enough in order to be able to support with their bayonets the falling edifice of the empire, or the latter will collapse and bury its young defenders under its debris’.117 The alleged absence of true officers in the new Ottoman army was another aspect that drew attention of the Russian critics of Mahmud II’s military reforms. European observers had long noted that the Ottoman armies and navies were frequently commanded by former barbers and water-carriers, who became viziers and capudan pashas by the whim of the sovereign and were often singularly incapable of exercising their functions.118 In the epoch when the European officer corps was still an aristocratic institution par excellence, this deficiency of the Ottoman military organization was ultimately related to Montesquieuian perception of the Ottoman Empire as Oriental despotism in which there could be no nobility by definition. Further on, the Westernizing reforms of Mahmud II and Abdul-Mejid I were also deemed to hamper the formation of the esprit de corps among the Ottoman officers. According to Bazili, who in 1839 became Russian consul in Syria and Palestine, the commanders of the reformed Ottoman army offered some degree of respect to the rank and file, yet were eager to enjoy the same standing among the subordinate officers as before. As a result, ‘all officers to the rank of major inclusively treated the privates as their equals’ and, at the same time, ‘kowtowed before their colonels and generals in accordance with the ancient forms of Turkish etiquette’.119 V.V. Grigor’ev also noted that the junior Ottoman officers were not much cleaner than the rank-and-file, could rarely read and write, and had neither Muslim nor European education. According to him, ‘[all] their efforts are devoted to wearing their uniforms better, making their spurs

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ring loudly and imitating the rifle techniques of their awkward instructors’.120 The observations of Bazili and Grigor’ev were confirmed by the veteran of the Crimean War P.V. Alabin, who described a captive Ottoman officer as ‘clumsy’, ‘lacking the appearance of an officer’ and having rude features and manners. Alabin refused to regard as equals the individuals who ‘do not differ from soldiers by their education or even their way of life’ and who, reportedly, were liable to corporal punishment up to the staff officer.121 He found it impossible ‘to speak of the moral development of a society composed by such people’ and claimed that ‘the majority of the Turkish officers are nothing more than superior barbarians’.122 While they focused primarily on Mahmud’s military policies, Russian critics also commented on the sultan’s attempts to reform local administration. In his Review of the Present State of Asia Minor (1839 – 40), the military geographer M.P. Vronchenko argued that with the destruction of the janissaries, ‘the population has lost the last support against the rapaciousness of the local administration, without gaining a new one in the form of justice and solicitude from the supreme government’. The destruction of the old provinces (sanjak) and the subsequent reorganization of the empire into smaller administrative units created a chaos of conflicting jurisdictions and left the system of tax-farming as the only stable element among Ottoman institutions.123 While praising the traditional noble moral qualities of the Turks, Vronchenko attributed the longevity of the Ottoman Empire to an ‘exemplary’ judicial system that was in accordance with the people’s way of thinking and living. According to Vronchenko, ‘[nowadays] the people regret the disappearance of these qualities, the corruption of the judges, and oppression by the governors’.124 He noted that with the re-establishment of the sultan’s control over Anatolia, the life of the individual had become almost as secure as in European states, yet paradoxically, ‘the people were not particularly grateful to the sultan for this’.125 From the perspective of the Russian observers, the lukewarm attitude of the Muslim population towards the policies of Mahmud II proved the incompatibility of the Westernizing reforms with the popular mores and customs. Vsevolozhskii portrayed all improvements in the Ottoman realm as products of the sultan’s personal convictions, whereas ‘the people are indifferent to everything, immobile in their notions, and do

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not want to understand the goals of these new inventions’.126 Failing to win popular support, the Westernizing policies of Mahmud II, according to Murav’ev, had a corrupting impact on the traditional moral qualities of the Ottoman Muslims and introduced ‘debauchery’ into their midst.127 What good he found in the Ottoman Empire existed not because of the reforming sultan’s efforts but in spite of them. According to Murav’ev, ‘[the] people. . . still preserve their old-time qualities – honesty and righteousness – and while the ill-conceived innovations destroy the purity of popular mores, the deep appreciation for justice has not yet been effaced from their hearts’.128 Even Bazili, who generally sympathized with Mahmud’s undertaking, had to recognize that the reforms were at odds with the spirit of the people. In a continuation of his Essays on Constantinople, he told readers of his encounter with a young Ottoman naval officer in an Istanbul library. In response to Bazili’s comment that reading foreign newspapers was much more useful than endlessly copying the Qur’an, his Ottoman interlocutor complained that ‘an infatuation with foreign education will condemn our authentic [korennoi] national learning to oblivion’. The officer wondered rhetorically whether forgetting the wisdom of one’s ancestors was the first condition of educational progress in the European states. Meanwhile, Mahmud II’s empire was precisely in such a dangerous situation: ‘The tree of the new knowledge planted by the Sultan is still too young and will not bear fruit soon, [while] the venerable tree of ancient learning is already decaying’. Given the ‘insurmountable barrier of religion and nationality [narodnost’]’ separating the Ottoman Empire from Europe, Bazili’s interlocutor insisted that ‘the reformer’s first concern should be to support this nationality’, and that the best way to educate his country was by improving its native Muslim institutions of learning.129 The alleged failure of Mahmud II and other reforming sultans to give a national character to the newly introduced Western institutions and practices became the most important aspect of the Russian representations of the Ottoman Empire by the time of the Crimean War. As many other elements of the Russian discourse on the realm of the sultan, it finds parallels in the Western portrayals of post-Petrine Russia. A slight sense of de´ja` vu will touch any reader of Bazili familiar with Rousseau’s On the Social Contract, which criticized Peter the Great for ‘wishing at once to make Germans and Englishmen, when he should

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have commenced by making Russians’. The criticism of the Ottoman Westernization as superficial was thus another manifestation of generic Orientalism, yet it also had its roots in the particular political and intellectual context of Russia during the 1830s. In the wake of Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, the failed coup d’etat of December 1825 and the Polish uprising of 1830 – 1, the Russian intellectuals preoccupied themselves with the problem of their country’s relation to Europe. In the meantime, the regime, that had hitherto been the main conduit of Russia’s Europeanization, began looking for the ideological means of filtering ‘pernicious’ Western influences. Implied in the category of nationality (narodnost’), a critical reappraisal of the merits of Westernization was not a product of the traditionalist reaction and should instead be seen as a proof of certain intellectual maturity acquired by the most Westernized segment of the Russian society. Remarkably, Bazili chose to articulate his critique of Mahmud II’s policies through the fictional figure of a ‘young’ rather than an ‘old’ Turk. The function of defence of the Ottoman ‘nationality’ thereby fell to someone familiar with European culture, just as the authorship of Russia’s ‘Official Nationality’ doctrine belonged to the perfectly Francophone Minister of Enlightenment S.S. Uvarov.

The Russian Critics of the Tanzimat Although the figure of Mahmud II could inspire sympathy of some Russian observers, their criticism of the Ottoman Westernization was increasingly uncompromising. This tendency reflected the changes in the Russian relation to the Ottoman Empire in the quarter century that preceded the Crimean War. Following Russia’s victory over the sultan in 1829, Nicholas I saw his best interest in the preservation of the Ottoman Empire. This ‘weak neighbour’ strategy aimed at securing Russia’s predominant influence in the realm of the sultan and manifested itself above all in the landing of the tsar’s troops on the shores of the Bosphorus in 1833 after Mahmud II’s army had been repeatedly defeated by the forces of his Egyptian vassal Muhammad Ali. Nicholas I thereby positioned himself as the saviour of the Ottoman Empire, while his envoy Murav’ev could imagine himself as the model that the Ottoman officers were eager to follow. The death of Mahmud II in 1839 and the beginning of the Tanzimat (Reorganization) by his less charismatic son

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Abdul-Mejid I made Great Britain and France rather than Russia reference points for the Ottoman reform party. Confirmed by the Crimean War, this loss of Russian influence over the Porte made the Russian representations of the Tanzimat ever more resentful and bilious. Increasingly critical of the Ottoman policies of the Tanzimat period, the Russian observers also decried the negative impact of Westernization upon the aesthetic unity of the Oriental universe. Mid-century Russian diplomats and private travellers could not fail to ignore significant transformations in the ways the Ottomans and their capital looked. The reforms of Mahmud II and his son and successor contributed to the adoption of European cultural practices by the Ottoman elite, while the growing currency of Western industrial goods and increasingly conspicuous presence of Western tourists spoilt the enjoyment of the things, sights and practices that the Russians considered to be ‘authentically’ Oriental. Too superficial to place the realm of the sultan on a par with the European powers, the Ottoman Westernization could thus appear salient enough to compromise the appeal that the Orientals exercised upon the educated subjects of the tsar. Russian observers of the Tanzimat viewed such manifestations of the Ottoman Westernization as spoilers of the classical Oriental aesthetics. V.P. Titov, who served as the Russian envoy on the Bosphorus during the 1840s, reported as early as 1837 that ‘the rich Persian and Kashemir rugs’, ‘the proud Arabian horses’, ‘the priceless Damascene weapons’ and the aromas of the Levantese coffee, either disappeared or got replaced by the cheaper British and American products. According to Titov, these transformations in the material aspects of Oriental life were paralleled by the changes in psychology and public mores whereby the Ottomans and their subjects lost some of their Oriental character. As ‘ugly red caps and awkward frock coats (siurtuk) made of European fabric’ replaced the shawls and silk vestments, the proud mystery surrounding the Muslim way of life was gone and ‘one [could] hardly see the savagery and fanaticism’ that constituted the favourite subjects of Oriental travel narratives.130 Having become accessible to foreign visitors, even the harems failed to meet their expectations.131 The increasingly numerous Russian tourists to Constantinople sensed the changes as they walked down the streets. Thus, Grigor’ev, who visited the Ottoman capital in 1839, was pleasantly surprised by the politeness of the inhabitants. According to the Russian Orientalist,

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fanatics no longer attacked European travellers in the back streets and the local boys no longer threw stones at them as they used to in the past: ‘They have become so accustomed to see the Europeans. . . that they would never touch them unless provoked’.132 In Grigor’ev’s opinion, this change of behaviour reflected an overall change of heart, whereby ‘ [the] old men have lost their spirit, while the young, particularly those in the military service, were trying to imitate the Europeans rather then their own fathers’. Even though some still harboured ‘the old hostility towards the infidels’ they did not give free rein to their feeling.133 In the words of the Russian Orientalist, ‘[the] presence of the British and French navies in the Archipelago had wonderfully contributed to the development of tolerance among the Muslims, while the prohibition to bear arms turned many tigers into sheer lambs’.134 However praiseworthy these changes could be, the new aspect of the Ottoman capital was also somewhat disappointing for those who had already developed Orientalist stereotypes. The death of the reformer sultan in 1839 was not followed by a bloody revolt of the old janissaries similar to those that aborted the Westernizing reigns of Ahmed III and Selim III. Nobody was hanged, strangled or impaled and ‘there was not a single head without a body, nor a single body without a head’. The Europeans continued to ‘stroll like masters, the shops remained open and everyone continued to go about his or her business’.135 The ascent of the new sultan Abdul-Mejid was likewise somewhat underwhelming. Grigor’ev could not look without a smile at ill-fitting clothes of the old Osmanli who participated in the traditional ceremony of the engirdling of the young sultan and noted that the following procession ‘lacked solemnity’.136 As a result of Westernization of the Ottoman elite, the polite society of the European envoys to Constantinople expanded to include the new generation of sultan’s officials and their families. By the time of the Crimean War ‘one could see a young and eminent Turkish woman sitting unveiled besides her Frenchified husband amidst Franks and ladies speaking a foreign tongue’ or else ‘visiting a ball at a European embassy. Still hesitant to dance, she converses with the young men as befits the most well-educated albeit somewhat shy woman’.137 The striking vestamentary and behavioral changes initiated by Mahmud II and continued by his son symbolized the disappearance of the pure Oriental style. In the words of M.A. Gamazov, a Russian member of the

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international commission on the delimitation of the Ottoman– Persian border in 1849–52, ‘the bright Oriental dress gave way to dark European coats [kaftany] and narrow trousers, the fez replaced the turban, the beards and amber mouthpieces became smaller, the saddles and caparisons lost much of their luxury. Everything got smaller, exhausted and colourless [ polinialo]’.138 These changes in the quality of vestments and material objects ultimately applied to the customs and mores as the ‘strict performance of the religious rites gave way to some tricks [ukhvatkam] and a mode of behaviour full of light-mindedness [legkomyslia]’.139 The loss of Oriental colour was the consequence of the growing presence of the Europeans, in particular the French and British, whose influence was on the rise after a brief period of Russian supremacy in the early 1830s. According to the authors of Picturesque Sketches of Constantinople (1855), a visitor to the popular promenades at the Sweet Waters of Europe and Sweet Waters of Asia ‘could rarely witness the festivities [uveseleniia] that would be purely Oriental, national [narodnykh], unspoilt by the presence of the round hats of curious gentlemen in red British uniforms or the sentimental observers in Parisian hats and with notebooks in their hands’.140 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the increasingly numerous European tourists on the shores of the Bosphorus were becoming embarrassed with their own presence which compromised the enjoyment of the authentic Oriental sights: ‘The short coat and black hat are out of place among these ponds, fountains, gilded kiosks and marble stones covered by sophisticated arabesques’. The very gaze of a European tourist intervened with the spontaneity of the Oriental pastimes ‘forcing the girls to hide themselves deeper in their veils’ and making the jokes of the jesters ( figliary) ‘colder’. Probably mindful of the fact that this critique of the invasiveness of the Western gaze could also apply to themselves, the Russian compilers of the Picturesque Sketches of Constantinople proposed ‘to observe the Turkish festivities from a hideout in some kiosk or under the guise of an Oriental vestment, although the latter is not as easy to wear as our unpicturesque clothes’.141 The ostensible disappearance of ‘Old Turkey’ served as another proof of the Ottoman decline. In the opinion of the famous traveller E.P. Kovalevskii, the Ottomans themselves found the Muslim faith in regress in Constantinople and attributed to it all the misfortunes that

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had fallen upon the empire. According to Kovalevskii, the reforms of Mahmud II applied primarily to the capital, whereas other cities openly or secretly opposed it. For this reason one could find more ‘authentic Turkish types’ in Adrianople, ‘a Turkish city par excellence’.142 However, the disappearance of the true Muslimhood was not limited to the capital where Westernization was the most evident, but also applied to the European provinces, whose most salient feature, according to Kovalevskii, was ‘the absence of Turks’.143 In his estimate, the latter amounted only to 800,000 out of the total population of ‘Turkey in Europe’ that constituted some 14 million. The ‘Turkish presence’ was assured by the Ottoman governors and the soldiers of the new Ottoman army (nizam) as well as by the owners of the coffee-houses and spas, but not by the timariot sipahis and owners of the estates, who were largely absentee. The Russian traveller attributed the visible shrinking of the Ottoman Muslim population to incessant wars, military recruitment, which applied only to Muslims, epidemics of plague which took a heavier toll among them, the destruction of the janissaries that constituted the wealthiest and healthiest class of the population, as well as the custom of polygamy, which was hardly conducive to population growth. Kovalevskii did not fail to mention ‘the spirit of the people itself, taken to the inevitable destruction by its fatalism’.144 For the Russian authors at mid-century, ‘Old Turkey’ embodied the authentic Orient which was about to disappear, yet continued to be a moral-political phenomenon that provoked contradictory attitudes. Some of the Russians viewed the Ottoman Turks with traditional hostility and described them in terms that are strongly reminiscent of the early modern European pamphlet literature. Thus, one of several historical reviews of the Ottoman Empire published during the Crimean War portrayed the Ottoman Turks as ambitious, envious, despising, calumnious, malicious, unstable, ignorant, superstitious and fanatical.145 The author dismissed the tolerant attitude of the Ottoman Turks towards the Christians as a pretence ‘based on their calculated interest’, and argued that their philanthropy applied only to Muslims.146 According to the already mentioned Gamazov, the supposedly immutable moral character of the Ottoman Turks limited the success of the Westernizing reforms. The younger generation was ‘trying to imitate the manners and attitudes of the enlightened people’, but they ‘cannot be sincere until they decisively depart from the shackles of their aberrant beliefs and forget their legends’.147

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Less Turcophobe authors avoided such summary characteristzations and instead contrasted the ‘official’ and the ‘unofficial Turkey’. According to Senkovskii, the ‘desperate immorality’ of the Ottoman government and its associates was ‘beyond any doubt’ and included ‘lie, deceipt, betrayal, poison, dagger, torture and robbery’ comparable to those of Rome, Byzantium and Renaissance Italy. However, the rest of the Ottoman society revealed ‘a lot of good qualities that are pleasant to admit even in an enemy’. The ordinary Muslim subjects, argued Senkovskii, were ‘quiet, courteous, polite with strangers, bashful and chaste in their marital life as well as remarkably honest and straightforward’.148 St Petersburg publisher A.I. Davydov fully shared the opinion of the famous Orientalist. According to his Picturesque Sketches of Constantinople, ‘renegades, pashas, governors of provinces, and above all their servants [cheliad’]’, revealed cupidity, debauchery, fanaticism, bribery and other vices that took the Ottoman Empire to its ruin. By contrast, the way of life of the ‘modest Turks’ had much to commend it: ‘The Turk of old times lived quietly and moderately smoking his pipe as he sat near his wife, frequenting the coffee-houses in order to pick up some news and bringing his family to the Sweet Waters or a cemetery for a walk’. Davydov portrayed him as magnanimous, generous and equally capable of both providing and receiving charitable support’.149 Yet, according to the Sketches, such ‘Old Turks’ were a disappearing type especially after Constantinople became inundated by the officers and soldiers of the allied armies in the course of the Crimean War. The author of the Sketches essentially argued that behind the fac ade of the Anglo-Franco-Ottoman alliance against Russia there hid the fundamental opposition between the ‘Old Turkish’ way of life and the invasive Westernization. As Constantinople became filled with British and French military men, ‘the Turkish population of the city apparently got hidden [skrylos’] in its depth’. With many of the public buildings occupied by the allied troops, the proverbial ‘Old Turks’ who used to smoke their pipes motionless at the sight of the Bosophorus disappeared, while small crowds of inhabitants with sad and concerned faces revealed misery and hunger. The hostility of the Muslim population towards the allies-invaders was unmistakable: Everyone hides away from the European and looks at him hostilely [ispodlob’ia]. The city itself became segregated between

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two semi-hostile camps: the European and the Muslim one. A Turk could not find a place for himself in the former while the latter did not accommodate an Englishman or a Frenchman. The former camp is full of activity and reveals some kind of order, the latter reveals only misery, low spirits and sulking silence [mrachnoe molchanie].150 *** In the second half of the nineteenth century, the number of publications about the Ottoman Empire continued to grow, but one observes a general pattern of Orientalization as early as the beginning of the Tanzimat period in the 1840s. One of its central features was the changing politics of how comparisons between the two empires were made. The Russian accounts always contrasted them, whether implicitly or explicitly, but they did so in remarkably different ways depending on the period in which they were written. Ignoring the religious divides, Peresvetov posed the Ottoman sultan as a model for the Russian tsar. Later, appreciation of the Ottomans became limited to certain aspects of their military or political organization, and eventually the Ottoman system was found to be lacking in every respect. In the late eighteenth century, the Ottoman decline was already used to measure Russia’s ascent to greatness. The former was not deemed to be irreversible, the latter was still in some way ‘miraculous’, and both were perceived as quite recent. This changed around 1800, when the sultans made their first attempts to emulate Peter the Great. The Western observers, who were quick to draw parallels between Mahmud II and the reforming tsar, had different attitudes towards Ottoman Westernization that ranged from skepticism to enthusiasm. By contrast, the Russian authors in this period were more cautious about such comparisons. Their evaluation of Ottoman Westernization was almost uniformly negative. They increasingly portrayed it as ‘rootless’, ‘superficial’, and ultimately unable to stop the imperial decline, which was now seen as prolonged and irreversible. While in the earlier reports the Ottomans’ ignorance and superstition had been contrasted to Russia’s mastery of European arts and sciences, now the ‘corrupting’ effect of the sultan’s Westernizing reforms was criticized from the point of view of ‘nationality’, the value of which the Russian observers had just discovered. This discursive shift afforded the

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Russian writers a ‘positional superiority’ in their relation with a rival empire, and ultimately allowed them to re-describe Russian –Ottoman relations as relations between ‘Europe’ and the ‘Orient’. In stressing the foolishness of Ottoman mimicry, Murav’ev’s and other nineteenth-century Russian accounts of the Ottoman Empire were not unlike French or British travelogues about Eastern Europe that focused on the superficiality of the Russian imitation of Western dress, manners, and speech.151 In both cases, unanimous references to the skin-deep Westernization of the ‘Other’ concealed divergent political outlooks among the authors. For the liberal critics of the Tanzimat policies who wrote for Russian ‘thick journals’ later in the nineteenth century, the superficiality of Ottoman Westernization was bad because it attested to hostility to enlightenment and an inability to assimilate European principles. For people of conservative outlook like Murav’ev, on the contrary, imitating the external forms of Western civilization was bad because it threatened the traditional values that the old-regime elites sought to oppose to emerging modern social forms and practices. By Orientalizing the Ottoman Empire the Russian writers asserted their European identity in the face of the references to Russia’s own semibarbarous character that one found at times in the Western literature. Such references must have hurt the pride of educated Russians, for they were judiciously edited out from translations of Western Orientalist writings. Articulated with the help of borrowed idioms, the Russian views of the Ottoman Empire can be taken as an example of the ‘compensatory Orientalism’ that helped many peripheral societies to overcome their marginality.152 However, the struggle for recognition in Europe was not the only thing that informed the triangular relationship between the ‘West’, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. The Russian views of the realm of the sultan also reveal a conjunction of Orientalism and Occidentalism. The latter should be understood not only in the sense of claiming a ‘Western pedigree’ through the recovery of the lands of classical antiquity from under the Oriental yoke,153 but also in the more conventional meaning of an essentializing depiction of the West by representatives of marginal or non-Western societies. This conjunction became possible as a result of the Westernization policies of Mahmud II, which coincided with the beginning of a re-evaluation of the Petrine legacy in Russia. Elements of Occidentalist attitudes are already observable in the Russian critiques of Mahmud II’s reforms and

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would become even more pronounced during the Tanzimat period. One should not, however, jump to the conclusion that this conjunction of Orientalism and Occidentalism, peculiar to Russia and perhaps other marginal societies, was simply a reflection of their failure to become part of the West. Instead, it reveals a characteristic ambivalence of Orientalist discourse as such, for was not Western Orientalism itself a critique of nineteenth-century modernity? Finally, the Russian representations of the Ottoman Empire reveal not only a critical attitude towards the ‘West’ transpiring through a critical portrayal of the ‘East’; they also functioned as a mirror for Russia itself. Indeed, there was also a significant ambivalence in the depiction of the Ottoman Empire as an Oriental empire attempting awkwardly to adopt foreign models in order to forestall its own disintegration. However comforting such a representation of an imperial rival was initially, it struck disturbingly close to home once the Crimean War and the next round of modernizing reforms revealed Russia’s own lack of internal cohesion. By the time of the revolution of 1905, the notion of Asiatic despotism, military inferiority, misconceived reform, and mass popular ignorance was no longer only an image of a faraway land; instead, it became a deadly nightmare that haunted the Russian old regime until its collapse in 1917.

CHAPTER 5 PEOPLES OF EMPIRE

The question of the Greco – Slavic peoples constitutes the central aspect of the Eastern Question.1 A Russian description of the Ottoman Empire published in 1829 claimed that Turks constituted the majority of the population of the European domains of the sultan, followed by Greeks and Armenians.2 Accordingly, the better part of the book was devoted to a description of the history of Islam, the rise of the Ottomans and their political system, their army, the national character of the Turks and their principal occupations, their capital city of Constantinople with its environs as well as the most important provincial cities of the empire. The book also provided a rather detailed discussion of continental and insular Greece, which followed the same pattern, as well as addressed at some length the state of the Ottoman vassal principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. By contrast, the Serbian and Bulgarian subjects of the Porte were given slightly more than a page each. The author’s apparent ignorance of the actual ethnic composition of ‘Turkey in Europe’ is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that by 1829 Russia was in its sixth war against the Ottoman Empire in little over a century. To be sure, in terms of the information on the sultan’s Christian subjects, the 1829 review was much better than the one published ninety years previously, in which the author did not even mention the term reaya and focused exclusively on the Ottomans and their Muslim vassals, such as the Egyptian and Tripolitan beys and the Crimean Tatars.3 Nevertheless, in the early nineteenth century, Russian

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knowledge about the Orthodox population of the Ottoman Empire was still very uneven. This becomes clear as soon as one compares the 1829 book with the one published in 1854, which contained equal chapters on all the major provinces and peoples of ‘Turkey in Europe’.4 This chapter argues that this unevenness reflected a sequence of Russian ‘discoveries’ of the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire. Each of the consecutive Russian–Ottoman wars of the late eighteenth – first half of the nineteenth century brought a particular Balkan people to the attention of the educated Russians, many of whom served in the active army. Every discovery of this kind implied not only an interest of the Russian public in the national character of a given people, but also a growing attention to the nature of its relations with the Ottomans and other subject peoples of the sultan. As a result of these discoveries, by the time of the Crimean War, the Russians had acquired a fuller understanding of the complex ethnic mosaic of the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The appreciation of this ethnic complexity was an important step towards the transformation of Russian representations of the ‘Turkey in Europe’ into a version of the discourse of Balkanism, which defined the peoples of the region in their own right, increasingly apart from their weakening dependence upon the Ottoman overlords.5 Whereas historians have so far focused on Russian –Greek, Russian– Serbian or Russian– Bulgarian relations, this chapter’s aim is to explore how the Russian authors of the period came to reflect upon the place of particular Ottoman subject peoples within the ensemble of interethnic relations that existed in the realm of the sultan.6 This exploration permits to account for the complex correlation of religion and ethnicity, both of which framed Russian perception of the population of the region. It will be demonstrated that at the turn of the nineteenth century ethnic categories assumed greater currency alongside the confessional ones as a means of classifying the sultan’s subjects. This was the outcome of both the secularization of the mental outlook of the Russian elites and the emergence of antagonistic national projects within the Orthodox community of the Ottoman Empire.

The Greeks Appropriation of the classical cultural heritage constituted one of the aspects of Russia’s Westernization in the late seventeenth, eighteenth

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and early nineteenth centuries. Representatives of the Ukrainian clergy versed in Latin and Greek played a major role in the church policies of Peter the Great producing important transformation in Russian political notions.7 Characters from the Greek and Latin mythology figured prominently in the ceremonial self-presentation of the reformer tsar as well as in the ‘scenarios of power’ adopted by his successors.8 Greek, Roman and contemporary classicist authors became part of the cultural baggage of the Russian elites. Classicist aesthetics, adopted under the influence of the French writers, informed the creations of Russia’s eighteenth-century literary figures.9 In parallel, the reformed Tsardom became associated with the Roman Empire in a way that was markedly different from the famous theory of ‘Moscow as the Third Rome’ articulated by the Pskovian monk Filofeus in his message to Grand Duke Vasilii III in 1519. The sixteenth-century concept contrasted the spiritually fallen state of the first two Romes to the truly Orthodox character of the ‘standing third one’ and was thus fully part of medieval political theology. By contrast, the eighteenthcentury translatio imperii emphasized Russian emulation of the Roman models and generally fitted the nearly contemporary European debates on the supposed superiority of the ‘ancient’ or ‘modern’ books (as well as scientific knowledge, military art and political organization).10 The classical political imagery included both the imperial idea and antityrannical republican themes, both of which informed the dialogue between the rulers and elites in a period between the reign of Peter the Great and the consolidation of the Romanov dynastical rule in the nineteenth century.11 Although this imagery never displaced Russia’s Christian and Orthodox identity, it definitely contributed to a considerable secularization of the outlook of the imperial elite by the late eighteenth century. Russian classicism would be little more than a belated penetration of the post-Renaissance culture to Europe’s periphery if it had not promptly acquired a geopolitical dimension in the context of the Russian– Ottoman wars of the Catherinian reign. The match between classicist cultural frame of reference and an aggressive policy in the south resulted from the efforts of Catherine the Great to compensate for her legitimacy deficit through intelligent public relations in both the Russian and the broader European context. The empress seized the Ottoman declaration of war in 1768 as an opportunity to present herself

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as a successful pursuer of the failed southern project of Peter the Great. This helped her to neutralize the aristocratic party at court that favoured the defensive policy of the ‘Northern Accord’.12 Simultaneously, she used her relations with Voltaire and other notable European figures in order to legitimize Russia’s expansion at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, even though this expansion potentially threatened the European balance of power. In this respect, several scholars were right to point out that Catherine’s ‘Greek project’ was born in the correspondence between Catherine the Great and Voltaire, in which Europe’s major classicist writer and a well-read ruler made constant references to the ancient Greek and Latin cultural imagery as they discussed the unfolding military and political events.13 Although the evocation of the Christian imagery (albeit in classicist poetical forms) constituted the first response of Russian literary figures to the outbreak of a new war with the Ottoman Empire, the empress privileged the classical motives, which soon became dominant in the representations of the war.14 Another notable development consisted in the ‘Hellenization’ of the cultural references, whereby the evocations of Roman antiquity (as in Catherine’s correspondence with P.A. Rumiantsev in the wake of the latter’s major victory at Kagul in 1770) gave way to the growing preference for classical Greek themes as the war went on.15 The example was provided by Voltaire, who compared the Russian– Ottoman war to the Greek – Persian one of the fifth century BC . Catherine’s famous correspondent thereby not only endorsed the already established association of the Ottoman Empire with Asiatic despotism but also helped to launch the notion of Russians as ‘modern Greeks’ that soon developed into a powerful cultural myth.16 The war of 1768–74 was of paradigmatic importance in Russian cultural and political history as it turned eighteenth-century Russian classicism into the empire’s direct military – political involvement with the lands of the Greek antiquity and their contemporary populations.17 The product of this match was Russian philhellenism that combined a fascination with ancient Hellas with the support of Greek emigration to Russia and cultivation of relations with the Ottoman Greeks. This philhellenism made an important difference in Russia’s relations with the Orthodox subject peoples of the sultan. Originating in the distinctly classicist idiom that informed Catherine’s correspondence with Europe’s most important deist philosopher, the idea of restoring the ‘Greek

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Empire’ under the scepter of Catherine’s grandson Constantine merged the cultural imagery of Constantinople and Athens in the minds of the educated Russians of the late eighteenth century.18 Representations of Russia as an heir to the classical Greece thereby emerged alongside the older theme of Muscovy’s religious continuity with the Byzantium.19 This could not fail to have a secularizing impact upon the Russian perception of the Greeks. At the same time, alongside the philhellenic image of Greeks as heroic freedom fighters, there was a different strain within the Russian discourse, which emphasized the subservience of the modern Greeks to their Ottoman overlords. Still before the onset of Russian philhellenism, the first permanent Russian envoy in Constantinople P.A. Tolstoi noted that the Ottomans ‘keep their Greek subjects in great oppression and frightened them so much that the Greeks do not even dare to think anything contrary to [their masters]’.20 Later in the century, the Russian discovery of the classics turned the ancient Greek virtues into the high moral standard, against which the educated Russians judged the mores of the contemporary Greeks. Thus, the charge´ d’affaires of the Constantinople mission P.A. Levashev deplored the ‘utter ruin and the most pitiful state of the Greek church’ as well as the ‘ignorance and misbehaviour of its leaders’ attributable to their ‘enslavement and humiliation’. According to Levashev, the Ottoman conquest scattered the ‘learned and artful’ Greeks over different Christian lands, whereas those who remained nearly lost the mastery of their own language and ‘became incapable of spreading the word of God correctly’.21 To illustrate this unflattering characterization of the co-religionists, Levashev described in detail the Ottoman practice of selling the patriarchal dignity to the highest bidder, which involved the Greek clergy in the base traffic of the ecclesiastical offices, high and low.22 The eighteenth-century Russians not only contrasted the erstwhile glory of the Greek Orthodox Church to its sorry state under the Ottoman dominance, but were also able to distinguish between the ancient and modern Greeks in purely secular terms. Well before Franc
ois Rene´ Chateaubriand, M.I. Prokudin-Gorskii, a nobleman of the Russian embassy in Constantinople, opposed Homer, Democritus, Demosthenes, Socrates and other ‘smartest people endowed with great qualities’ and their 1atter-day descendants, who abandoned themselves to commercial pursuits. ‘Cunning, deception, hostility towards their neighbours have

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become the most respected qualities’ of the Greeks whom he met in Constantinople in 1760.23 According to the author, the moral decay of the Greeks occurred under ‘the cruel yoke’ of the Ottomans and resulted from the annihilation of the Greek aristocracy by Mehmed the Conqueror. Given the freedom to conduct commerce, the low people quickly lost any noble ambitions and instead developed greediness and cupidity ‘so that one cannot find a single noble person in the entire empire’.24 Philhellenic fascination with the imagined Greeks explains a great disappointment that the Westernized Russian officers often felt when they encountered the real inhabitants of Morea and the Archipelago. Thus, the veteran of the first Archipelago expedition of the Russian navy S.P. Khmetevskii referred to the Greeks as ‘great liars’ and noted the ‘boundless indolence’ that reigned in their land.25 Distressed by the failure of the anti-Ottoman uprising in Morea, the commander of the Russian navy in the Archipelago in 1770– 4, A.G. Orlov portrayed Russia’s co-religionists as ‘flattering, deceitful, unreliable, insolent, cowardly and avid for money and booty’. In Orlov’s appreciation, the ‘rude ignorance’ of the inhabitants of the Aegean Islands and the peninsular Greece, as well as ‘slavery and the bonds of the Turkish rule in which they were born and raised’, left one no hope of success ‘in any well founded enterprise undertaken for their benefit’.26 Khmetevskii’s and Orlov’s vituperations against the Greeks were published almost a century after the first appearance of the Russian navy in the Mediterranean, yet the contemporary Russian reading public found similar characterization of the Orthodox co-religionists in the description of the Archipelago by M.G. Kokovtsev. According to this participant in the 1770–4 expedition, the local Greeks lived in ‘ignorance and poverty’ because of ‘laziness, darkness and disorderly Turkish rule’. In Kokovtsev’s description, the Greeks employed their quick wit ‘to deceive, dissimulate and flatter’ while the ‘greediness that reigned in their hearts’ made them ‘glad to sacrifice their best friends and relatives to the ring of a coin’.27 Educated Russians developed an even more critical perspective on the Phanariot Greeks, who over the late 1600s and the 1700s had become deeply integrated into the Ottoman institutions. Cultural heirs of Byzantium, much reviled by the famous historian Edward Gibbon and his readers, the Greek aristocrats of the Phanar district of Constantinople also figured as pitiful products of the Ottoman political system that

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served the prototype of Montesquieu’s theory of Oriental despotism. The earliest elements of this approach towards the Constantinople Greeks can be found already in the reports of P.A. Tolstoi. According to the Russian diplomat, the famous founder of the Phanariot system Alexander Mavrocordatos was a ‘good politician’ and ‘a Christian in his image’, but he had ‘a Muslim mode of thinking’, which made his activities ‘repugnant to the Christian faith’. For his ‘great help in ambassadorial affairs’ the Porte gave Mavrocordatos ‘respect and riches, but there is hardly any help coming from him to the pious Christians who are under the Muslim yoke; although he could [help them], he does not want to, [and instead is] catering to the Muslim will’.28 The Russian – Ottoman wars and periodic occupations of the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia gave tsarist diplomats and officers an occasion to evaluate the consequences of the Phanariot rule in these countries, which began with the assent of Mavrocordatos’s son Nicholas to the throne of Moldavia in 1711. By the late 1700s, Russians came to view the Phanariot princes of Moldavia and Wallachia as part and parcel of the system of Ottoman despotism. Russian diplomat J.Ch. Struve noted that the Porte rarely allowed the princes to retain their posts for more than five or six years in a row in order to prevent them from forming a strong party in the principality, or out of simple ‘avarice in view of receiving more frequently the presents and sums which always accompany the ceremony of taking possession of the office’.29 In this situation, ‘the idea of promoting the happiness of the people. . . never yet entered the mind of a hospodar’.30 Instead, the Phanariot princes spared no effort in order to compensate for the ever rising price of the hospodar office by means of selling offices, creating sinecures, and simple extortions. Governed by fear, treachery and avarice, the Phanariots tested the Enlightenment experience of human psychology. According to A.F. Langeron, ‘a European, a person born in a civilized country, can conceive of neither the abnegation nor the fearstricken existence, which is the life of the Phanariots’.31 Such portrayals of the Phanariots revealed the problematic relations between the Greeks and other Christian subjects of the sultan that the philhellenic discourse all but neglected. Characteristic in this respect was Constantin Cantacuzino’s article ‘A Picture of Wallachia’ published in the Russian magazine Messenger of Europe. One of the best provinces of Europe according to its geographic position and the quality of land,

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Wallachia, in the appreciation of Cantacuzino, was ‘a country dominated by barbarians, a country of oppressed humanity’, whereby even ‘the beauties of nature such as the majestic flow of the Danube lost their attractiveness’.32 The author attributed the misfortunes of the land to the Phanariot Greeks, who had ruled the principality for about a century. According to Cantacuzino, ‘[these] malicious abettors of the Turkish crimes in one hundred years reduced Wallachia to the most pitiful state, devastated it and even changed the mores of its inhabitants. The oppressed people lost all energy and became hesitant and lazy’. For its part, the nobility ceased to care about the common good, which was no longer in its power, and joined the Phanariots.33 By the early nineteenth century the predominant Russian attitude towards the Phanariots was increasingly negative. The Russian reception of the Western European discourse about them34 reverberated with the pre-Petrine Muscovite view of the Greeks as ‘cunning’ and ‘duplicitous’. The most perceptive Russians became aware that the descendants of Pericles and Themistocles, in the words of Catherinian ambassador Ia.I. Bulgakov, ‘were born in Turkey’. Mindful of Bulgakov’s words, A.G. Krasnokutskii, a Russian officer dispatched with a secret diplomatic mission to Constantinople during the war of 1806–12, treated as provocation the expressions of the desire ‘to be under the Russian protectorate’ that the Greek notables of the town of Serres addressed to him on his way back to the Russian headquaters.35 In the end, the Russian officer was glad to have recognized in such advances the intrigues of the Ottoman governor of Serres Ismail Pasha, who sought to check in this way Krasnokutskii’s own professions of good will. Needless to say, such encounters limited the impact of the ‘Greek myth’ upon the Russian perception of the contemporary Greek subjects of the sultan. The discovery of the role of the Phanariots in the system of Ottoman rule did not eliminate the sympathy for the Greeks overnight. Although the contrast between the ancient and modern Greeks was all too apparent, some of the Russian observers joined contemporary Western travellers in viewing the modern Greeks as victims rather than abettors of the Ottoman domination and retained a measure of sympathy towards them. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Russian philhellenes could wonder with Franc
ois Pouqueville at the ability of the Greeks to preserve, despite foreign conquest and many vicissitudes, their ‘customs and the remnants of their language’,36 or else

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be incensed, not unlike Rene´ Chateaubriand, at the sight of the Ottoman governors of Athens who lived amidst the works of Ictinos and Phidias and did not care to know their provenance.37 Thus, the participant in the Second Archipelago Expedition of the Russian navy in 1805–7, P.I. Panafidin, argued that the Greeks had lost their ‘vivid and ardent character’ and become ‘duplicitous and meanly avaricious’ as the result of the ‘cruel oppression’ of a ‘fat Turk who enjoyed his keyif with a pipe in his hands’ in total ignorance of the names of Aristides, Themistocles, Pericles and Alcibiades.38 The political developments of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era weakened the ideological and cultural binding between the Russian autocracy and the educated elite that philhellenism helped to secure during the reign of Catherine the Great. Under the impact of the French revolutionary expansionism in the Mediterranean, Paul I and Alexander I abandoned the ‘Greek project’ of Catherine the Great in favour of the policy of cooperation and alliance with the Ottoman Empire, which in 1799 even led to a joint Russian–Ottoman attack against the French troops on the island of Corfu.39 Apart from its waning geopolitical relevance for the Russian elites, the influence of philhellenism was compromised by the ideological conjuncture of the early decades of the nineteenth century. The republican connotations of the Greek antiquity appeared increasingly problematic to the Russian rulers in the context of the Europe-wide confrontation between the absolutist regimes and the French revolution that modeled itself on the ancient examples. Philhellenism was even more at odds with the mystical Christian ideology of the Holy Alliance proposed by Alexander I after the defeat of Napoleon as a way of consolidating the anti-revolutionary unity of the European monarchs. Although Alexander I supported the activity of Greek educational societies and appointed the native of Corfu Ioannis Kapodistrias to serve as his minister of foreign affairs, the ‘Agamemnon of Europe’ never viewed the Holy Alliance as a means of an antiOttoman crusade.40 When the news of the Philiki Etaireia uprising in Moldavia and Wallachia reached Alexander I at the Laibach Congress of the alliance in March 1821, the emperor condemned this movement led by his former aide-du-champ Alexander Ypsilantis as insurgency against a legitimate, if Muslim, sovereign.41 Whereas Catherine II was ready to foment the anti-Ottoman revolts in Morea, her grandson chose to stay legitimist when the flame of rebellion really flared up.

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The Etaireia uprising of 1821 had a contradictory impact upon the Russian views of the Greeks. Whereas Alexander I adopted a legitimist approach towards the insurgents, the Russian readers met the news of the rebellion enthusiastically, which was indicative of the ‘parting of ways’ between the government and the educated public during the first half of the nineteenth century.42 The uprising constantly figured in the political news columns of the Russian periodicals of the 1820s and there was no shortage of publications which elicited compassion for the Greek victims of Ottoman oppression.43 Provoking the sympathy of the Russian readers, the uprising offered examples of ancient heroism that made some authors challenge Chateaubriand’s perspective upon the modern Greeks and speak of a ‘regeneration of Greece’.44 According to the testimony of the Russian officer and writer N.V. Putiata, during the 1820s, ‘the banks of the Danube, Constantinople, Greece rising from the ashes were never-ending subjects of our conversations’.45 Although the Greek War of Independence provoked widespread sympathy and support in Russian society,46 the course and eventual outcome of this struggle contained within itself the seed of eventual cooling of the Russians towards the Greeks. During the 1820s the freedom-fighters of Morea could ‘appear to be worthy descendants of Aristides, Themistocles and others’,47 yet they could not define the Russian perception of the much greater number of Greeks who continued to be Ottoman subjects after the establishment of a small peninsular Greek kingdom in 1830–2. The latter, by virtue of their position in the social and economic structure of the Ottoman Empire, continued to be viewed as lowly traders, dissimulating clergymen or treacherous Phanariots. This explains the persistence of the perception of modern Greeks of the Ottoman Empire as unworthy of their ancient predecessors that was popularized by the French writers of the late 1700s and the early 1800s. Admittedly, the 1820s were the high point of the classical revival in Russia in the course of which the appropriation of the ancient Greek poets and writers played an important role in the emergence of the Russian national poetic and literary tradition.48 However, the very popularity of the classical Greek authors and their heroes with several generations of the educated Russians explains their repeated disillusionment with the modern Greeks. Classical education instilled in its bearers an idealized notion of ancient virtues that the latter-day heirs to Leonidas and Pericles could not possibly match. Sometimes the

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very infatuation with the antiques led the Russians to detest those who trampled those stones daily under their feet. Dispatched to collect Greek and Roman coins, medals and marbles in Bulgaria in 1829– 30, the agent of the governor-general of New Russia V.G. Tepliakov was appalled by the stinginess of a Greek metropolitan of Varna who demanded 500 piasters for an antique marble built into a wall of the city fortress. Ridiculing the belief of the locals in the magical capacities of these stones to prevent the destruction of the buildings, Tepliakov found such stories indicative of ‘the real character of the people disfigured to a such a degree by cupidity and pusillanimous superstition – the inevitable consequences of the prolonged lethargy of spirit, darkened by absence of moral life and languishing under the burden of a secular yoke’.49 As he looked at ‘the heirs of enlightenment, taste and luxury of Athens’, the Russian author could only remark how little time it took for the ‘blind barbarity’ to grow ‘on the ruins of human education’.50 In the nineteenth century, Russian perceptions of the Greeks were thus increasingly ambiguous. In a sense, they had always been so. The elements of this ambiguity can be seen in the Muscovite attitude towards the Greek co-religionists. This attitude was simultaneously respectful of the Byzantine origins of Russian Orthodoxy and mindful of the later ‘apostasy’ of the Greeks (i.e. their conclusion of the Florentine Union with Rome in 1439) that supposedly brought about God’s punishment on them in the form of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. Secularization and Westernization of the outlook of the Russian elites during the eighteenth century reproduced this ambiguity on an entirely different plane. As it valorized pre-Christian past, philhellenism helped to secularize the Russian image of the Greeks as well as compromised the traditional association of Greeks with the Orthodox faith that Russia had adopted from Byzantium. At the same time, Westernization not only made the Russian elites enthusiastic about the classical letters, but also led them to adopt a critical perspective on the Phanariots, which reverberated with the traditional Muscovite and East Slavic perception of the Greeks as ‘treacherous’. Greek history thus provided the grounds for both admiration and reprobation. Despite the portrayal of Greece as the cradle of European civilization, its more recent historical experience was characterized by greater passivity. The Ottoman conquest, according to common opinion, resulted in the decay of the arts and learning in

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Greece, which was paralleled by the change of character of the Greeks themselves. Both the earlier importance of the Greek theme in the culture of Russia’s eighteenth-century elites and its heterogeneity, which became more evident later, proved to be crucial for the emergence of the new attitude towards other Christian peoples of the Balkans that had hitherto remained in the shadow of the Greeks. The Greeks as valiant ancient heroes and the Greeks as treacherous and servile courtiers provided the Russian authors with the two models for the description of the rest of the Balkan population.

The Slavs The Russian discovery of the Ottoman Slavs was a gradual process, in the course of which race and ethnicity came to supplement the existing religious framework. For a long time, educated Russians hardly differentiated their Southern Slavic ‘brothers’ from other Orthodox coreligionists. If anything, in their relations with the northern Tsardom, the representatives of Southern Slavs were more likely to stress common race, sometimes even at the expense of common religion. By contrast, the Russians for a long time either ignored these specifically Pan-Slavic messages or reinterpreted them in terms of championship of the Orthodox cause. The travails of the already-mentioned Juraj Krizˇanic´ in Russia are indicative in this respect. The Muscovite authorities proved to have little interest in Krizˇanic´’s pioneering ideas of the Slavic union and exiled him to Tobolsk upon learning that he was a Catholic missionary. Although Montenegro’s defiance of Ottoman rule attracted the attention of Peter the Great and led to the establishment of long-lasting relations, these relations were not free from mutual frustrations.51 The immediate successors of the reformer tsar had little use for Montenegrin bellicosity or found the local warrior society too unruly. Empress Elizabeth (1741– 61) let the visiting Montenegrin Prince-Bishop Vasilije Petrovic´ Njegosˇ serve a liturgy in a Moscow cathedral and provided him with funds for the restoration of churches in his native country. However, Vasilije did not manage to secure effective Russian support for the unification of the Slavic peoples of the Ottoman Empire under Montenegrin leadership and the Russian protectorate.52 In the meantime, Elizabeth’s emissary S. Pushkov, dispatched to pacify the quarrelling local factions, reported to the empress that ‘no use can be

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expected from Montenegro, as these people do not care to serve your Imperial Majesty and apparently all matter of advice on the creation of a Senate and a corps will turn into nothing’.53 An even more negative picture of Montenegro was presented by the emissary of Catherine II Iu.V. Dolgorukov, dispatched to the Black Mountain following the outbreak of the Russian–Ottoman war in 1769. Dolgorukov had little success in mobilizing the Montenegrins for a struggle against the sultan and wrote that they ‘live by theft, robbery and banditry with no regard to faith, friendship or humanity’.54 The Russian empress had little motivation to question Dolgorukov’s report, disconcerted as she was by the appearance three years previously of the Montenegrin ‘pretender’ Sˇc´epan Mali, who claimed to be Catherine’s dethroned husband Peter III.55 The parallel mission of Lieutenant-Colonel N.A. Karazin to Bulgaria in 1769 was similarly unsuccessful, albeit for different reasons.56 For the remainder of Catherine’s reign, the Greeks took the pride of place in St Petersburg’s anti-Ottoman designs, often to the detriment of Russian relations with Southern Slavs. According to Catherine’s ‘Greek Project’, Montenegro, Bosnia and Ottoman Serbia fell within the prospective Habsburg partition of the Ottoman Empire, while the territories of the latter-day Bulgaria were supposed to be part of the restored Greek Empire. In a demonstration of her commitment to the Russian –Austrian alliance against the sultan, the empress expelled the Montenegrin leader Petar Petrovic´ Njegosˇ, who had come to Russia in the hope of securing traditional support.57 For the same reason, the empress and her favourite G.A. Potemkin had little use for the project of a southern Slavic state under Russian protectorate or the idea of raising the Ottoman Slavs for an uprising against the sultan, and only the rivalry with the revolutionary and Napoleonic France led Catherine’s successors to recognize the importance of the Slavic factor.58 Until the turn of the nineteenth century, the information on the Slavic subjects of the sultan came almost exclusively from the Southern Slavs themselves who immigrated to Russia or visited it temporarily. These authors for the most part focused on the ancient history of Slavs and their glorious resistance to the sultans.59 Nevertheless, inasmuch as they discussed the Ottoman period, the authors did not miss an opportunity to state their grievances against the Greeks. Thus, Vasilije Petrovic´ complained in his History of the Black Mountain (1754) that the Greeks used the Russian – Ottoman war of 1736– 9 in order to present

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the Serbs as traitors of the sultan attached to Russia and secure the appointment of their co-national at the head of the Serbian church hierarchy. Armed with the sultan’s firman, the latter subsequently travelled around Serbia, ‘appointing Greek hierarchs, tormenting the people and extorting money’ along the way. Although the brave Montenegrins eventually chased the impostor away, the headquarters of the Serbian Patriarch in Pec´ were left ‘fleeced to the very walls’.60 Later in the century, one finds anti-Greek innuendos in Jovan Rajic´’s History of the Different Slavic Peoples, the first volume of which was published in Russia in 1794. In it, Rajic´ deplored the vilification of the Slavic name by Greek authors, who ‘sought to eclipse the glory [of the Slavs]’ after the latter ‘had surpassed all others in courage and valour’ and ‘had caused the Greeks great troubles’.61 The first decade of the nineteenth century brought about the first manifestations of Russian interest towards the Ottoman Slavs as particular peoples rather than as members of an Orthodox religious community.62 Whereas the Mediterranean expedition of the Russian navy in 1770– 4 headed by A.G. Orlov marked the emergence of Russian philhellenism, that of 1805– 10, led by admiral D.M. Seniavin, helped to place the Black Mountain on the mental map of the Russian reading public.63 In his Memoirs of a Naval Officer (1818– 19), a participant in this expedition, V.B. Bronevskii, provided one of the first widely read Russian descriptions of Montenegro. It portrayed the inhabitants of this small country as implacable enemies of the Ottomans who were ruled by an Orthodox prince bishop in cooperation with the general assembly and who expended their remarkable energies in robbery and blood feuds.64 This rather sympathetic characterization of the primitive but straightforward mores of the Montenegrins reveals the influence of the Russeauistic idea of the ‘noble savage’.65 At the same time, the author strongly criticized Montenegrins for their ignorance and neglect of commerce and industry and contrasted them to the more advanced and less warlike Slavic neighbours, such as the Dalmatians, Croats and Serbians.66 As a result, the account was equally distant from the eighteenth-century Russian reports that took a negative view of the Montenegrins and the works of the latter-day Russian Pan-Slavists who were totally fascinated by this people.67 By the early nineteenth century, relations between the Russian troops and the Christian Slavic population of the Ottoman Empire were

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already conditioned by the memory of the previous appearance of the Russian armies on the Danube. In 1806– 12, as in 1768 –74, the Russians fought with the Ottomans on the right bank of this river in the territories with a greater or lesser share of the Bulgarian population. In their writings, Russian officers predictably focused on the enthusiasm and devotion with which the Ottoman Christians met their Orthodox co-religionists and tended to overlook other feelings that periodic Russian occupations and withdrawals might have caused among the local population. Thus, A.G. Krasnokutskii reported an encounter with a Bulgarian host and his family who joyously kissed silver coins with the image of Catherine II in appreciation of her intention to deliver them from the cruel yoke.68 On his way back, Bulgarian peasants would meet Krasnokutskii and accompany him to their villages ‘nearly carrying him on their arms’.69 Such scenes clearly conveyed the idea that the local Slavic population looked at the Russian representative as the messenger of their deliverance from oppression. Since the early nineteenth century, Russian perceptions of Southern Slavs focused on the latters’ suffering from and resistance to the ‘Turkish yoke’. A.I. Turgenev and A.S. Kaisarov, who visited the Habsburg – Ottoman border and Belgrade in 1804, were perhaps the first Russian travellers who left a moving description of the plight of the Serbian population in the Ottoman Empire. As a Russian related to Serbs ‘by race and religion’, Turgenev ‘could not look without internal revolt and indignation’ at the situation of this people and warned his readers that ‘unless they are aided, soon even their traces will disappear in Turkey’.70 The Serbian uprising that followed in 1804–13 was presented as the story of heroic struggle par excellence. The Serbian leader Karageorge Petrovic´ figured in the Russian press of the 1810s and 1820s as a noble savage and romantic freedom fighter of unparalleled bravery and courage.71 This combination of heroism and victimhood explains a particularly strong attraction that the nineteenth-century Russians experienced towards the Serbs. The Greek crisis of the 1820s played an important role in the Russian discovery of the Southern Slavs. The educated subjects of the tsar could not fail to reflect upon the reasons for the lukewarm attitude of the Balkan peoples towards the Greek cause. This reflection led the secretary of the Russian mission in Constantinople, S.I. Turgenev to criticize the leader of Philiki Etaireia, Alexander Ypsilantis, for the lack of

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preparation and knowledge of the local situation. Turgenev also denounced Ypsilantis’ tendency to treat the Greeks preferentially to other Balkan peoples and described the attempt of the rebel leader to restore the Greek Empire as ‘useless and perilous’.72 Whereas Turgenev attributed the defeat of the Etaireia to the errors of its leadership, his colleague at the Russian consulate in Bucharest A.M. Spiridov explained the failure of the all-Balkan uprising in 1821 by ‘a general and unchangeable ill-disposition [ predubezhdenie] of all the Slavic peoples of the Ottoman Empire towards the Greeks’.73 In Spiridov’s opinion, this enmity had deep historical roots and ultimately owed to the moral corruption of the Greeks, as a result of which the ‘courtiers of debauched morals’ took place of the ancient ‘sons of glory’. According to him, the servile Byzantines ‘were looking with envy at the [Slavic] tribes’, which defended them against ‘barbarians’, but for a long time ‘remained free and unsubordinated to their power’.74 In the end, the Greeks disarmed their defenders and abolished their rights only to fall themselves under foreign domination. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, ‘flattery and self-humiliation opened to the Greeks the access to their conquerors’. In order to improve their position, they spared nothing in order to turn the attention and vengeance of the Ottomans on the simple-natured and belligerent Slavic peoples. Having lost their peculiarity (samobytnost’), the Greeks for centuries have been trying to dominate in the land of their ancestors through quick wit and shrewdness and, in order to realize their intention, they have diverted the rays of enlightenment away from the Slavic peoples.75 Spiridov’s discussion is important in so far as, in an attempt to explain the failure of the Etaireia to provoke the all-Balkan uprising, it pointed to the existence of important conflicts and tensions among the different ethnic groups of the Orthodox subjects of the sultan (reaya). A testimony to the ambiguous attitude of the Russians towards the Greeks, Spiridov’s piece is also one of the early statements of Pan-Slavic unity, which assumed a glorious past of the Slavic peoples and attributed their present suffering to Ottoman and Greek oppression. In his article, Spiridov created an essentially mythical story of the struggle between the forces of

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evil and good, in which the symbolic opposites were represented by the Greeks and the Slavs respectively. Spiridov’s interpretation of Greek–Slavic relations accorded with the perspective of the most important Serbian intellectual of the period, Vuk Karadzˇic´, who corresponded with Russian Slavists. In his description of Serbia published in the Messenger of Europe, Karadzˇic´ blamed the Greek Orthodox hierarchs who had monopolized the high ecclesiastical positions in Serbia in the second half of the eighteenth century for bringing the Serbian clergy to such a state that ‘it is difficult to find a parish priest who would be able to read well enough’. For Karadzˇic´, the Greek clergymen were ‘foreigners, who belonged to a people that has never been friendly to our tribe’. Similarly to the Phanariot princes of Moldavia and Wallachia, the Greek bishops were essentially tax-farmers who obtained their positions for a year and were concerned above all about compensating themselves. When they appointed the parish priests, the Greeks therefore cared about the candidate’s ability to pay rather than his ability to perform the priestly duties. Finally, according to Karadzˇic´, the Greek hierarchs themselves were rarely possessed of great enlightenment, being usually ‘commoners of questionable morals, at times bankrupt merchants or monks who used the donations made to their monasteries to pay to the Ottomans for their appointment’.76 Despite the nefarious role of the Greek clergymen, the Serbs did not succumb to the pressures of conversion to Islam or temptations of Catholicism and instead remained attached to Orthodoxy. According to A.G. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, who composed a detailed description of Serbia in the wake of the Russian– Ottoman war of 1828–9, this reassuring loyalty could be attributed to the emigration of the Serbian nobility in the wake of the Ottoman conquest.77 To prove his thesis, the Russian officer pointed to the nefarious role of the better entrenched nobility of Bosnia and Herzogovina. The latter converted to Islam ‘in order to preserve their properties, statuses and titles’, which triggered a mass apostasy and ultimately led to the formation of a Slavic Muslim majority in the two provinces.78 Against this background, the absence of the nobility in Ottoman Serbia eliminated an important conduit of Muslim influence upon the broader population and helped it to preserve the Orthodox faith despite the turpitude of the church hierarchy. At the same time, the Orthodox frame of reference coexisted in Rozalion-Soshal’skii’s portrayal of the Serbs with purely secular

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references. The continued importance of the classicist cultural idiom, coupled with the gradual disillusionment with the Greeks in the first half of the nineteenth century, led him to portray southern Slavs as true embodiments of classical virtues. Extrapolating from the life stories of Serbian tribal aristocracy, Rozalion-Soshal’skii assumed that the mores and customs of the simple Serbs had ‘a lot in common with the mores and customs of the Greeks prior and during the Trojan war’.79 Whereas the Greeks lost their ancient virtue, the Serbs preserved the traditional way of life, which paralleled their attachment to Orthodoxy. According to the Russian officer, the frequent wars between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs that often took place on the Serbian territory prevented the development among the inhabitants of this country of the ‘slavish docility with which the captive purchases certain condescension [sniskhozhdenie] and peace from his master’.80 Although the wars ‘deprived the Serbs of the desire to improve their agriculture in which they are inferior to the Bulgarians and the Greeks’, they helped to preserve ‘the bellicose spirit and gave to the country its savage aspect, which it preserves until nowadays’.81 In fact, Rozalion-Soshal’skii found the mountainous Serbs ‘in many respects approaching the natural state of the humankind’, and claimed that ‘the mass of the people still preserve the freshness of reason, which frequently becomes suppressed by the errors (zabluzhdeniia) that accompany the exit from this condition’.82 In Russian eyes, the Serbs could thus be virtuous heroes, noble savages and a staunchly Orthodox people, all at the same time. This almost impossible combination of the religious, classicist and rousseauistic frames of reference explains why in the first three decades of the nineteenth century the Serbs nearly monopolized the attention of those educated Russians who were interested in the Orthodox Slavic population of the Ottoman Empire. In comparison with the fleeting infatuation with the Greeks, the interest of the reading public towards the Serbs proved to be more tenacious and persisted, with some remissions, well into the twentieth century. At the same time, this interest arguably never fitted the foreign political objectives of the Russian government as nicely as happened in the case of early Russian philhellenism and Catherine’s ‘Greek project’. It also came somewhat ‘too late’ as far as the Serbs themselves were concerned. The Orthodox frame of reference and, later, the ‘Greek myth’, prevented the Russian ‘discovery’ of the Serbs during the eighteenth century, i.e. the time when

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the latter needed Russia more than ever after, both as a political force and a source of culture and enlightenment.83 Indicative of this rendez-vous manque´ was Catherine’s prohibition to publish the later volumes of Jovan Rajic´’s History of Different Slavic Peoples written in a ‘Sloveno-Russian’ language in accordance with the eighteenth-century practice of the southern Slavic scholars.84 Since the 1820s, Vuk Karadzˇic´’s linguistic reform made it impossible to assume any longer that Russian and Serbian were dialects of the same language, which necessarily made it somewhat more difficult to launch projects of a ‘Sloveno-Serbian Tsardom’ under Russia’s protectorate.85 Other southern Slavs, and in particular Bulgarians, never completely disappeared from the Russian horizon and yet they remained in the shadow of the Greeks and the Serbs until the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century.86 Although the wars of 1768– 74 and 1806 –12 involved some military action on the right side of the Danube, neither of these wars made the formulators of Russia’s Eastern policy view the Bulgarians as a political subject capable of autonomous or independent existence in the manner of the Greeks or the Serbians. Thus, Bulgaria was included into the projected ‘Kingdom of Serbia’ in the outline of the political organization of the Balkan peninsula, which the President of Greece and former Foreign Minister of Alexander I, Ioannis Kapodistrias, wrote upon the request of the Russian government in March 1828, on the eve of the new Russian– Ottoman war that brought Russian troops across the Balkans.87 Similarly, Bulgaria did not figure as a separate polity in the memorandum that the Russian representative in Greece Count M.N. Bulgari submitted to the attention of the ‘Secret Committee on the Eastern Question’ convoked by Nicholas I on 4 September 1829 to consider the future policy towards the Ottoman Empire. Instead, Bulgari proposed to unite Moldavia and Wallachia into a single state under Russian protectorate.88 At the same time, the war of 1828 –9 was different from the previous ones since on this occasion Russian troops for the first time crossed the Balkans and occupied Adrianople. Russian officers with PanSlavist sensibilities, such as the future Slavophile A.S. Khomiakov, could not fail to take notice of the predominant Bulgarian population in the occupied territories. Khomiakov’s comrade-in-arms, A.N. Murav’ev, himself a famous religious writer in the years to come, wrote in 1829 that the ‘Bulgarian tribe. . . unlike the Greeks, has not lost its primeval

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freshness’. As in the case of the Serbs, Ottoman rule, according to the young ensign, had fallen upon the Bulgarians not ‘at the moment of exhaustion of the decrepit old age, but in the full blossom of youth’. Murvav’ev compared the heavy yoke that the conquering sultans had imposed upon the Bulgarians to an ‘enchanted sleep, from which one wakes up not noticing the centuries that have elapsed’.89 The war of 1828 – 9 also made possible the scholarly journey of Iurii Ivanovich Venelin, who helped Russians re-discover Bulgarians in the first half of the nineteenth century.90 A Transcarpathian Rusyn known for his association with the Pan-Slavist historian and publicist M.P. Pogodin and the Moscow Slavophiles, Venelin first encountered Bulgarians in Bessarabia where he spent several years before coming to study at the Moscow University.91 This encounter turned him into a self-proclaimed Bulgarian intellectual who for the rest of his short life pursued the goal of placing the Bulgarians at the centre of the emergent Pan-Slavic historical narrative.92 Venelin challenged the view of Avgust Schlozer, N.M. Karamzin, Julius Klaproth and Pavel Jozef Sˇafa´rik, who argued for the Turkic or Ugro-Hunnic origin of Bulgarians and sided with the Russian and Slavic authors like A.I. Lyzlov, V.N. Tatishchev and Jovan Rajic´, who shared the medieval Russian perception of Bulgarians as Slavs.93 Venelin’s research on Bulgarians, being mostly linguistic and historical in character, also had important implications for the Russian perception of the contemporary Slavs living in the Ottoman Empire. Venelin challenged the almost exclusive focus of the Russians on the Serbs and Montenegrins by arguing that those who resisted the Ottoman dominance were not necessarily the same as those who bore the greatest burden of it. In his diary of the journey to Bulgaria still occupied by the Russian troops in 1830, Venelin argued that Ottoman rule in Europe ‘weighs almost exclusively upon the Bulgarians’ who were not protected by geography or intercession of other powers.94 According to him, ‘Moldavians and Wallachians have always been semi-free; the Serbs, who were less mixed with the Turks suffered less from the insolence of the latter; besides, their mountainous country, which is better suited for defence, served as a shield of sorts and now, thank God, they breathe easier and freer under the protection of a national government and the Russian aegis’.95 An absolute dependence of Bulgarians upon the Ottomans could have been moderated by a well-organized church hierarchy, yet the latter, in

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Venelin’s words, was ‘in a pitiful state’ because of the intrigues of the Greeks.96 After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople brought the Greek and the Bulgarian patriarchates under a single rule, the Greeks ‘reduced the latter to the status of an exarchate and subordinated it to the former, which gave Greek monks the access to the Bulgarian church hierarchy’. As a result, the bishoprics of Macedonia and Rumelia were Bulgarian by ethnicity and the language of liturgy in parish churches, but Greek by the composition of their hierarchies.97 Venelin deplored the lack of schools necessary to prepare individuals for the exercise of the priestly functions, which made the white clergy as ignorant as the rest of the population. Coupled with the traditional Ottoman prohibition to renovate churches or construct new ones, the absence of educated priests exposed many Bulgarians to the temptations of Islamism and the Uniate propaganda, although the latter, in Venelin’s appreciation, won fewer converts among the Bulgarians than it did among the Serbs, Greeks and Armenians.98 Some fifteen years after Venelin’s trip to Bulgaria, another important Slavist, V.I. Grigorovich, confirmed his critical assessment of Greek – Bulgarian relations and the state of education among Bulgarians. At Mount Athos, Grigorovich was appalled by the Greek monks’ neglect of the Slavic manuscripts, but at the same time deplored the indifferent attitudes of Slavs themselves, who, out of a fickle desire to pass for aristocrats, revealed an ‘attachment to everything Greek’.99 With several notable exceptions such as the Rila Monastery, the curriculum of the parish schools and gymnasia set up in Bulgarian towns was dominated by Greek rhetoric at the expense of practical knowledge that, in Grigorovich’s opinion, better corresponded to the character of the Bulgarians.100 The Russian scholar mentioned multiple cases of Greeks burning or hiding Slavic manuscripts, often in cooperation with the Ottomans, and reported being treated humiliatingly by the Greek hierarchs in the cities and towns of Ottoman Bulgaria that he visited. Considering the Bulgarians an unduly neglected people, Grigorovich deplored ‘the Byzantine haughtiness that assumes that only Greeks are human beings and that continues to sow inhuman notions among Christians’.101 Whereas the Russian descriptions of Montenegrins and Serbs published in the early 1800s emphasized their heroism and courage, the portrayals of Bulgarians that appeared later in the century cast these

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people as paradigmatic victims. In the early 1820s, an official at the Russian consulate in Bucharest, I.P. Iakovenko, found Bulgarians languishing ‘under the despotic dominance of the Turkish pashas and notables [ayans] in great poverty, slavery and humiliation’ due to the lack of courageous and capable representatives comparable to the Serbian prince Milosˇ Obrenovic´ and his deputies in Constantinople.102 The famous Russian traveller E.P. Kovalevskii, who visited Bulgaria during the 1840s, argued that, out of all the Ottoman subject peoples, the Bulgarians ‘bore the Ottoman yoke most patiently even though they suffered from it most of all’.103 A figure of a lone Bulgarian shepherd with ‘sad apathy in all his features and movements’ sketched in his memoirs could serve as a preamble to the heartbreaking story of the Ottoman oppression of the Orthodox Slavs that never failed to command the sympathy of the educated Russians in the age of the growing popularity of Pan-Slavic ideas.104 Some Russian observers attributed the particularity of Bulgarians in the ensemble of the Slavic peoples of the Ottoman Empire to the historical transformation that this people underwent over centuries. The foregoing discussion had already highlighted the dichotomy between the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’ in Russian representations of the Greek subjects of the sultan. In a more positive way, a review of the Ottoman Empire published at the outbreak of the Crimean War opposed the bellicose protagonists of early Bulgarian history to their latter-day descendants who, ‘being softened by agricultural life. . . became industrious, peaceful and hospitable’.105 Another review pointed to conversion to Christianity as the factor behind the transformation of the Bulgarians from the ‘rude and savage barbarians’ of the times of Justinian into ‘industrial, meek, circumspect and hospitable’ Bulgarians of the present times.106 Thus, the comparisons between the erstwhile and present-day national character of the Bulgarians were not necessarily disadvantageous to the contemporary Bulgarians as they were to the modern Greeks. Nevertheless, the very presence of such contrast distinguished the Russian representations of Bulgarians from the portrayals of contemporary Serbs and especially the Montenegrins, whom the Russians saw as the embodiments of ancient military valour. The contrast between the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’ was not the only common dimension of Russian representations of Greeks and Bulgarians. Another similarity consisted in emphasizing the divergent qualities of

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different subgroups within both peoples depending upon the occupation, geographical location and the influences of the neighbouring peoples. Thus, Kovalevskii praised the ‘courage’ and the ‘love of fatherland’, which the mountainous Greeks shared with the Serbs and the Montenegrins. At the same time, he despised the Greek lease-holders of Rumelia as ‘the real scourge of the reaya people’, and did not fail to mention their ‘treacherousness and ability for the most sophisticated intrigue’.107 According to Kovalevskii, the Greeks as a ‘predominant element’ to the south of the Balkan Mountains influenced the local Bulgarian population which was ‘energetic, cunning, loathing work, ingratiating, seeking to endear themselves to their oppressors [laskaiushchegosia k tomu kto gnetet ego], and having a great passion for money and all pleasures’. By contrast, the Bulgarians who lived to the north of the Balkan range were ‘industrious, firm in their attachment to religion and moral principles, honest, clumsy and heavy in their movements and their activities, seasoned by the experience of prolonged sufferings, and therefore, patient’.108 The moral qualities that Kovalevskii attributes to the northern Bulgarians best fitted the role of paradigmatic victims that conditioned the Russian perception of the Ottoman Slavs. The Russian interest in the Bulgarians, anticipated by Venelin in the late 1820s, fully developed during the 1850s.109 As had happened previously, the Russian discovery of the Bulgarians was the product of a specific political and intellectual conjuncture. By the middle of the century, there emerged a Bulgarian expatriate community in Russia whose members sought to draw the attention of educated Russians to the situation of their co-nationals in the Ottoman Empire.110 The circumstances attending the outbreak of the Crimean War greatly facilitated their task. The attitude of neutrality adopted by the leadership of Serbia and the Greek Kingdom in 1853 contrasted sharply with the heroic exploits of Karageorge Petrovic´ in the 1800s or the desperate struggle of the Greek rebels during the 1820s.111 This, together with the brief presence of Russian troops on Bulgarian soil in 1854, permitted the Bulgarians for the first time to claim the limelight. For a period of time, they became the first ethnic reference in the Russian discourse on the Orthodox subjects of the sultan. The most notable of the war-time publications on the Bulgarians, Naiden Gerov’s Letters from Bulgaria (1854), continued the already familiar theme of the Ottoman and Phanariot oppression. According to

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Gerov, the recent Ottoman reforms had hardly relieved the centurieslong oppression, and his account denounced as fictive the abolition of capital punishment and the principle of legal equality between Muslims and Christians proclaimed in 1839 by the hatt-i sherif of Gulhane. The same applied to the recently created councils of local self-government, where the functions of the Christian representatives were reduced to offering pipes to the Muslim council members.112 The benign decrees of the Ottoman central government remained dead letters ridiculed and ignored by the local Ottoman authorities and the Muslim population.113 Somewhat disturbingly from the Orthodox point of view, the church leadership itself was often a part of the Ottoman system of oppression. According to the Letters, the church hierarchs were ‘foreign to the people’, remained ‘indifferent to its needs’ and, in fact, acted ‘as the Ottoman spies’.114 The author stopped short of naming the Greeks, but an informed Russian reader could guess the culprits. The lot of Bulgarians preoccupied Gerov and his Russian readers not only on account of the ‘Muslim yoke’ that oppressed them, but also because of the ‘Latin temptation’ that increasingly threatened their Orthodoxy.115 The author denounced the activities of the French and British missionaries who sought to ‘separate Bulgarians from their coreligionist brothers’. At the same time, the author hurried to assure his readers that the Franco-British efforts to denigrate Russia in the eyes of his compatriots were going to fail because of the strong attachment of the Bulgarians to their Orthodox faith.116 In general, the discussion of Catholic and Protestant proselytism among the Porte’s Orthodox subjects on the eve and during the Crimean War indicated that the Russian educated public increasingly viewed Western influences upon the co-religionists as a greater problem than the continued rule of the sultan over them.117 In this respect, the Crimean War constituted an important watershed beyond which Russia’s perceptions of the Ottoman Slavs were no longer primarily determined by Russian –Ottoman relations and were instead increasingly conditioned by Russia’s perceived relations with ‘Europe’.

The Romanians As he reflected on the geographical position of the Romanians, F.P. Fonton, a member of the diplomatic chancellery of the Russian

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Danubian army in 1828 –9, could not conceal his regret about the fact that ‘these eight million people foreign to the Slavs had settled here on the beautiful slopes of the Carpathians, drawing a wedge between the Slavic tribes and preventing their unification’. If instead of these Romanians, reasoned Fonton, there had been Serbs or Bulgarians, ‘how easy it would have been to solve the Eastern, or better to say, the Slavic question’.118 Once he entered the subjunctive mood, the young Russian found it difficult to stop: If instead of the traitor Braˆncoveanu (the hospodar of Wallachia in 1688– 1714 – V.T.) and an indifferent people used to oppression, Peter the Great in his campaign had encountered here the stout and honest Bulgarians or valiant Serbs, the result would have been different. The point of gravity of the Russian policy would move to the South and then perhaps not the eccentric, cold and granite St Petersburg, but the splendid Kiev would have become the second capital of our state!119 This passage was part of the Humorous, Political and Military Letters that Fonton addressed to a friend from the headquarters of the Russian army fighting against the Ottomans on the Danube in 1828– 9. The light and jocular tonality of these letters written by a youthful diplomat, suggests that the author did not take all too seriously his observations about the fatal role that the Romanians supposedly played in the history of Russia. Nevertheless, they do provide one of the first testimonies of the Russian discovery of Romanians as a specifically non-Slavic people that occupied a very peculiar place in the ensemble of interethnic relations within the Orthodox community of the Ottoman Empire. Due to their geographical location, the vassal Ottoman principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia maintained much more direct and intensive contacts with Muscovy, and later the Russian Empire, than any of the Southern Slavic territories. All Russian– Ottoman wars beginning with the Pruth campaign of 1711 involved the occupation of either Moldavia or of both principalities by the Russian troops. Nevertheless, the first Russian-language review of the two countries appeared only at the end of the eighteenth century and drew on sources in Western European languages rather than direct observation.120 The Russian eyewitness accounts which followed in the 1790s and early 1800s concurred with

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contemporary Western descriptions that celebrated the proverbial fertility of Moldavia and Wallachia, but deplored their underpopulation, lack of cultivation, as well as the misery and ignorance of the population languishing under Ottoman and Phanariot dominance.121 The straightforward picture of the principalities as victims of Phanariot rapaciousness was complicated by the ambiguous record of the Moldavian and Wallachian boyars, who survived the Ottoman conquest unlike the Bulgarian and Serbian elites south of the Danube. The Ottoman overlords and their Greek servitors could have been accused of the sorry state of Bulgaria and Serbia, yet the continued existence of the autochthonous aristocracy in the principalities posed the question of their share of responsibility for the misfortunes of the local population. Indicative in this respect was the attempt to rehabilitate the Phanariots made in 1810 by A.F. Negri, a Greek expatriate who three years previously came to Russia in the suite of the Wallachian prince Constantine Ypsilantis. In his response to the above-cited ‘Picture of Wallachia’ by Constantin Cantacuzino, Negri argued that the Phanariots, who had founded princely academies in Ias¸i and Bucharest, had brought to Moldavia and Wallachia what little enlightenment one could find in the two principalities. In the absence of local laws, whose codification was prevented by the underdevelopment of the Romanian language, the Phanariot hospodars introduced the Byzantine codes and contributed to the development of crafts and printing.122 In Negri’s opinion, the misfortunes of Wallachia had to be attributed to the rapaciousness of the indigenous boyars as well as the population’s inherent ignorance and lack of industriousness and courage. Proverbial cupidity characterized not the Phanariot princes, but the members of the interim governments composed of indigenous boyars, who would step in after the deposition of one hospodar and the appointment of another and ‘did not lose the opportunity to plunder the unfortunate motherland’. According to Negri, this cupidity explained why ‘Wallachians have neither patriotic zeal nor compassion for their compatriots’ and why they did not try ‘to rebel against the oppressors of their freedom and common foes of Christendom’.123 Although Negri’s attempt to rehabilitate the Phanariots in the eye of the Russian public opinion failed, his critique of Wallachian boyars resonated with the Russian perception of the elites of the two principalities and ultimately contributed to the formation of the Russian

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views of Romanians as a people. Russian observers of Moldavia and Wallachia were particularly likely to criticize endemic corruption of the upper classes and sympathize with the suffering of the simple people. One official who audited the accounts of the Moldavian administration during the Russian occupation of the principalities in 1806 –12 compared the boyars to a ‘crocodile, [who] having found its pray, would water it with its tears, before tearing it apart and consuming. Similar to such animals are many individuals here who sympathize with the destiny of the ruined fatherland, shed tears and complain, and yet are the main culprits of this ruin, having filled their bags with gold and silver’.124 As long as the Phanariot rule in Moldavia and Wallachia continued, the Greeks absorbed a greater or lesser part of the blame for the sorry state of the two countries. After the abortive Greek Etaireia rebellion spelled the end of the Phanariot regime in the principalities, Moldavian and Wallachian boyars became the main object of Russian criticism. One finds a nice illustration of this transition in the account of the events in the principalities during the 1820s published by the already mentioned official at the Russian consulate in Bucharest, I.P. Iakovenko. Despite official Russia’s uncompromising condemnation of any rebellion, Iakovenko found profound truth in the passionate denunciation of the Phanariot abuses by Tudor Vladimirescu, the leader of the anti-Phanariot uprising in Wallachia, which paralleled the Philiki Etaireia rebellion in 1821.125 However, the first autochthonous hospodars appointed after the fall of the Phanariots proved to be no less eager abettors of the ruinous Ottoman dominance. Iakovenko denounced their reliance on increased Ottoman contingents, arbitrary persecution of political opponents and predatory taxes they imposed in order to meet the Porte’s demands.126 More generally, Iakovenko criticized the failure of the Wallachians to offer even token resistance to the Ottomans, which contrasted with the Serbian defiance of the Porte’s authority during the 1810s and 1820s. Whereas the Serbians refused to disarm and obeyed only those orders that were ‘in accordance with the common good of the people’, Wallachia ‘let the arms slip from her hands and bent its neck before the Turks with slavish obedience’.127 This unflattering comparison suggested that the inhabitants of the Danubian principalities lost the military valour that the eighteenth-century observers still attributed to them.128 One can see here a manifestation of the same dichotomy between the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’ that informed the Russian perception of the Greeks.

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In the meantime, the growing influence of Pan-Slavic ideas led Russian authors to address the problem of the relation of Moldavians and Wallachians to the Slavs. Despite references to their Latin origin that could be encountered in the eighteenth-century descriptions of the two principalities, some Russian observers during the 1820s argued that the inhabitants of Moldavia and Wallachia were Slavs.129 According to A.M. Spiridov, ‘everything in Wallachia [evoked] Slavic origin’; the language itself represented a combination of Slavic and ‘broken Latin or Italian’, which the Dacians, whom Spiridov also believed to have been Slavs, had borrowed from the Romans. Spiridov viewed Moldavians and Wallachians as part of the greater Slavic community, the existence of which was testified to by ‘the similarity of tongues, mores, customs, names of persons, towns, villages, rivers, lakes, settlements and finally, by their faith’.130 Several years later, Iu.I. Venelin concurred with Spiridov that Moldavians and Wallachians were Slavic. In order to link the historical narratives of Southern and Eastern Slavs, Venelin was prepared to rewrite the entire history of the two principalities as the history of the Bulgarians. The predominance of the Slavonic element (Slovene) in Moldavia and Wallachia, according to Venelin, could be demonstrated by the prevalence of Slavonic toponyms in the principalities as well as the use of the Slavonic language by the upper classes and in government correspondence during the Middle Ages. In his opinion, the linguistic and cultural peculiarity of the Romanians was the result of the Ottoman conquest. In order to break the natural connection which existed between Russia and Moldavia and Wallachia, the Ottomans established Phanariot rule, whereupon the Wallachian language replaced Slavonic in churches, while the Bulgarian nobility became hellenized.131 Venelin’s historical interpretation accorded with the perception of the Moldavian and Wallachian boyars as a corrupt and unpatriotic elite. This view emerged in the first decades of the nineteenth century and reflected the experience of the Russian provisional authorities in Moldavia and Wallachia during the war of 1806– 12 and the subsequent Russian rule in Bessarabia. According to Spiridov, ‘having become used to obey the will of the Phanariots and expect benefits and rewards from them, the nobility adopted all the vices of these Greeks, famous for their treachery, splendour, wiliness and debauchery. It has lost all the virtues of its

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ancestors and forgot their valour and belligerent spirit, forewent its love for the fatherland and its attachment to faith’.132 Spiridov argued that the corrupting impact of the Phanariots upon the Slavic substance of the Moldavians and Wallachians was unequal. It was particularly strong in Wallachia where the boyars’ ‘haughtiness and pride were equal only to the flattery and self-humiliation, with which they treat their fleeting (mgnovennyie) rulers in order to obtain offices that would allow them to rob and plunder their compatriots’. Not limited to the aristocratic apex of Wallachian society, the pernicious foreign influence affected Wallachian merchants who sought to attain the boyar rank and were also characterized by ‘laziness, caused by oppression [and] cowardice as a consequence of the fear of beating or extra taxation’. Even Wallachian peasants and artisans, according to Spiridov had a disagreeable character showing ‘ugly dissimulation in communication with everyone, hidden anger and envy’.133 By contrast, the inhabitants of the mountainous regions of Wallachia and Oltenia (Little Wallachia) provoked Spiridov’s sympathy for their industriousness, courage, sincerity and purer mores. Similarly, simple Moldavians, although ‘more coarse and less naturally gifted than the Wallachians’, were nevertheless ‘more courageous and valiant and may be more enterprising than their neighbours’. Accordingly, ‘they preserved a greater number of Slavic words and phrases in their language’, which, in Spiridov’s opinion, originated from a Slavic root, but was corrupted by Latin and Italian words.134 In his appreciation, even the Moldavian upper class were more concerned than their Wallachian counterparts with enlightenment and education, less servile in the relationships with the princes, less avid for sinecures, ranks and distinctions and were generally more concerned with the well-being of their country. Both Venelin and Spiridov assumed that Moldavians and Wallachians were Slavs and thus shared the early Slavic glories and later suffering from Ottoman and Greek oppression. However, their perspective went against the theory of the Latin origin of Romanians proposed by a number of representatives of the Uniate clergy in Habsburg Transylvania.135 Since the 1810s and 1820s, the ideas of the so-called ‘Transylvanian school’ became increasingly popular among the indigenous elites of the principalities and eventually led to significant linguistic transformations that emphasized the Latin substratum of the Romanian language at the expense of its numerous Slavic borrowings.

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In the meantime, language and literature of the principalities was becoming an object of academic study in Russia that focused on peculiarities and details rather than broad generalizations. Thus, in 1840, the recently appointed first chair of Romanian at St Petersburg University, Ia.D. Ginkulov in his Sketch of the Moldo-Wallachian Grammar (1840) found it possible to speak of a single Romanian language and classified it as a branch of Latin in terms of the predominant vocabulary.136 Against this linguistic evidence some proponents of Venelin’s theory admitted that the ‘Wallachian language’ was a branch of Latin, but argued that its contemporary predominance in the principalities was a relatively recent phenomenon attributable to the changes in the Ottoman system of domination. Thus, Vasil Aprilov, a major activist of the Bulgarian renaissance who was active in Russia, wrote in the 1840s that Wallachia originally used a ‘Bulgarian language’ and preserved it during the first epochs of the Ottoman rule until the establishment of the Phanariot regime in the early eighteenth century. ‘Having their own policy, the Greek princes tried to translate everything into the “Wallachian language”’ and continued to use Cyrillic script only because the Greek letters were not suitable to the Wallachian tongue while using Latin alphabet meant a step in the direction of the Union with Catholicism.137 This argument presented the linguistic peculiarity of the principalities as the consequence of a Greek intrigue against Slavic unity, yet it obviously failed to account for the vibrancy of the Romanian linguistic revival some two decades after the end of the Phanariot regime, a revival that further increased the distance between the Romanians and Slavs. Another weakness of the Russian Pan-Slavic perspective upon the Moldavians and Wallachians consisted in the underestimation of the political potential of the boyars. By the time Spiridov, Venelin and other authors denounced the boyars as a denationalized predatory class, the younger generation of the latter were busy formulating the project of modern Romanian nation. The end of the Phanariot regime and the appointment of the first autochthonous hospodars in over a century necessarily increased the political influence of indigenous elites of the two principalities.138 The tendency of the boyar elites towards greater independence from foreign and, in particular, Russian interference made the more perceptive Russian observers, like the above cited F.P. Fonton, realize that the Romanians could hardly be part of Slavic unity and, in

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fact, posed a major problem for it. Together with the increasingly evident linguistic peculiarity of the Romanians, this consideration could provoke a total reversal of the Russian Pan-Slavic perspective upon Romanians. The writings of E.P. Kovalevskii contain a striking illustration of this process. Passing through the principalities on his way to Montenegro where he was sent with a diplomatic mission, Kovalevskii could not help wondering how ‘this relatively small people [i.e. the Romanians – V.T.] surrounded by Slavic tribes and sharing their faith, performing its divine service and conducting its correspondence in the same language. . . is presently so different from them in its spirit and its moral direction’.139 According to Kovalevskii, the moral-political distinctiveness of the Romanians from their Slavic neighbours was not recent and in fact had manifested itself centuries before. Having succumbed to the Ottoman yoke together with other Balkan peoples, the Romanians nevertheless differed markedly from the Slavs who had always fought the enemy: ‘This was the fight of a gladiator attacked from all sides, but never vanquished, of a gladiator, who would fall exhausted, but only in order to distract the attention of the enemy by a trick and rise at the first opportunity, with former valour, if not with former strength’. Conversely, Moldavians and Wallachians bore their lot obediently and patiently, seeking and finding profit in their own servility. They allied with the Slavs only. . . by necessity or else acted by intrigue, a weapon which they brought to perfection, and which they substituted for political relationships, an intrigue worthy of the Byzantine and, later, Phanariot Greeks and surpassing in its finesse the Machiavellian politics of the Italian Republics. Inciting the Slavic peoples against their common oppressors, the Romanians almost always betrayed them to the enemies trying in the meantime to negotiate or plead, by force of deceit, flattery, seduction or bribe, some privileges for themselves, the privileges which benefited the princes or the boyars. . . at the expense of the poor people, reduced by these aristocratic privileges to the lowest state of humanity.140 One can see that the sympathy for the simple people of the principalities, oppressed by the rapacious princes and boyars, was still there and would

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always remain, inherited as it was from the Western European accounts of the principalities. Nevertheless, the author treats the upper classes as the actual representatives of the nation and not as isolated groups, who forgot their origin and lost the virtues of their ancestors. Kovalevskii unambiguously asserts the difference between the national character of the Slavs and the Romanians in characteristic black and white colours: ‘The Slavs fought life and death, heading to the battle with an open breast, and, when it came to defending an ally, with an open heart. The Romanians acted by force of their politics, and succeeded much more frequently’.141 Needless to say, the medieval and early modern history of Moldavia and Wallachia contained no fewer examples of staunch resistance to the Ottoman conquest than the history of the neighbouring Serbia or Bulgaria. However, this clear instance of ‘getting history wrong’ helped Kovalevskii and some other Russian observers to explain the present. Political and cultural changes in Moldavia and Wallachia in the third, fourth and fifth decades of the nineteenth century emphasized the cultural and linguistic distinctiveness of the Romanians from the Slavs and left few doubts that the political sympathies and aspiration of the Romanian elites lay with France and not with Russia. As they confronted these changes, some Russian observers of the principalities reacted with obvious exasperation. The fundamental irony of the situation consisted in the fact that this outcome was to a large extent the product of Russia’s own policies in the principalities. The end of the Phanariot regime in Moldavia and Wallachia and a series of political reforms sponsored by the Russian occupation authorities in the wake of the Russian –Ottoman war of 1828–9 stimulated cultural Westernization of the Romanian upper classes and the development of modern Romanian nationalism.142 The transformation of cultural practices involved the gradual replacement of the Oriental vestments by Occidental fashions and the growing currency of French in place of Greek as the language of politics and high culture.143 One finds a curious illustration of this process in A.N. Demidov’s description of Bucharest high society on the promenade set up in the early 1830s on the order of the head of the temporary administration of the principalities, General P.D. Kiselev: ‘In the same carriage you would see women imitating Viennese fashions and coquetry, young men dressed in European black suits together with an old boyar with a venerable and

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noble countenance, a long, absolutely white beard and monumental headwear introduced here by Phanariots’.144 The same mixture of Oriental traits and westward inclinations characterized, in the opinion of Russian commentators, the mentality and political orientation of Moldavian and Wallachian elites of the midnineteenth century.145 According to I.P. Liprandi, ‘the influence of the Phanar made [them] completely different from the nobility of all other European countries’ and, as a result, their nature ‘contains a singular inclination for plots and intrigues’146. On the other hand, Liprandi deplored the ‘pernicious’ or ‘bizarre’ ideas of Western-educated boyars of the younger generation who believed ‘that the Wallachians were the true descendants of the ancient Romans, shared a common origin with Western Europeans, and therefore should try to imitate them in everything from the language to the way of thinking, mores, government and even religion’. Liprandi noted with regret that the new Wallachian writers were trying to seduce away the simple people, related to Russia by instinct and centuries-long ties, by gradually replacing numerous Slavic words with Italian, French or Latin ones as well as by latinizing the Cyrillic script.147 The new political attitudes of the Romanian elites did not escape the attention of other Russian observers of Moldavia and Wallachia. Thus, P.V. Alabin, an officer in the Russian army that occupied the principalities at the beginning of the Crimean War in 1853, noted with regret the passing from the political scene of ‘the venerable boyars. . . who remember acutely how we with our own hands broke the yoke, which weighted upon them, [and] how we extracted them from the abyss of ignorance and semi-savagery’. This, according to Alabin, left Russians without local support. Alabin also noted the hostility of the new generation of the Moldavian and Wallachian intelligentsia towards Russia, whose intervention in 1848 suppressed the revolutionary movement in the principalities. According to Alabin, the ‘young Romanians’ forgot ‘whatever good the Russians had done for Moldavia and Wallachia’ and remembered only that ‘we did not allow the principalities to adopt the forms upon which, in their opinion, depends the happiness of a country’. Alabin was also aware of the broader political philosophy that underlay the new attitude towards Russia. ‘The revolutionary party of Moldavians and Wallachians, he observed, consider us to be the enemies of civilization, who are not only willing to

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suppress the democratic elements, upon which they are going to build a new and, in their opinion, great building, but also deprive them of their fatherland by annexing the Danubian principalities’. Unlike some of his comrades-in-arms in the Russian occupation army, Alabin remained unconvinced by the outward expressions of sympathy, loyalty and love demonstrated by Romanians in 1853 noting that ‘if we happen to lose this war, they will no longer be constrained by anything and will try to pay us back for 1848. . .’.148 The discovery of the Romanians during the first half of the nineteenth century was an important aspect of the evolution of Russian perceptions of the Ottoman Empire in a number of respects. The conflict between the Etaireia insurgents led by Alexander Ypsilantis and the uprising headed by Tudor Vladimirescu, which had fatal consequences for both movements, alerted Russian observers to the tensions between the Greeks on the one hand and other Orthodox subjects of the sultan on the other. In the decades that followed, increasingly negative representations of Romanians served as a necessary counterpoint to the ever more enthusiastic portrayals of southern Slavs. In such portrayals, the most perceptive of the Russian observers such as Liprandi and Alabin realized already by the time of the Crimean War that the Romanians were effectively lost for Russia.149 However, the Pan-Slavic frame of reference prevented the widereading public from drawing implications from the Romanian case. Instead of recognizing in the Romanian ‘turn to the West’ a general pattern that all the Balkan peoples were likely to follow in the process of their emancipation from the Ottoman dominance, the educated Russians of the middle decades of the nineteenth century attributed the ‘disloyal’ attitudes of the Romanians to their non-Slavic character, the nefarious influence of their corrupted elites or the weakness of their attachment to the Orthodoxy. By contrast, it was assumed that the Russian– Bulgarian or Russian– Serbian relations would be different because those peoples were Slavic, lacked vacillating nobilities and were firmly Orthodox. The developments in the wake of the war ‘for the liberation of Bulgaria’ of 1877–8 revealed the unrealistic character of such expectations and caused strong disappointment among educated Russians. *** Despite the persistent tendency of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian authors to speak of the population of Southeastern Europe in a

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generalizing and totalizing language of common religious identity, they were increasingly sensible to the perceived and real differences between particular ethnic groups and increasingly better disposed to some of them and not to others. This sensitivity was the result of secularization of the mental outlook of the Russian elites since the late seventeenth century that led to the differentiation between religion and ethnicity in the perception of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’. With time, the appreciation of differences of historical origin, language and putative collective character led to the ‘discovery’ of particular nations within broader religious communities into which the pre-modern mind divided the humanity. A sequence of such discoveries in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries was a cumulative process. Perceptive patterns that characterized the Russian view of the earlier discovered subject peoples of the sultan conditioned the portrayal of those who attracted the attention of Russian observers later on. Representations of southern Slavs and Romanians bore direct or indirect influences of the earlier modes of treatment of the Greeks. One of the most notable of such patterns consisted in the distinction between the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’. Manifested above all in the differentiation between the virtuous heroes of the Greek antiquity on the one hand and the Byzantine and Phanariot Greeks on the other, this pattern can also be found in the Russian treatment of the Bulgarians and Romanians. With sympathy or criticism, Russians contrasted the valiant founders of the Bulgarian, Wallachian and Moldavian states to their latter-day timid and docile descendants who languished under Ottoman dominance. Alongside the basic distinction between the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’, the Russian discovery of the Greeks influenced later perceptions of southern Slavs and Romanians in a more direct way. The very terms in which Russian authors described the Greeks – valour, virtue, learning, or else, treacherousness, ignorance and cupidity – were later used to characterize the Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians as well as social and regional subgroups within these peoples. They provided the moral palette that helped to elevate southern Slavs and particularly the Serbs into the ranks of heroes of anti-Ottoman resistance and victims of the Byzantine and Phanariot intrigue as well as gradually recast Romanians from the role of typical victims of the Ottoman and Greek oppression into that of ungrateful traitors of Slavdom and Russia. One of

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the most remarkable aspects of this exercise in national characterology consisted in the mutual relatedness of the collective ethnic portraits. The moral ambiguity attributed to the Greeks and Romanians existed against the background of Slavic virtue and vice versa. The Orthodox framework was never totally superseded. In fact, in particular circumstances, such as the eve of the Crimean War, its importance grew significantly at the expense of the ethnic categories.150 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the confessional Orthodox frame of reference would expressly clash with the Pan-Slavic one as the Russian elites and the educated public would find themselves divided on the issue of the Greek– Bulgarian church schism.151 However, most of the time, and certainly during the first half of the nineteenth century, confessional and ethnic categories co-existed more peacefully in the Russian representations of the Ottoman Empire. During this period, discoveries of particular Christian subject peoples affected Russian perception of the ethnic composition of the Orthodox community in the realm of the sultan. In this respect, the ‘Greek myth’ in Russian elite culture of the eighteenth century helped to secularize the image of the Greeks and thereby weaken the perception of Orthodoxy as an unambiguously ‘Greek faith’, which created the preconditions for its subsequent designation as a Slavic one. The Russian discoveries of particular Christian subject peoples of the Porte should be seen as part of a process which resulted in the recognition of the ethnic complexity of the Ottoman Empire hidden below the fac
ade of the Orthodox religious community (millet). Although Russian observers dismissively compared the empire of the sultan to a (temporary) military encampment, the Ottoman presence in the region was strong enough to frame not only the actual relations between different Orthodox subject peoples, but also the Russian perception of these relations. In this respect, the Russian–Ottoman war of 1853–6, which evolved into Russia’s struggle with the coalition of the maritime powers, constituted the real watershed in the Russian perception of the Orthodox subjects of the sultan. From that moment onwards, Russia’s tensions with Western powers superseded the traditional Russian–Ottoman confrontation as the most important factor of the Russian–Greek, Russian–Serbian, Russian–Bulgarian and Russian–Romanian relations. R.A. Fadeev, N.Ia. Danilevskii, I.S. Aksakov, K.N. Leont’ev and a host of lesser authors who wrote about the Orthodox co-religionists in

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the realm of the sultan during the 1860s and 1870s did so within the context of Russia’s relations with ‘Europe’ or the ‘Romano-Germanic world’. From their point of view, the uncritical adoption of Western political and cultural notions by Southern Slavic national intelligentsias represented a far greater danger for the Pan-Slavic unity which they envisioned than the traditional despotism of the Ottoman pashas. In fact, Danilevskii, Aksakov and, especially, Leont’ev went as far as praising the conservative influence of the Ottoman rule upon the Orthodox subject peoples inasmuch as it slowed down their Westernization. Admittedly, the rhetoric of the ‘Ottoman yoke’ over Russia’s co-religionists re-emerged powerfully during the Eastern Crisis of 1875– 78, motivating thousands to fight as voluneers in the Ottoman– Serbian war of 1876 and securing the popularity of Russia’s war ‘for the liberation of Bulgaria’ the next year. Nevertheless, Russia’s diplomatic defeat at the Berlin Congress that followed its victory over the Ottomans on the battlefield served as a reminder that Britain and Austria-Hungary had long replaced the Porte as Russia’s most important rival in the struggle for influence over ‘Turkey in Europe’. The weakening and eventual undoing of Ottoman rule in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century manifested itself in the gradual substitution of the term ‘Turkey in Europe’ by a number of alternative designations. The growing currency of the terms ‘the Balkans’ or ‘the Orthodox East’ reflected the tendency of Russian authors to perceive this territory as a region in its own right, apart from the Ottoman formal and increasingly precarious hold on it. This period witnessed the transformation of Russian representations of the ethnic complexities of the Ottoman realm into a Russian variant of the discourse of Balkanism, which crystallized in Europe on the eve of World War I.152 However, this transformation consisted primarily in the change of framework rather than of substance. Although the Russian perceptions of the Balkan peoples in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were increasingly nuanced and elaborate, they generally continued the approaches that had emerged a century and a half prior to the Crimean War.

CONCLUSION

This study reconstructed the basic dimensions and the main intellectual consequences of Russia’s encounter with the Ottoman Empire over several centuries preceding the Crimean War. This encounter constitutes an important chapter in the history of the Russian discovery of the Orient and an equally significant aspect of Russia’s relations with Europe. Admittedly, neither the Orient nor Europe existed as figments of the Russian geographical imagination, let alone as real political and cultural entities at the early stages of Russian–Ottoman relations. In fact, the importance of Russia’s encounter with the empire of the sultan consisted precisely in that it helped to generate these symbolic entities and, through them, contributed to the emergence of the modern Russian identity. A redescription of the Ottoman Empire as Orient over a century and a half prior to the Crimean War became an important motor and manifestation of the Westernization of the Russian elites, which ultimately revealed the limits of Russia’s transformation into Europe. The tsarist embassies to Constantinople constituted the oldest and the most basic aspect of this encounter. The history of these embassies suggests that the ‘forms’ of diplomacy were as important as its ‘content’, so much so that the Russian– Ottoman transactions often boiled down to the negotiations on the appropriate format of negotiations. Contestations over aspects of the diplomatic ceremony were an expression of the rulers’ struggle for the symbolic equality or superiority. Such struggle carried a great significance in an age when the ‘state’ was still fundamentally an extension of the sovereign’s body and thus little more than a function of the ruler’s ‘status’ with respect to his or her own

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subjects and other rulers. At the same time, Muscovy’s transactions with the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrate that this struggle took place on different levels, which the tsars consciously sought to keep apart from one another. The format that characterized Russian –Crimean relations was fundamentally at odds with the manner in which the Muscovite envoys represented their ruler in Istanbul. By the eighteenth century the defence of the tsars’ honour in the Ottoman capital in many ways became synonymous with the struggle for the affirmation of Russia’s status among the European powers. This twin process manifested itself in securing the right to maintain a permanent representative in Constantinople in the manner of other European powers, the struggle for the recognition of the tsars’ imperial title by the Porte as well as the efforts to make the Russian envoy equal in rank to the four oldest and most high-ranking foreign ambassadors. The Ottoman capital stimulated the tsarist representatives to assimilate European diplomatic principles. The religious and cultural distance that separated the ‘Franks’ from the Muslims and even the Levantine Christians served to accentuate the distinctiveness of the European diplomatic community in the Ottoman capital. This community became a likely reference group for the tsar’s representatives as soon as they began to appreciate the challenges and opportunities of modern diplomacy. The flipside of this tendency consisted in the Orientalization of the Ottoman manner of conducting foreign relations in the correspondence and writings of the Russian diplomats. The sui generis character of the Ottoman diplomatic ritual as well as the Porte’s perceived imperviousness to the European principles of reciprocity and equality further stimulated the attachment of tsarist diplomats to these very principles and led them to denounce the Ottoman manner of conducting foreign relations as ‘barbaric’ and ‘uncivilized’. At the same time, the history of Russian diplomacy at the ‘Threshold of Felicity’ demonstrates that the relation between the Westernization of Russian diplomats and the Orientalization of the Ottomans in their writings was not all that straightforward and unambiguous. The tsars’ representatives not only denounced the ‘barbarities’ of the Ottoman manner of receiving and treating foreign envoys, but also criticized their European colleagues for treating with indulgence the Porte’s deviation from such principles of European diplomacy as reciprocity, equality and

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inviolability of diplomatic agents. In their attachment to these principles, the Russians sought to be more European than the Europeans themselves and, remarkably, did so precisely at the moments of their greatest tensions with other European powers. In this way the Orientalization of the Ottoman Empire in the writings of Russian diplomats not only constituted the flipside of their Westernization, but also served as an expression of Russia’s conflict with the rest of Europe in the context of the Eastern Question. Finally, Russian criticism of Ottoman diplomatic ‘barbarities’ and European indulgence towards them demonstrate that the contest between the great powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not limited to conflicts over territory, trade or symbolic status, but included the struggle for the definition of the overall format of the international relations. The rhetorical affirmation of the principles of ‘civilized’ diplomacy illustrates that there were no universally acceptable and functional rules, followed by empires in their relations with one another. The struggle for power thus included the struggle of each empire to reshape the entire international environment in its image. The captivity of the tsars’ subjects in Ottoman domains constituted the second oldest aspect of the Russian– Ottoman encounter. An analysis of the early modern captivity narratives suggests that the Muscovite attitude towards captives was strikingly different from that of the nineteenth-century Russians, who justified their conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia, among other things, by the necessity to liberate their co-nationals from the oppression of the Asiatic slave masters. By contrast, Muscovy could do little to deliver the tens if not hundreds of thousands of its subjects who became slaves in the Ottoman Empire during the pre-Petrine period, while those few who managed to escape back to Russia on their own provoked not only sympathy, but also suspicion, if not outright reproach. This attitude transpired through the records of interrogations of such returnees by the Russian ecclesiastical authorities, which associated captivity with apostasy, either wilful or forced. It was assumed that one could hope for spiritual salvation only as long as one continued to live in the Holy Orthodox land and that any departure from it, even when it happened against one’s will, placed this salvation in question. The likely passage of the returnees through the Catholic lands of southern and central Europe further accentuated the suspicion of religious heterodoxy on their part, which suggests that, here

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again, Russia’s encounter with the rival Muslim empire was another form of its encounter with ‘Europe’. Naturally, the returnees resisted this perspective and tried to present the captivity in the Ottoman Empire as a continuation of their service to the tsar or else stressed their pilgrimage of the Holy Places that their forced presence in the Ottoman Empire allowed them to undertake. Since the late seventeenth century, the dominance of the fundamentally religious perspective upon the captives was compromised by the secularization of the Russian elites. In the late 1700s, a returnee from the Ottoman captivity was no longer necessarily perceived as a possible apostate from Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the attitude towards him or her continued to be reserved until the representatives of Russian educated society developed the means of depicting the experience of captivity as compatible with the moral integrity of the person in question. This happened with the appearance of the captivity narratives of a number of Russian noblemen who became prisoners in the context of the Russian– Ottoman wars of the early nineteenth century. Their accounts reveal tensions between the basic condition of the captive on the one hand and the noblemen’s notion of honour and human dignity on the other. The solution to the implicit moral dilemma of captivity paradoxically lay in stressing the powerlessness of the noble captive, which contrasted with the remarkable, but often morally ambiguous choices and actions of the commoner protagonists of the earlier captivity narratives. In parallel, there was a shift of attention from the behaviour of the captive to the conditions of captivity, including the treatment of the prisoners by the Ottoman authorities and the attitude towards them on the part of the local population. This shift of emphasis turned captivity narratives into yet another site of Orientalizing representations of the Ottoman Empire, which included depictions of the violent fanaticism of the Muslim crowds, portrayals of the noble pashas or descriptions of exotic nature. Through such representations, the Russian captive in the Ottoman Empire ceased to be a morally suspicious figure that he used to be for much of the early modern period. Instead, the educated Russians appreciated the accounts of captivity as a means of vicarious exploration of the exotic and, at the same time, came to sympathize with their authors, whose sufferings now fully merited the benevolent intervention of Russian power.

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Since the early eighteenth century, a series of ‘Turkish campaigns’ became the third dimension of Russia’s encounter with the Ottoman Empire. In a century that followed Peter the Great’s debacle on the Pruth, the Russian armies acquired clear superiority over their Ottoman counterparts in the battlefield, yet they continued to face different cultural, climatic and demographic challenges. These challenges tested the notions of the ‘civilized’ or ‘regular’ war that the educated Russian officers developed over the 1700s and the early 1800s through their participation in the European campaigns and their reading of the Western military literature. An intellectual engagement with the challenges of the Oriental war led tsarist officers to develop a set of alternative precepts, the application of which, in their mind, could secure the best results in the ‘Turkish campaigns’. Despite its ostensible importance, the military Orientalism has so far remained a neglected phenomenon. For one thing, this neglect owed to the sui generis character of the military literature, which combined, on the one hand, theoretical and historical studies, and, on the other hand, the veterans’ diaries and memoirs of varying literary merit. Historians of the Russian Orientalist scholarship did not pay attention to the Russian works on Eastern warfare. The latter did not become integrated into the academic Orientalism centered on the study of Eastern languages, the knowledge of which helped to rule rather than to conquer. For their part, students of literary Orientalism must have considered the diaries and memoirs of the Oriental wars decidedly mundane in comparison to the Oriental travelogues and other relevant literary works of major nineteenth-century Russian writers. However, these literarily unsophisticated and fragmentary yet numerous sources arguably offer a better opportunity to examine how the image of the ‘Other’ and the sense of the ‘Self’ are constituted through the sublimation of the lived experience of fighting with the real adversary. The intellectual trajectory of the post-colonial studies is another factor explaining this neglect. Although Edward Said pointed to Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition as the beginning of modern Orientalism, his discussion jumped over the military aspect of this enterprise to concentrate on its broader cultural and intellectual significance. Other post-colonial scholars followed suit in focusing almost exclusively on the regimes of power that emerged after decisive demonstrations of Western military superiority over the Eastern empires. Advances in the knowledge

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of modalities of Western rule over the East were thus accompanied by the relative oblivion of the cultural history of wars that preceded the establishment of this rule. And yet, accounts of the ‘Oriental’ wars are crucial to understanding the processes of re-description through which the once formidable Eastern empires became an object of power known as the Orient. An examination of the Russian accounts of the ‘Turkish campaigns’ undertaken in this study can thus serve as an invitation to further studies of the genesis of military Orientalism. Diplomacy, captivity and war explored in the first three chapters of this study constituted the three principal dimensions of Russia’s encounter with the Ottoman Empire between the late fifteenth century and the Crimean War. Over this period, several hundreds of Russians experienced the Ottoman Empire as the envoys of the tsars and their assistants. A much larger number, likely running to many tens of thousands, experienced the empire of the sultans as captives and, later, as prisoners of war. Finally, a still greater number of Russians, running to hundreds of thousands, experienced it as soldiers, who fought in one of the six Russian– Ottoman wars that took place on the territory of ‘Turkey in Europe’ in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. These basic varieties of historical experience of the rival empire served as the basis for the more general Orientalizing portrayals of the Ottoman Empire and representations of its subject peoples in the Russian press during the 1700s and the first half of the 1800s. The intellectual prehistory of Nicholas I’s comparison of the Ottoman Empire to a ‘sick man’ explored in Chapter Four of this study offers a new entry to the analysis of the discourses of historical decline and stagnation, which became so characteristic of the modern European representations of the Orient. The perception of the Ottoman Empire as declining had emerged long before Nicholas I supposedly coined his famous phrase and was not a Russian invention. The European observers had attested this tendency more than two centuries prior to the Crimean War and explained it in different ways, all of which ultimately fed into the modern perception of the Orient as stagnant and ossified. The borrowing of such perception by the educated Russians in the post-Petrine period constituted one of the aspects of their intellectual Westernization. Nevertheless, the Russian perspective upon the Ottoman decline was unique because of the different timing of the Russian and Ottoman encounters with Europe. Like the realm of the sultans, Muscovy was

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originally a non-Western society, which remained largely uninvolved into the Renaissance and the wars of religion, the two constitutive experiences for most other countries of the European continent. Both Russia and the Ottoman Empire subsequently revealed the same generic pattern of Westernization reproduced many times since: the initial impetus given to this process by the central authority, which in time led to the involvement of the broader society, while an early fascination with the technical and material aspects of the European civilization later came to be complemented by an increasingly critical attitude towards the Western moral influences. However, Muscovy embarked on the process of conscious Westernization already at the end of the seventeenth century, which anticipated the similar move of the Ottomans by more than one hundred years. As a result of this discrepancy, the Ottoman Empire emerges in the accounts of Russian authors as a country whose relation to Europe is the opposite of Russia’s own relation to the latter at any one moment. During the eighteenth century, the Russians contrasted the Ottoman neglect of the European ‘arts and sciences’ with Russia’s successful emulation thereof. Since the early 1800s, they criticized the belated efforts of the sultans at just such an emulation for being at odds with the ‘spirit of the people’, the importance of which became apparent in the course of the Napoleonic wars. Hence, without ignoring the changes that the Ottoman Empire underwent in the century prior to the Crimean War, the Russians were able to reinterpret them as manifestations of irreversible decline attributable to the continuously ‘wrong’ relations with Europe. Repeated Russian victories over the Ottomans during this period only served to confirm the apparent truth of this perspective. This suggests that the Orientalist discourse does not necessarily present the Other as immutable, stagnant, or ahistorical. Nor is the Self substantiated by such a discourse always unproblemaically progressive and free of contradictions. Instead, the evolution of Russian representations of Ottoman decline suggests that both the Other and the Self can each be filled with quite different meanings at different moments in time. The only thing that remains constant in their opposition is the implicit assumption of superiority of the Self, which results from an explicit criticism of the Other. This assumption always secures the Self symbolic victories over the Other, which complement the more concrete manifestations of the power relations. In this respect,

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the Orientalization of the Ottoman Empire in the Russian accounts served to amplify Russian victories over the Ottomans on the battlefield in the same way in which the British and French portrayals of the Orient served to amplify the commercial dominance of these two powers in the Levant. The image of the Ottoman Empire as a declining and ultimately moribund Oriental empire created a precondition for the re-description of ‘Turkey in Europe’, into a region of its own, defined apart from the Porte’s weakening control over it. This transformation was prepared by the intensification of Russia’s relations with the Orthodox subjects of the sultan, which occasioned increasingly frequent portrayals of the suffering of the Christian co-religionists from the Muslim ‘yoke’. However, before long, the confessional category of co-religionists came to be filled with different ethnic meanings inasmuch as the educated Russians of the Catherinian, Alexandrian and Nicholavean epochs consecutively ‘discovered’ the Greeks, the Serbs, the Bulgarians and the Romanians. The portrayals of each of these ethnic groups were hardly uniform and at times contradictory, and yet the national characteristics that the Russians attributed to them had their origin in the perceived role of the given people in the affirmation or subversion of the Ottoman dominance. This applies above all to the Greeks, the first of the ‘discovered’ peoples, whom the educated Russians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could see alternatively as heroic freedom fighters or treacherous abettors of the Ottoman tyranny. The modes of descriptions initially applied to the Greeks constituted a nomenclature of transposable ideal types that were subsequently used in the description of the later ‘discovered’ Slavs and the Romanians. By the middle of the nineteenth century, these discoveries helped the educated Russians to (re)construct a veritable system of hierarchically organized interconfessional and interethnic relations based on the putative national characters of the Balkan peoples. However important the ethnic discoveries were, they did not supplant the basic confessional category of co-religionists, but rather periodically filled it with different ethnic meanings. By the eve of the Crimean War, one witnesses the renewed importance of the overarching religious framework in the Russian perception of the Orthodox peoples of ‘Turkey in Europe’. The growing Western cultural, political and religious influences upon the Orthodox peoples of the region on the eve

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of and after the Crimean War explain the continued return of the educated Russians to the category of co-religionists during the middle decades of the century. In this respect the Crimean episode could only lead the Russian observers of the Balkan region to conclude that their traditional antagonism with the Ottoman Empire was nothing more than a form of Russia’s confrontation with the West. The Crimean War is a culmination of several simultaneous tendencies. This war serves as a symbolic watershed, beyond which the other European powers become a more serious factor in Russia’s relations with the Orthodox co-religionists than the Ottoman government itself. ‘Turkey in Europe’ became thereby transformed into the ‘Orthodox East’ that serves as the principle object of discord between Russia and the Catholic or Protestant, but also increasingly secular, West. With the Crimean War, the Russian–Ottoman encounter for the first time generated a direct confrontation between Russia and a European coalition. This confrontation forced educated Russians to confront the problem of the limits of their country’s Europeanness that the Orientalization of the Ottoman Empire helped so much to promote.

NOTES

Introduction 1. A.K. Sverchevskaia and T.P. Cherman, Bibliografiia Turtsii. vol. 1 (1713 – 1917) (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1961); Theophanes George Stavrou and Peter R. Weisensel, eds, Russian Travellers to the Christian East From the Twelfth to the Twentieth Century (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 1986). 2. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 3. On the Muscovite perceptions of their Western neighbours, see James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Cuture (New York: Knopf, 1966), 84 – 102. On the symbolic geography of early modern Europe structured along the North– South rather than the West– East axis, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 4. Max J. Okenfuss, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi. A Muscovite in Early Modern Europe, trans. and ed. Max J. Okenfuss (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987), xvi. 5. Ibid., xviii. 6. Ibid., xiv – xv. 7. For a comparative analysis of the Russian, Turkish and Japanese positioning with respect to the West, see Ays¸e Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 8. V.A. Ulianitskii, Dardanelly, Bosfor i Chernoie more v XVIII v. (Moscow: Gatsuk, 1883); S.S. Tatishchev, Vneshniaia politika Imperatora Nikolaia Pervogo. Vvedenie v istoriiu vneshnikh snoshenii Rossii v epokhu Sevastopol’skoi voiny (St Petersburg: Skorokhodov, 1887); S.A. Zhigarev, Russkaia politika v vostochnom voprose. (Ee istoriia v XVI– XIX vekakh, kriticheskie otsenki i budushchie zadachi). Istorikoiuridicheskie ocherki. 2 vols. (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1896); S.M. Goriainov, Bosfor i Dardanelly. Issledovanie voprosa o prolivakh po perepiske

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khraniashcheisia v Gosudarstvennom i Sankt-Peterburgskom glavnykh arkhivakh (St Petersburg: Skorokhodov, 1907). Among the histories of the Russian – Ottoman wars, the most remarkable is the series of studies by A.N. Petrov: A.N. Petrov, Voina Rossii s Turtsiei i pol’skimi konfederatami. 5 vols. (St Petersburg: Veimar, 1866– 74); idem, Vtoraia turetskaia voina v tsarstvovanie Ekateriny Vtoroi (St Petersburg: Golike, 1880); idem, Voina Rossii s Turtsiei, 1806– 1812. 3 vols. (St Petersburg: Voennaia tipografiia, 1885– 7); idem, Voina Rossii s Turtsiei. Dunaiskaia kampaniia, 1853– 1854. 2 vols. (St Petersburg: Voennaia tipografiia, 1890). See, most importantly, H.B. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell, 1949); Norman E. Saul, Russia and the Mediterranean, 1797–1807 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970); George F. Jewsbury, Russian Annexation of Bessarabia, 1774–1828: A Study of Imperial Expansion (New York: Eastern European Monographs, 1976); Barbara Jelavich, Russia and the Romanian National Cause, 1858–1859 (Bloomington, IN: Slavic and East European Series, Indiana University Press, 1959); eadem, Russia and the Formation of the Romanian Nation-State (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Lawrence S. Meriage, Russia and the First Serbian Uprising, 1804–1813 (New York: Garland Publishers, 1987). L.B. Valev, ed., Iz istorii russko-bolgarskikh otnoshenii (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1958); O.B. Shparo, Osvobozhdenie Gretsii i Rossiia (1821 –1829) (Moscow: Mysl’, 1965); V.Ia. Grosul, Reformy v Dunaiskikh kniazhestvakh. i Rossiia (20-e – 30-e gg. XIX v.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1966); L.G. Arsh, Eteristskoie dvizhenie v Rossii. Osvoboditel’naia bor’ba grecheskogo naroda v nachale XIX v. i russkogrecheskie sviazi (Moscow: Nauka, 1970); I.S. Dostian, Rossiia i Balkanskii vopros. Iz istorii russko-balkanskikh politicheskikh sviazei pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1972); G. S. Grosul, Dunaiskie kniazhestva v politike Rossii, 1774– 1806 (Kishinev: Shtiintsa, 1975); A.M. Stanislavskaia, Rossiia i Gretsiia v kontse XVIII – nachale XIX veka. Politika Rossii v Ionicheskoi respublike (Moscow: Nauka, 1976); A.P. Bazhova, Russko-iugoslavianskie otnosheniia vo vtoroi polovine XVIII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1982). Karl Marx, The Eastern Question: A Reprint of Letters Written 1853 – 1856 dealing with the Events of the Crimean War (New York: Franklin, 1968); Karl Marx, Iˆnsemna˘ri despre Romaˆni, manuscrise inedite (Bucharest: Editura politica˘, 1964). Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient (London: Penguin, 2006 [1978]), 3. For a contemporary Marxist critique of Western Orientalism, see Maxime Rodinson, La Fascination de l’Islam (Paris: Maspero, 1980). For the studies of Western academic orientalism that are critical of Said’s perspective, see Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Books, 2006); idem, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (New York: Overlook Press, 2008); Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism: Race, Religion, Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

216 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

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22.

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24.

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Said, Orientalism, 2 – 3. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 102. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). On the conservatives’ appreciation of the Oriental and/or colonial hierarchy, order and authority that were diluted by the democratizing tendencies in the mother country, see David Canadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). On the leftists’ use of the Orient as a laboratory of an alternative modernity or a source of spiritual values, see Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univesity Press, 2010) and Paola Ferruta, ‘Constantinople and the Saint-Simonian Search for the Female Messiah: Theoretical Premises and Travel Account from 1833’, International Journal of the Humanities 6, no. 7 (2009): 67 – 72. Milica Bakic Hayden was the first to analyze this phenomenon which she called ‘nesting Orientalism’. See Milica Bakic-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917– 93. There were two important debates on Russian Orientalism that in many respects conditioned the subsequent development of this historiographic subfield: ‘Russian history and the Debate over Orientalism’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 4 (2002): 691–727; ‘Modernization of Russian Empire and Paradoxes of Orientalism’, Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space, no. 1 (2002): 239–311. For Russian academic Orientalism, see Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Period (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011) and David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to Emigration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 31 – 43, 93 – 121, 153 – 98. Susan Layton, Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Katya E. Hokanson, Empire of the Imagination: Orientalism and the Construction of Russian National Identity in Pushkin, Marlinskii, Lermontov, and Tolstoi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Sara Dickinson, ‘Russia’s First “Orient”: Characterizing Crimea in 1787’, in Orientalism and Empire in Russia, eds, Michael David Fox, Peter Holquist and Alexander Martin (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2006), 85 – 106. Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Imperial Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Leonid Gorizontov, ‘The “Great Circle” of Interior Russia: Representations of

NOTES

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the Imperial Center in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1917, eds, Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen and Anatolii Remnev (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 67– 93; Aleksei Miller, ‘Empire and Nation in the Imagination of the Russian Nationalism’, idem, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 161–80. On the nexus of the orientalist knowledge and power on the Caucasian and Central Asian peripheries of the Russian Empire, see Daniel Brower, Edward L. Lazzerini, eds, Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845– 1917 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2002); Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1867– 1923 (Bloomington IN.: Indiana University Press, 2006). Ekaterina Andreeva, Russia and Iran in the ‘Great Game’: Travelogues and Orientalism (London & New York: Routledge, 2008). Victor Taki, ‘Orientalism at the Margins: The Ottoman Empire under Russian Eyes’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 2 (2011): 321– 51. On Orientalizing portrayals of Russia by Western European authors, see Marshall Poe, A People Born To Slavery: Russia in Early Modern Ethnography, 1478– 1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe; Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (New York: Routledge, 1996); idem, Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Ezequiel Adamovsky, Euro-Orientalism: Liberal Ideology and the Image of Russia in France, 1740s – 1880s (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006). For the early modern Western European perspectives on the Ottoman Empire, see Clarence D. Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature, 1520– 1660 (Paris: Boivin, 1938); Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453 –1517) (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1967); John W. Bohnstedt, The Infidel Scourge of God: The Turkish Menace as Seen by German Pamphleteers of the Reformation Era (Philadelphia, PA: The American Philosophical Society, 1968); Ezel Kural Shaw and C. J. Heywood, English and Continental Views of the Ottoman Empire, 1500– 1800 (Los Angeles: University of California, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1972); Brandon H. Beck, From the Rising of the Sun. English Images of the Ottoman Empire to 1715 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987); He´le`ne Desmet-Gre´goire, Le Divan Magique: La France et l’O`rient Turc au XVIIIeme sie`cle (Paris: L’Hartmann, 1994); Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580– 1720 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Christine Laidlaw, The British and the Levant: Trade and Perceptions of the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010); Paula Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam (New York: Reaktion Books,

218

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32.

33. 34.

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2006). Although focused on the Ottoman Empire, some of these works contributed to a broader subject of Western perception of Islam and the Islamic world that was otherwise treated in R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1962); Samuel Claggett Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York: Octagon Books, 1965). Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe; Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvo¨lkerreich: Enstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munchen: C.H. Beck, 1992); Geoffrey Hosking, Russia, People and Empire, 1552 – 1917 (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997); Dominic Lieven, Empire: Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). Theodore Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia. Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863– 1914 (DeKalb, Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); Witold Rodkiewicz, Russian Nationality Policy in Western Provinces of the Empire (1863 – 1905) (Lublin: Scientific Society of Lublin, 1998); L.E. Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki: poliaki v Rossii i russkie v Pol’she (Moscow: Indrik, 1999); Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest, New York: CEU Press, 2003) (Russian edition: A.I. Miller Ukrainskii vopros v politike vlastei i russkom obschestvennom mnenii (St Petersburg: Aleteia, 2000)); M.D. Dolbilov, A.I. Miller, eds, Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006); L.M. Dameshek, A.V. Remnev, eds, Sibir’ v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007); V.O. Bobrovnikov, ed., Severnyi Kavkaz v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007); S.N. Abashin, ed., Tsentralnaia Aziia v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008); Andrei Cusco, Victor Taki, Bessarabiia v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii, 1812– 1917 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011). Samuel E. Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, vol. 1, Ancient Monarchies and Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8. Ronald Bobroff, Roads to Glory: Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006); Brian Davies, Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500– 1700 (London & New York: Routledge, 2007); Brian L. Davis, Empire and the Military Revolution: Russia’s Turkish Wars in the Eighteenth Century (London & New York: Continuum, 2011). Daniel A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Houghton: Mifflin Co., 2007); Jeremy Black, A History of Modern Diplomacy (London: Reaktion Books, 2010). For the most notable statements of the state-centred approach to international relations, see E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919– 1939: An Introduction

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to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1946 [1939]); Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948); Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966); Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York, NY: Columbia Univeristy Press, 1977); Martin Wright, Power Politics (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1986); Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 37. Aleksei Miller, ‘Between Local and Inter-Imperial: Russian Imperial History In Search of Paradigm’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 1 (2004): 7 – 26; Alfred J. Rieber, ‘The Comparative Ecology of Complex Frontiers’, in Imperial Rule, eds, Aleksei Miller and Alfred Rieber (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), 177–208; Aleksei Miller, ‘The Value and the Limits of a Comparative Approach to the History of Contiguous Empires on the European Periphery’, in Imperiology: From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire, ed. Kimitaka Matsuzato (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2006), 11– 24. 38. For a useful review of the field, see Paul Werth, ‘Lived Orthodoxy and Confessional Diversity: The Last Decade on Religion in Modern Russia’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 4 (2011): 849– 65. 39. The most notable works are: Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky, eds, Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in the Russian Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Elena Vishlenkova, Zabotias’ o dushakh poddannykh: Religioznaia politika v Rossii pervoi chetverti XIX veka (Saratov: Izdatel’stvo Saratovskogo universiteta, 2002); Paul Werth, On the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governanace and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1805– 1917 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Robert Crews, ‘Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia’, American Historical Review 108, no. 1 (2003): 50 – 83 and idem, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003); D.Iu. Arapov, Sistema gosudarstvennogo regulirovaniia islama v Rossiiskoi imperii, posledniaia tret’ XVIII – nachalo XX vv. (Moscow: MPGU, 2004); Darius Staliunas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007); Alexander Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868– 1910: A Comparison with British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Barbara Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church: Uniate and Orthodox Conflict in 18th-Century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); M.D. Dolbilov, Russkii krai, chuzhaia vera: Etnokonfessional’naia politika imperii v Litve i Belorussii pri Aleksandre II (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010).

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40. Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Mara Kozelsky, Christianizing Crimea: Shaping Sacred Space in the Russian Empire and Beyond (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). 41. Kemal Karpat, ‘The Formation of Modern Nationhood: Turkism and PanIslamism in Russian and the Ottoman Empire’, in his Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford University Press, 2001), 276– 307; James H. Meyer, ‘Immigration, Return, and the Politics of Citizenship: Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, 1870– 1914’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 2 (2007): 15 – 32; Eileen Kane, ‘Odessa as a Hajj Hub, 1880s-1910s’, in Russia in Motion: Cultures of Human Mobility Since 1850, eds, Eugene Avrutin and John Randolph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 107– 125; Will Smiley, ‘The Meanings of Conversion: Treaty Law, State Knowledge, and Religious Identity among Russian Captives in the Eighteenth Century Ottoman Empire’, International History Review 34, no. 3 (2012): 559– 80. 42. Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London; New York: Penguin, 2011). 43. For a recent discussion of this subject, see Victor Taki, Limits of Protection: Russia and the Orthodox Co-Religionists in the Ottoman Empire, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 2401 (Pittsburgh, PA: Center for Russian and East European Studies, 2015). 44. For particularly seminal revisions of the theory of the Ottoman economic, political and military decline, see, respectively, Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (London: Methuen, 1981), 1–24; Rifaat Ali Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Virginia H. Aksan, ‘Breaking the Spell of Baron de Tott: Reframing the Question of Military Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1760–1830’, The International History Review 24, no. 2 (2002): 253–77.

Chapter 1 At the Threshold of Felicity 1. Karl Marx, ‘Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975– 2004), 15:81. 2. On Menshikov’s mission see, David M. Goldfrank, ‘Policy Traditions and the Menshikov’s Mission of 1853’, Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 119– 58. 3. ‘Posol’stvo kniaza Menshikova v Turtsiiu i ego prebyvanie v Konstantinopole’, in Materialy dlia istorii Krymskoi voiny i oborony Sevastopolia, ed. N.F. Dubrovin (St Petersburg: Departament udelov, 1871), 1:1. 4. Rose to Lord John Russell, 25 February 1853, Correspondence Respecting the Rights and Privileges of the Latin and Greek Churches in Turkey (London: Harrison and Sons, 1854), 90.

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221

5. Ibid., 91. 6. ‘Threshold of Felicity’ (Bab-u¨s Saadet) was the gate leading into the Third (Inner) courtyard of the Topkapi Palace, in which the sultan’s Audience Chamber was located. 7. Pointing to the importance of ceremony and formulas for both the Muscovites and the Ottomans in their relations to each other, Alan Fisher argued that it had constituted one of the four factors of similarity between the two polities that explained their generally peaceful relations during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. See Alan Fisher, ‘Muscovite-Ottoman Relations in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Humaniora Islamica 1 (1973): 207 – 17. The other three factors were similar political organizations and ideologies, common enemies and the multi-confessional character of both Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire. 8. Jeremy Black, A History of Modern Diplomacy (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 14. 9. For two different approaches to the problem of the body in diplomacy, see Iver B. Neumann, ‘The Body of the Diplomat’, European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 4 (2008): 671– 95, and Cynthia Weber, ‘Performative States’, Millenium 27, no. 1 (1997): 77– 95. 10. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the College de France, 1977– 1978, ed. Michael Sellenart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007); idem, The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the College de France, 1982– 1983, ed. Michael Sellenart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 11. On the centrality of festivals and the theatre to the functioning of the early modern monarchies, see Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450– 1650 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1994); John Adamson, ‘The Making of Ancie´n-Regime Court, 1500 –1700’, in The Princely Courts of Europe 1500– 1700: Ritual, Politics, Culture under Ancie´n Regime, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 7 – 41. For discussion of the same issues in the Russian context, see Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 12. On the early modern diplomatic ceremonial, see William Roosen, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial: A Systems Approach’, The Journal of Modern History 52, no. 3 (1980): 452– 76. 13. N.A. Smirnov, Rossiia i Turtsiia v XVI-XVII vv. (Moscow: Uchenye zapiski MGU, no. 94, 1946), 1:37. The inventory of Fond 89 of the Russian State Archive for Ancient Manuscripts (Moscow), available at www.vostlit.info/Texts/Dokumenty/ Russ/XVI/Posolbook/PosolBook.html#fd89 (accessed 25 January 2012), which contains the materials on the Russian–Ottoman relations in this period, indicates that there were 33 Muscovite embassies against only 18 Ottoman ones. 14. Smirnov, ‘Rossiia i Turtsiia’, 69; A.V. Nekliudov, ‘Nachalo snoshenii Rossii s Turtsiei. Posol Ivana III-go Pleshcheev’, Sbornik Moskovskogo Glavnogo Arkhiva

222

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

NOTES

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22 –24

Ministerstva Insostrannykh Del 3– 4 (1883): 12 – 13. For reasons of dynastic politics, Bayezid II conducted a much more active diplomacy than was customary of his successors. Halil Inalcik, ‘A Case in the Renaissance Diplomacy: The Agreement between Innocent VIII and Bayezid II Regarding Djem Sultan’, in idem, The Middle East and the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire. Essays on Economy and Society (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Turkish Studies, 1993), 342– 68. In general, the Ottomans were much closer to the origins of European diplomacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries than is frequently assumed. See Daniel Goffman, ‘Negotiating with the Renaissance State: the Ottoman Empire and the New Diplomacy’, in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, eds, Daniel Goffman and Virginia H. Aksan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 61 – 74. How disadvantageous the power situation to the north of the Black Sea initially was to the Muscovites can be seen from Halil Inalcik, ‘Power Relations Between Russia, the Crimea and the Ottoman Empire’, Passe´ TurcoTatar et Present Sovie´tique: Studies Presented to A. Bennigsen, eds, Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Gilles Veinstein and S. Enders Wimbush (Paris: Peeters, 1986), 175– 211. See also G.F. Karpov, ‘Otnosheniia moskovskogo gosudarstva k Krymu i Turtsii v 1508– 1517 godakh’, Izvestiia Moskovskogo Universiteta, no. 4 (1865): 1 – 32. See ‘Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii Moskovskogo gosudarstva s Krymom, nagaiami i Turtsieiu’, Sbornik Imperatorskogo Russkogo Istoricheskogo Obshchestva 95 (1895): 100. This collection contains the materials on the embassies of M.I. Alekseev, V. A. Korobov, T. Kadyshev, D.S. Byk, B.Ia. Golokhvastov, V.M. Tret’iakov-Gubin, all of which took place during the reigns of Ivan III and Vasilii III. Ibid., 83–130, 226–38, 334–7, 426–32, 619–30, 667–706. See, A.L. Khoroshkevich, ‘Rus’ i Krym posle padeniia ordynskogo iga: dinamika tributarnykh otnoshenii’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 2 (1999): 69 – 79; eadem, Rus’ i Krym. Ot soiuza k protivostoianiiu (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2001), 240– 58; L.A. Iuzefovich, Put’ Posla. Russkii posol’skii obychai. Obikhod. Etiket. Tseremonial (St Petersburg; Limbakh, 2007), 15 – 16. For the discussion of the Russian – Crimean diplomatic protocol, see Khoroshkevich, Rus’ i Krym, 196– 208. E.I. Zabelin, ‘Russkie posol’stva v Turtsiiu v XVII stoletii’, Russkaia starina, no. 9 (1877): 1 – 34. See ‘Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii Moskovskogo gosudarstva s Krymom, nagaiami i Turtsieiu’, SIRIO 95 (1895): 92. Zabelin, ‘Russkie posol’stva’, 5; See Iuzefovich, Put’ posla, 34. Zabelin, ‘Russkie posol’stva’, 5 – 6. ‘Stateinyi spisok I.P. Novosil’tseva’, in Puteshestviia russkikh poslov XVI-XVII vv. Stateinye spiski, ed. D.S. Likhachev (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1954), 63 – 4. Zabelin, ‘Russkie posol’stva’, 7 – 8; ‘Stateinyi spisok Novosil’tseva’, 65. The first Russian ambassador Pleshcheev had to report from Caffa what kinds of honours were accorded to him from the sultan in that city. See A.V.

NOTES

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

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24 –28

223

Nekliudov, ‘Nachalo snoshenii Rossii s Turtsiei. Posol Ivana III-go Pleshcheev’, Sbornik Moskovskogo Glavnogo Arkhiva Ministerstva Inostrannykh Del 3– 4 (1883): 21. See also the instructions to the V. A. Korobov embassy of 1515 in ‘Pamiatniki’, SIRIO 95 (1895): 110. In 1570, I.V. Novosil’tsev descended on the shore at Kerch only after some disputes with the Ottoman governor of the fortress. See ‘Stateinyi spisok Novosil’tseva’, 67. Ibid. The latter principle reflected the desire of the Muscovite rulers to maintain direct relations with the sultan, unmediated by the latter’s vassal, the khan of Crimea. On the Russian– Crimean diplomatic relations and ritual, see R.M. Croskey, ‘The Diplomatic Forms of Ivan III’s Relationship with the Crimean Khan’, Slavic Review 42, no. 2 (1984): 257 – 69; idem, Muscovite Diplomatic Practice in the Reign of Ivan III (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 117 – 20, 299– 300; Khoroshkevich, Rus’ i Krym, 196 – 208. Nekliudov, ‘Nachalo snoshenii’, 21. Ibid., 25. M.A. Pleshcheev’s report about his embassy was not preserved, but the circumstances of his mission to Bayezid II can be reconstructed from the messages of Mengli-Ghirai, the Crimean khan, whose representative escorted Pleshcheev to Constantinople. SIRIO 95 (1895): 110– 11. ‘Stateinyi spisok I.P. Novosil’tseva’, 74. Zabelin, ‘Russkie posol’stva’, 19–20; ‘Nakaz, dannyi stol’niku Il’e Danilovichu Miloslavskomu i diaku Leontiiu Lazorevskomu po otpravlenii poslami v Tsar’grad’, Vremennik OIDR 9 (1850): 1–102; ‘Stateinyi spisok o posol’stve Il’i Danilovicha Miloslavskogo i diaka Leontiia Lazorevskogo v Tsar’grad v 7150’, Ibid., 7:1–136. S.O. Smirnov, ‘O posol’stve Il’i Danilovicha Miloslavskogo i diaka Leontiia Lazorevskogo v Turtsiiu v 1643 godu’, ibid., 6:13–58; see also ‘Posol’stvo E.I. Ukraintseva v Konstantinopol’’, M.M. Bogoslovskii, Petr I. Materialy dlia biografii (Moscow: Ogiz-Gospolitizdat, 1948), 5:24–5. Ibid., 24 – 6, 33. Iuzefovich, Put’ posla, 34 – 7. On the Pruth campaign of 1711 see Chapter 3. See article 14 of the Belgrade treaty in Dogovory Rossii s Vostokom, ed. T.P. Iuzefovich (St Petersburg: Bakst, 1869), 22. Similarly, article 27 of KuchukKainarji Treaty of 1774 defined the goal of the embassy to make peace and friendship ‘be so much more strongly and authentically sealed’. Dogovory Rossii s Vostokom, 39. Ibid., 22. The Austrian envoy in St Petersburg Marquis Botha provided the necessary details. On A.I. Rumiantsev’s embassy, see R.A. Mikhneva, ‘K voprosu o russko-turetskikh otnosheniiakh posle Belgradskogo mira (Cherezvychainoe posol’stvo v Turtsiiu A.I. Rumiantseva)’, Etudes Balkaniques, no. 4 (1979): 91 – 107; eadem, Rossia i Osmanskaia imperiia v mezhdunarodnykh otnosheniiakh v seredine XVIII veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1985), 47–63.

224

NOTES

TO PAGES

28 –29

38. On the efforts of Muscovite diplomacy to make the Habsburgs recognize the title of the tsar after the grand dukes, see the first volume of Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii s Rimskoi imperiei. 10 vols. (St Petersburg: Sobstvennaia E. I. V. kantseliariia, 1851– 71). On the efforts of the Russian diplomacy to obtain the recognition of the imperial title by Vienna, see G.A. Nekrasov, ‘Mezhdunarodnoe priznanie rossiiskogo velikoderzhaviia v XVIII veke’, in Feodal’naia Rossia vo vsemirno-istoricheskom protsesse, ed. V.T. Pashuto (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), 381–9. 39. On Ottoman-Polish diplomatic exchanges in the early modern period, see Krzysztof Wawrzyniak, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations in the Sixteenth Century (Istanbul: Institute of Economic and Social Sciences of Bilkent University, 2003); Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman– Polish Diplomatic Relations (fifteenth-eighteenth century): An Annotated Edition of ʽAhdnames and Other Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Tetiana Grygorieva, ‘Symbols and Perceptions of Diplomatic Ceremony: Ambassadors of the Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealth in Istanbul’, in Kommunikation durch symbolische Akte. Religio¨se Heterogenita¨t und politische Herrschaft in Polen-Litauen, ed. Yvonne Kleinmann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010), 115–31. 40. For an account of one of such embassies, see K.M. Pobedonostsev, ed., Prikliucheniia cheshskogo dvorianina Vratislava v Konstantinopole v tiazhkoi nevole u turok, s avstriiskim posol’stvom (St Petersburg: Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia, 1877); see also Karl Teply, Die kaiserliche Grossbotschaft an Sultan Murad IV (Vienna: Schendl, 1976). 41. Cited in Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, L’Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman (Paris: Bellizard, Barthes, Dufour and Lowell, 1839– 1841), 12:10 – 11. 42. The first post-Karlowitz Habsburg Embassy of Prince Ettingen to the Ottoman Empire is described by Simpert, Abbe of Neserheim, Diarium ou Relation curieuse d’un voyage de Vienne a` Constantinople et de la` en Allemagne (Augsburg: n. p., 1701). See also Hammer, L’Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, 13:22 – 32, who compares the Austrian and the Polish embassies and the ways in which they were treated by the Ottomans. The ceremonial of the extraordinary Habsburg ambassador Count von Virmont dispatched to Constantinople in the wake of the conclusion of the Passarowitz treaty in 1718 is described in Gerhard Cornelius der Dirsch, Historische Nachricht von der Ro¨m. Kayserl. Groß-Botschafft nach Constantinopel (Nuremberg: Monath, 1723); as well as Hammer, L’Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, 14:17– 20. See also Ana Milosevic, ‘The Festival Book Dedicated to the Exchange of Austrian and Turkish Deputations in 1719’, in The Peace of Passarowitz, 1718, eds, Charles Ingrao, Nikola Samardzic, and Jovan Pesali (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011), 239– 53. 43. Distinta relazione della solenne entrata fatta in Vienna dal gran ambasciatore Ottomano Ibrahim Pascia` Beiler Bey di Rumelia, seguita li 30 gennaro 1700 (Roma: Luca Antonio Chracas, 1700). In the Ottoman terminology this exchange of embassies was called mubadele. See, Norman Itzkowitz and Max Mote

NOTES

44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

TO PAGES

29 –30

225

‘Introduction’, in Mubadele. An Ottoman –Russian Exchange of Ambassadors, eds, and trans. Norman Itzkowitz and Max Mote (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 1 – 51. For an early manifestation of the influence of the European model of international relations upon the Ottomans, see S.F. Oreshkova, ‘Neizvestnoie turetskoie sochinenie serediny XVIII veka ob otnosheniiakh s Rossiei i osmanskom ponimanii evropeiskikh mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii togo vremeni’, in Osmanskaia imperiia: problemy vneshnei politiki i otnosheniia s Rossiei, ed. S.F. Oreshkova (Moscow: Institut vostokovedeniia, 1996), 129–46; see also Mikhneva, Rossia i Osmanskaia imperiia; A.V. Vitol, ‘Osmanskaia imperiia i mezhdunarodnye otonosheniia v 1718– 1735 gg.’, in Osmanskaia imperiia. Gosudarstvennaia vlast’ i sotsial’no-politicheskaia struktura, ed. S.F. Oreshkova (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 306–21. Before the eighteenth century the Habsburgs preferred to deal with the Ottomans through occasional grand embassies combined with low-rank permanent diplomatic representatives (first established in 1622). See Peter Meienberger, Johann Rudolf Schmid zum Schwarzenhorn als kaiserlicher Resident in Konstantinopel in den Jahren 1629– 1643 (Frakfurt am Mein: Peter Lang, 1973). At the time of Tolstoi’s mission, the Habsburg Monarchy was represented at the court of the sultan by Johann Michael Tallmann, who was the first permanent Austrian resident in the rank of internuncio appointed in 1703. On Tallmann, see Bertold Spuler, ‘Die Europa¨ische Diplomatie in Konstantinopel bis zum Frieden von Belgrad (1793)’, Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r die Geschichte Osteuropas 1 (1936): 229– 62, 383– 439; V.E. Shutoi, ed., Turtsiia nakanune i posle Poltavskoi bitvy. Glazami avstriiskogo diplomata (Moscow: Nauka, 1977). Hammer, L’Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, 15:16– 21. On the Ottoman embassies to Russia in this period, see A.S. Tvertinova, ‘Izvlecheniia iz opisaniia posol’stva v Rossiiu Shekhdi-Osmana v 1758 g.’, in Vostochnyie istochniki po istorii narodov Iugo-Vostochnoi i Tsentral’noi Evropy, part 2, ed. A.S. Tvertinova (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), 296– 303. Strictly speaking, there was no clear distinction between civilian and military ranks in pre-Petrine Russia, yet the seventeenth-century envoys tended to be diaks, who dealt with administrative rather than military matters. On Rumiantsev’s embassy, see Opisanie tseremoniala s kotorym Ee Imperatorskogo Velichestva cherezvychainyi i polnomochnyi posol gospodin general Rumiantsev v Konstantinopol’ svoi torzhestvennyi v’ezd imel i sperva u Verkhovnogo Viziria na vizite a potom u Turetskogo Sultana na audientsii byl (St Petersburg: n. p., 1741). On Repnin’s embassy, see [Ia.I. Bulgakov], ‘A Description of the Reciprocal Exchange of Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’, in Mubadele. The original Russian edition is [Ia.I. Bulgakov], Rossiiskoe posol’stvo v Konstantinopole (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1777). On Kutuzov’s embassy see [Johann Christian von Struve], Travels in the Crimea. A History of the Embassy from St. Petersburg to Constantinople in 1793 (London: S. Hamilton,

226

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72.

73.

NOTES

TO PAGES

31 –38

1802); L.G. Beskrovnyi, ed. M.I. Kutuzov. Sbornik materialov (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo, 1950), 1:189 –341; V.I. Sheremet, ‘Saf’ianovyi portfel’ M.I. Kutuzova’, Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 5 (1995): 75 –8. ‘The Sefaretname of Abdulkerim Pasha’, in Mubadele, 74. Ibid., 75. M.I. Kutuzov to his wife E.I. Kutuzova, 6 October 1793 and 6 January 1794, Russkaia starina, no. 2 (1870): 502, 506. [Struve], Travels in the Crimea, 77 – 8. Repnin to Peterson, 6 September 1775, SIRIO 6 (1871): 356. Sheremet, ‘‘Saf’ianovyi portfel’ M.I. Kutuzova’, 75. [Struve], Travels in the Crimea, 69. [Bulgakov], ‘A Description of the Reciprocal Exchange of Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’, in Mubadele, 131– 43. See ‘Memorial moldavskikh boiar’ and ‘Proshenie podanoe kniaziu N.V. Repninu ot zhitelei Valakhii’, 30 August 1775, SIRIO 6 (1871): 323– 32, 345– 6. See ‘Vypiska iz zhurnala posla grafa A.I. Rumiantseva’, and ‘Remarki iz zhurnala posla grafa Repnina’, ibid., 359. Repnin to Catherine II, 11 October 1775, SIRIO 15 (1875): 430. Repnin to Panin, 4 December 1775, ibid., 539. Ibid.; [Bulgakov], ‘A Description of the Reciprocal Exchange of Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’, 165. Repnin to Panin, 4 December 1775, SIRIO 15 (1875): 539. [Bulgakov], ‘A Description of the Reciprocal Exchange of Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’, 170; Repnin to Panin, 4 December 1775, SIRIO 15 (1875): 540. Ibid., 539. Ibid., 540. Ibid. Ibid., 539. The audiences that Repnin had with other high Ottoman officials – the deputy of the grand vizier, the minister of the navy (capudan pasha) and the aga of the janissaries – passed without excesses. Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 155– 6, 232; Lindsay Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 23. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Cape, 1955). The term itself appeared in the middle of the eighteenth century. G.R. Berridge, ‘The Origins of the Diplomatic Corps’, in The Diplomatic Corps as an Institution of International Society, eds, Paul Sharp and Geoffrey Wiseman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 15 – 30. On the British embassy, see G.R. Berridge, British Diplomacy in Turkey, 1583 to the Present: A Study in the Evolution of the Resident Embassy (Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2006). On the Dutch Embassy, see G.R. Bosscha Erdbrink, At the Threshold of Felicity: Ottoman – Dutch Relations during the

NOTES

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

TO PAGES

38 – 40

227

Embassy of Cornelis Calkoen at the Sublime Porte, 1726– 1744 (Ankara: Tu¨rk Tarih Kurumu Basemevi, 1975). Studies of the French diplomatic mission in Constantinople are numerous. See, among others, Albert Vandal, L’Odysse´e d’un ambassadeur. Les Voyages du Marquis de Nointel (1670 – 1679) (Paris: Plon, 1900); idem, Une ambassade franc
aise en Orient sous Louis XV. La Mission du Marquis de Villeneuve (Paris: Plon, 1887); Orville Theodore Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes. The French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution, 1709 – 1787 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982), 53 – 164. On capitulations, see Maurits H. van den Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System: Qadis, Consuls and Beraths in the Eighteenth Century (Berlin and Leiden: Brill, 2005); V.O. Iastrzhembskii, O kapituliatsiiakh v Osmanskoi imperii (Khar’kov: ‘Pechatnoe delo’, 1905); A.M. Ladyzhenskii, Otmena kapituliatsii v Turtsii (Moscow: Kushner, 1914). Tolstoi, ‘Pis’ma P.A. Tolstogo iz Turtsii k bratu ego I.A. Tolstomu’, Ruskii arkhiv, nos. 5 – 6 (1864): 147. Ibid., 149– 50. See Bogoslovskii, Petr I. Materialy dlia biografii, 5:5. ‘Posol’stvo E.I. Ukraintseva v Konstantinopol’, 32. See Tallmann to Imperial War Council, 15 September 1709, in Turtsiia nakanune i posle poltavskoi bitvy, 49. Tolstoi, ‘Pis’ma P.A. Tolstogo’, 156– 7. Unlike other rulers in Europe, the Ottomans assumed at least part of the costs of the resident ambassadors and envoys until the end of the eighteenth century. This traditional Ottoman practice was discontinued by Selim III, who, at the same time, made the first attempt to adopt the European diplomatic practices and appointed permanent ambassadors to some European capitals. Thomas Naff, ‘Reform and the Conduct of Ottoman Diplomacy in the Reign of Selim III’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 83 (1963): 295– 315. In his instructions to Tolstoi, Peter ordered that he ‘treat foreign ministers politely and exchange visits with them as is the universal custom of the ministers resident at great courts’. See P.A. Tolstoi, Russkii posol v Smabule, eds, M.R. Arunova and S.F. Oreshkina (Moscow: Nauka, 1985), 104– 5. Akdes Nimet Kurat, ed. The Dispatches of Sir Robert Sutton, Ambassador in Constantinople (1710 – 1714). Camden Third Series, vol. 78 (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1953), 19. Ibid., 21. Tallmann dispatch from 26 January 1710, in Turtsiia nakanune i posle poltavskoi bitvy, 63. The Ottoman sultan had little patience for such demands and ended the audience before Tolstoi finished his speech. Ibid., 79. See Vil’gel’m Teil’s, Izvestiia sluzhashchie k istorii Karla XII, korolia shvedskago, vol. 1 (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1789), 6 – 9. Teil’s was the first interpreter and secretary of Count Jacob Colier, the Dutch envoy, who, together with the British ambassador Sir Robert Sutton, served as a mediator

228

87. 88. 89.

90.

91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

NOTES

TO PAGES

40 – 45

in the prolonged negotiations between the Ottomans and the Russians that took place after the Pruth campaign of 1711. See Article 5 of the Kuchuk-Kainarji treaty in Iuzefovich, Dogovory Rossii s Vostokom, 28. Zabelin, ‘Russkie posol’stva’, 26. ‘Porfirii Voznitsyn to Peter I, 22 October 1698’, I.I. Golikov, Dopolnenie k deianiiam Petra Velikogo (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1790– 97), 5:268. ‘Cherezvychainoe posol’stvo k Porte Ottomanskoi v 1699 i 1700 gg. dlia zakliucheniia mirnogo dogovora na 30 let’, Otechestvennye zapiski 29, no. 82 (1827): 210; no. 83 (1827): 460– 2. ‘There are so my flatterers here who instantly try to enter the confidence of a young man in order to find out (vyvedat’) his secret’, wrote M.I. ProkudinGorskii, a gentleman of the Russian embassy in Constantinople in 1760. See [M.I. Prokudin-Gorskii], Pis’ma, ili uvedomlenie v Moskvu byvshego v Konstantinopole v 1760 godu dvorianinom posol’stva leibgvardii Preobrazhenskogo polku serzhanta M.P. (Moscow: n. p., 1764), 75. V.A. Teplov, Russkie predstaviteli v Tsar’grade, 1496– 1891 (St Petersburg: Suvorin, 1891), 21. Cited in G.L. Kessel’brenner, Khronika odnoi diplomaticheskoi kar’ery. Diplomatvostokoved S.L. Lashkarev i ego vremia (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 60. Berridge, ‘The Origins of the Diplomatic Corps’, 19. [P.A. Levashev], ‘Tsaregradskie pis’ma’, in Puteshestviia po Vostoku v epokhu Ekateriny II, ed. A.Ia. Khazizova (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1995), 52. Ibid., 52 – 5. See also [Ia. I. Bulgakov,] Rossiiskoe posol’stvo v Konstantinopole (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1777), 168– 73, as well as Travels in the Crimea, 175– 81. [Levashev], ‘Tsaregradskie pis’ma’, 59. For the Russian edition, see Fransua de Kalier, Kakim obrazom dogovarivat’sia s gosudariami, vol. 1 (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1772). See A.A. Vigasin et al., ‘Predislovie’, in Puteshestviia po Vostoku v epokhu Ekateriny II, 8 – 9. Hamish Scott, ‘Diplomatic Culture in Old Regime Europe’, in Cultures of Power in Europe in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 58 – 85. Levashev, Plen i stradaniia rossian u turok (St Petersburg: n. p., 1790), 45. [Levashev], ‘Tsaregradskie pis’ma’, 59. Levashev, Plen i stradaniia, 10 – 11. ‘Donesenie Ia.I. Bulgakova Imperatritse Ekaterine II’, 1 December 1783, SIRIO 47 (1885): 96. Ia.I. Bulgakov to A.A. Bezborodko, 1 January 1784, ibid., 104. [Prokudin-Gorskii], Pis’ma, 75. Ia.I. Bulgakov to A.A. Bezborodko, 1 November 1781, SIRIO 47 (1885): 8.

NOTES

TO PAGES

45 –50

229

108. K.M. Bazili, Bosfor i novye ocherki Konstantinopolia (St Petersburg: Grech, 1836), 1:293. 109. Bulgakov to Bezborodko, 1 June 1782, SIRIO 47 (1885): 31. 110. A.I. Ribop’er, ‘Zapiski grafa A.I. Ribop’era’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 5 (1877): 34. 111. Tolstoi, Russkii posol v Stambule, 89. 112. L’Abbe´ Laugier, Histoire des ne´gociations pour la paix conclue a` Belgrade (Paris: Duche`sne, 1768), 1:vi. 113. At the outbreak of the war of 1736– 39, he was not imprisoned, but rather was made to accompany the grand vizier in his campaign against the Russians in 1736 and was treated ‘with consideration’. Albert Vandal, Une Ambassade Franc
aise en Orient, 266; A.A. Kochiubinskii, Graf Osterman i razdel Turtsii (Odessa: Shtab odesskogo voennogo okruga, 1899), 149– 50. 114. See Kessel’brenner, Khronika odnoi diplomaticheskoi kar’ery, 55. 115. Russkii biograficheskii slovar’, s. v. ‘Bulgakov, Iakov Ivanovich’. Upon his return, Bulgakov went on to become the Russian envoy to Warsaw where he presided over the second partition of Poland and ended his career as the governorgeneral of Vil’no. There, he must have met Choiseul-Gouffier, who, in the meantime, entered the Russian service and received from Catherine the Great land grants in Lithuania. With the entry of many aristocratic enemies of the French revolution into the Russian service, Russia’s integration into the Europe of great powers was complete. 116. A.I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, Opisanie turetskoi voiny 1806 – 1812 gg. (St Petersburg: Shtab otdel’nogo korpusa vnutrennei strazhi, 1843), 1:35. 117. E.P. Kudriavtseva, Russkie na Bosfore. Rossiiskoe posol’stvo v Konstantinopole v pervoi polovine XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 2011), 117. 118. The last European diplomat to end up in Yedikule was the French charge´ d’affaires Pierre-Jean Ruffin, who was imprisoned in 1798 as a result of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. 119. V.A. Teplov, Predstaviteli evropeiskikh derzhav v prezhnem Konstantinopole (St Petersburg: ‘Obshchestvennaia pol’za’, 1890). The subject was discussed along the same lines by the orientalist scholar I.N. Berezin. See I.N. Berezin, ‘Diplomaticheskie snosheniia Turtsii’, Sovremennik, no. 6 (1855): 92 – 112. 120. V.I. Kochubei to S.R. Vorontsov, 14 April 1796, Arkhiv kniazia Vorontsova, ed. P.I. Bartenev (Moscow: Mamontov, 1880), 18:108. 121. Martin Malia, Russia under the Western Eyes: From Bronze Horseman to Lenin’s Mausoleum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 87 – 103, 146 – 59. 122. A.L. Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla. . .: Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologia v Rossii poslednei treti XVIII – pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001); V.Iu. Proskurina, Mify imperii: literatura i vlast’ v epokhu Ekateriny II (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006). 123. Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618– 1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1 – 3.

230

NOTES TO PAGES 50 –53

124. The same is equally true of the partitions of Poland, another source of the nineteenth-century discourse of the ‘Russian menace.’ The partitions were the direct consequence of Catherine II’s acceptance of the principles of the balance of power followed by Frederick II and the Habsburgs.

Chapter 2

Captivity Narratives

1. A.G. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera, byvshego v plenu u turok v 1828 i 1829 godakh’, Voennyi sbornik 3, no. 5 (1858): 180. 2. Krizˇanic´ uses the term ‘Russiaci generis homini’. See [Juraj Krizˇanic´], O promysle. Sochinenie togo zhe avtora kak i Russkoe gosudarstvo v polovine XVII v. ed. P S. Bessonov (Moscow: Semen, 1860), 9. 3. Ibid., 10. 4. On Krizˇanic´, see Ivan Golub and Wendy Bracewell, ‘The Slavic Idea of Juraj Krizhanic’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 10, nos. 3 – 4 (1986): 438– 91. 5. N.M. Berezhkov, Plan zavoevaniia Kryma sostavlennyi v tsarstvovanie Alekseia Mikhailovicha uchenym slavianinom Iuriem Krizhanichem (St Petersburg: Balashev, 1891), 83 –8. 6. Charles Verlinden, L’Esclavage dans l’Europe me´die´vale, vol. 2, Italie, Colonies italiennes du Levant, Levant latin, Empire byzantin (Gent: De Tempel, 1977). 7. Alan W. Fisher, ‘Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade’, in idem, A Precarious Balance: Conflict, Trade, and Diplomacy on the Russian-Ottoman Frontier (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1999), 29; Charles Verlinden, ‘Medieval Slavers’, in Economy, Society and Government in Medieval Italy, ed. David Herlihy (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1969), 1 – 14. 8. Verlinden, L’Esclavage dans l’Europe me´die´vale, 485–6, 622– 48. The slaves would be re-baptized into the Catholic faith upon purchase. Ibid., 642. 9. Brian Davies, Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500– 1700 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 6 – 26. 10. See Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, ‘Slave Hunting and Slave Redemption as Business Enterprise: the Northern Black Sea Region in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Oriente Moderno 25, no. 1 (2006): 149– 59. 11. See Fisher, ‘Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade’, 27 – 46. 12. A.A. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba moskovskogo gosudarstva s tatarami v pervoi polovine XVII veka (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1948), 436. 13. Halil Inalcik, ‘Service Labor in the Ottoman Empire’, in The Mutual Effects of the Islamic and Judeo-Christian Worlds. The East European Patterns, eds, Abraham Ascher, Tibor Halasi-Kun and Be´la K. Kira´ly (New York: Brooklin College, 1979), 25 – 43. 14. The Russians used the term ‘captives’ ( polonianiki) to designate those taken by the Tatars. By contrast, the Tatars used the word ‘slave’ (esir) from the moment a person was captured and applied it to those whom the Muscovite authorities ransomed as well as to those who remained in Crimea forever or were sold to the Ottoman Empire. The modern term ‘ransom slavery’ accords well with the

NOTES

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

TO PAGES

53 –55

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Tatar usage. However, it might be worthwhile to retain the word ‘captive’ (which suggests the possibility of individual’s return to his or her native society) with reference to those who were ransomed, exchanged or who otherwise managed to escape and return to Muscovy. They, rather than those who forever remained in Crimea and the Ottoman Empire, constitute the subject of this chapter. See M.N. Berezhkov, Russkie plenniki i nevol’niki v Krymu (Odessa: Shultse, 1888). Of the more recent scholarship on this problem, see Mikhail Kizilov, ‘The Slave Trade in the Early Modern Crimea from the Perspective of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources’, Journal of Early Modern History 11, no. 2 (2007): 1 – 31; Maria Ivanics, ‘Enslavement, Slave Labor and the Treatment of Captives in the Crimean Khanate’, in Ransom Slavery Along the Ottoman Borders (Early Fifteenth – Early Eighteenth Centuries), eds, Geza David and Pal Fodor (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 201 – 7; Ezio Matsuki, ‘The Crimean Tatars and their Russian Captive Slaves: An Aspect of Muscovite – Crimean Relations in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, available at www.econ.hit-u.ac.jp/ , areastd/mediterranean/mw/pdf/18/10.pdf (accessed 25 January 2012). G.K. Kotoshikhin, O Rossii v tsarstvovanie Alexeia Mikhailovicha (St Petersburg: Arkheograficheskaia komissiia, 1884), 98. S.O. Shmidt, ‘Russkie polonianiki v Krymu i sistema ikh vykupa v seredine XVI v.’, in Voprosy sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi istorii i istochnikovedeniia perioda feodalizma v Rossii, ed. N.V. Ustiugov (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1961), 30– 4. Berezhkov, Russkie plenniki i nevol’niki v Krymu, 24, 26. It also demanded the secession of the Crimea, Ochakov and Azov and resettlement of the Tatars into Anatolia. See Smirnov, Rossiia i Turtsiia, 1:27. The principle of reciprocal exchange of prisoners without ransom was adopted only in the wake of the war of 1735– 39. See Will Smiley, ‘The Meanings of Conversion’, 561. Robert C. Davies, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500 –1800 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 23. See Frederick Hintzel, ‘Osman Aga, un captive ottoman dans l’empire des Habsburg a` la fin du XVIIe sie`cle’, Turcica 33 (2001): 191 – 213; Geza Palffy, ‘Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman-Hungarian Frontier in the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries’, in Ransom Slavery, 35– 84; Mark L. Stein, Guarding the Frontier: Ottoman Border Wars and Garrisons in Europe (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007). On the Mediterranean piracy see Eyal Ginio, ‘Piracy and Redemption in the Aegean Sea during the First Half of the Eighteenth Century’, Turcica 33 (2001): 135 –47. Berezhkov, Russkie plenniki i nevol’niki v Krymu, 30. On Western European accounts of captivity, see G.A. Starr, ‘Escape from Barbary: A Seventeenth-Century Genre’, The Huntington Library Quarterly 21 (1965): 35 –52.

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26. Inalcik, ‘Service Labor in the Ottoman Empire’, 25 – 43. 27. On the slaves of the private individuals, see Alan Fisher, ‘Chattel Slavery in the Ottoman Empire’, Slavery and Abolition 1, no. 1 (1980): 25 – 41. 28. For the discussion of the social functions of slavery in Ottoman society of the nineteenth century, see Ehud R. Toledano, As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007): 23 – 34. On the Russian captives in the Ottoman elite slavery system (kul), see Will Smiley, ‘The Meanings of Conversion’, 559– 80; idem, ‘The Burdens of Subjecthood: The Ottoman State, Russian Fugitives and Interimperial Law, 1774 –1869’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 46, no. 1 (2014): 73 – 93. 29. As late as 1740, when the supply of the Russian slaves into the Ottoman Empire became dramatically reduced, there were about 1,000 Russian galley slaves in the Ottoman navy. See Will Smiley, ‘The Meanings of Conversion’, 562. 30. Similarly, Il’ia Gerasimovich Lovushkin and Ignatii Fedorovich Opalkov reported being captured by the Nogais, sold to Constantinople and ‘forcibly converted’ before returning to Moscow with the Ottoman envoy. ‘Rassprosnye rechi inozemtsev i russkikh vozvrativshikhsia iz plena, prislannykh iz Razriada v Patriarshii dvortsovyi prikaz dlia doprosov’, Russkaia istoricheskaia biblioteka, izdavaemaia Arkheograficheskoiu komissieiu (St Petersburg: Panteleevy, 1875), 2:619. 31. See the cases of Ivashko Osipov and Lukian Bukolov, ibid., 622. 32. Ibid., 625. 33. They returned to Muscovy with the tsar’s envoy to Istanbul Ivan Kondyrev, ibid., 620, 626. 34. Ibid., 620. 35. Ibid., 649. 36. Ibid., 654– 5. 37. Ibid., 604– 5. 38. Ibid., 640 – 1. For the similar stories of Stepan Terpugov, Luka Zakhariev and Mikifor Lunin, who likewise succumbed to the ‘Catholic temptation’ after their liberation from Ottoman captivity by the Spaniards, see, ibid., 641 and 646 – 7 respectively. Similarly, Oleksei Dolzhonkov, after being a slave at the Ottoman galleys, escaped to France and made his way to Rome, where, ‘on the order of the Pope’, a Catholic priest took his confession and where he attended church and ‘held the Roman faith’. He then made his way to Muscovy through Venice, the lands of the Caesar, Poland and Lithuania. Ibid., 653. The same applied to Sofronii Ivanov and Lavrik Filippov, ibid., 665 – 7. This was also the case of Feodor Borisov, captured by the Nogais in 1607 and sold in Constantinople to a janissary. Borisov ‘secretly kept the Christian faith’ and eventually managed to escape to Spain, from which he returned to Moscow by way of France, Germany, Hungary, Moravia and Poland. Ibid. Alongside the European way, another escape route passed by

NOTES

39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

55.

TO PAGES

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way of Asia Minor, Persia and the Caucasus. Others still made their way through the Balkans, Wallachia, Moldavia and the lands of the Zaporozhian cossacks. For an exploration of strategies pursued by slaves to improve their lot, see Toledano, As if Silent and Absent, 60 – 255. Thus, Stepashko Sergeev, captured by the Tatars near Azov in 1600, spent twelve years on the galley whereupon he was released and settled as a ploughman in Anatolia. ‘Rassprosnye rechi’, 607. Ibid., 632– 3, 649– 50. See ‘Donesenie kievskogo voevody, kniazia Iuriia Petrovicha Trubetskogo’, in ‘Opisanie turetskoi imperii, sostavlennoe russkim, byvshim v plenu u turok vo vtoroi polovine XVII v.’, Pravoslavnyi palestinskii sbornik 30 (1890): 51 – 4. According to P.A. Syrku, who prepared the publication, Dorokhin was a likely author of the description. ‘Chelobitnaia kaluzhskogo strel’tsa Ivana Semenovicha Moshkina’, ChIOIDR, kn. 2 (1894): 20 – 8. Sil’vestr iz Livorno, ‘Izvestie o zamechatel’nom proisshestvii nedavno sluchivshemsia’, Kievskaia starina, no. 6 (1883): 224– 8. Both Sil’vestr’s account and Moshkin’s petition are also published in Memuary otnosiashchiesia k istorii Iuzhnoi Rusi, no. 2 (1886): 389–405. The social status of the remaining three individuals remains unclear. See his individual petition in ChIOIDR, no. 2 (1894): 97 – 8. ‘Rassprosnye rechi’, 631– 2. ‘Spisok s chelobitnoi Vasiliia Vasil’eva syna Polozova’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 3 (1865): 19 –24. Makarii and Sil’vestr, ‘Put’ nam ieromonakham Makariiu i Sil’vestru iz Monastyria Vsemilostlivogo Spasa Novgorodka Severskogo do Sviatago Grada Ierusalima poklonit’sia Grobu’, ChIOIDR, no. 3 (1873): 2. Ibid., 2 – 3. Serapion, ‘Putnik ili puteshestvie v Sviatuiu Zemliu Matreninskogo monastyria inoka Serapiona 1749 goda’, ibid., 80–1. Although Chigirin was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1793, Serapion began his pilgrimage in Kiev (which was under Muscovite rule since 1667) and was travelling ‘from the Russian state’. Ibid., 87. Thus, the outbreak of the war of 1828– 29 forced sixty Russian pilgrims to stay in Palestine. See A.N. Murav’ev, Puteshestvie v Sviatuiu Zemliu (St Petersburg: Tret’e otdelenie Sobstvennoi E. I. V. kantseliarii, 1832), 1:230. Serapion, ‘Putnik’, 87. Varlaam, ‘Peregrinatsiia ili Putnik, v nem zhe opisuetsia put’ do sviatago grada Ierusalima i vo vse sviatye mesta Palestiinskie, ot ieromonakha Varlaama, byvshego tamo v 1712 g’. Ibid., 76. Ivan Luk’ianov, Puteshestvie vo Sviatuiu Zemliu moskovskogo sviashchennika Ioana Luk’ianova v 1701– 1703 gg. (Moscow: Lazarevskii institut vostochnykh iazykov, 1862), 35.

234

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66 –70

56. For cases of deserters from the Russian army who converted to Islam, see Lucien J. Frary, ‘Russian Consuls and the Greek War of Independence (1821 – 1831)’, Mediterranean Historical Review 28, no. 1 (2013): 49. 57. Will Smiley, ‘The Rules of War on the Ottoman Frontiers: An Overview of the Military Activity, 1699– 1829’, in Empires and Peninsulas: Southeastern Europe Between Carlowitz and the Peace of Adrianople, 1699– 1829, ed. Plamen Mitev et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 63 – 71. Whereas the state-owned captives were liberated rather promptly, the release of the privately owned Russian slaves proved much more difficult to secure due to the resistance of the slaveowners and the ambiguity of the category of ‘Russian slaves’. Idem, ‘Let Whose People Go? Subjecthood, Sovereignty, Liberation and Legalism in the EighteenthCentury Russo-Ottoman Relations’, Turkish Historical Review, no. 3 (2012): 196– 228. 58. ‘Dopros sniatyi s nizhegorodskogo kuptsa Vasiliia Iakovlevicha Baranshchikova, iavivshegosia dobrovol’no iz-za granitsy’, Deistviia Novgorodskoi Gubernskoi Uchenoi Arkhivnoi Komissii 4 (1900): 108 – 10. For different interpretations of Baranshchikov, see R.A. Shtil’mark, Povest’ o strannike rossiiskom (Moscow: Geograficheskaia literatura, 1962); E.M. Dziuba and P.V. Kiseleva, ‘V. Baranshchikov: Zagadki lichnosti i poetika prozy nizhegorodskogo meshchanina’, in Nizhegorodskii tekst russkoi slovesnosti: mezhvuzovskii sbornik nauchnykh statei, ed. V.T. Zakharov (Nizhnii Novgorod: NGPU, 2007), 280 – 9. 59. Neshchastnye prikliucheniia Vasiliia Iakovlevicha Baranshchikova, meshchanina Nizhnego Novgoroda v trekh chastiakh sveta: V Amerike, Azii i Evrope s 1780 po 1787 god (St Petersburg: Vil’kovskii i Galichenkov, 1787). 60. ‘Dopros’, 109; Neshchastnye prikliucheniia, 3 – 4. 61. Ibid., 5 – 12. 62. ‘Dopros’, 9; Neshchastnye prikliucheniia, 17 –18. 63. Ibid., 19 – 20. 64. ‘Dopros’, 109– 10. 65. Neshchastnye prikliucheniia, 20. 66. Ibid., 21. 67. Ibid., 26 – 33. 68. Ibid., 34 – 8. 69. Ibid., 39 – 40. 70. Ibid., 42 – 9. 71. Ibid., 49 – 66. 72. Ibid., 66 – 72. 73. A.A. Vigasin, ‘Predislovie’, Puteshestviia po vostoku v epokhu Ekateriny II (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1995), 105. 74. Neshchastnye prikliucheniia, 47 –8. 75. Ibid., 54 – 6. 76. Ibid., 60. 77. Ibid., 74 – 5.

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78. At the end of his narrative, Baranshchikov expresses his gratitude, among others, to A.R. Vorontsov, I.I. Betskoi, I.I. Shuvalov and several representatives of the Naryshkin and the Stroganov families. Baranshchikov, Neschastnye prikliucheniia, 78–9. 79. On the Archipelago expedition, see E.B. Smilianskaia, I.M. Smilianskiaia and M.B. Velizhev, Rossiia v Sredizemnomor’e: Arkhipelagskaia ekspeditsiia Ekateriny II (Moscow: Indrik, 2006). The treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji (1774) obliged the Porte to use all its influence in order to assist the conclusion of treaties between the Russian Empire and the Barbary States that were the nominal vassals of the sultan. See article 12 of the treaty in Dogovory Rossii s Vostokom, 31. On the European slavery in North Africa during the early modern period, see Stephen Clissold, The Barbary Slaves (London: Elek, 1977); Michel Fontenay, ‘The Barbary Coast and Mediterranean Slavery during the 16th and 17th Centuries’, Cahiers de Tunisie 44, nos. 3 – 4 (1991): 7 – 43; Pal Fodor, ‘Piracy, Ransom Slavery and Trade: French Participation in the Liberation of the Ottoman Slaves from Malta during the 1620s’, Turcica 33 (2001): 119 – 34; Davies, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters; On the Western European and Northern American perspectives on the Barbary Coast Captivity, see Gillian L. Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Linda Coley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600 – 1850 (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 23 – 134. 80. M.G. Kokovtsev, Opisanie Arkhipelaga i Varvariiskogo berega (St Petersburg: Vil’kovskii and Galichenkov, 1786), 88 – 9, 94, 96, 100– 101, 123. 81. Ibid., 104. 82. Ibid., 106. Conversion at the moment of capture could help one to avoid the worst of the slave’s lot – that of a galley rower. However, the Barbary slavers had an ambiguous attitude towards such conversions as they necessarily reduced the number of galley rowers. Even after the galleys began to fall out of use, conversion to Islam reduced the slave’s resale value. Davies, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, 21 – 2. 83. Zerkalo sveta, no. 97 (1787), 729– 30. 84. Entsiklopedicheskii leksikon. s. v. ‘Baranshchikov’. 85. N.S. Leskov, ‘Vdokhnovennye brodiagi (Udaletskie ‘skazki’)’, idem, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St Petersburg: Suvorin, 1897), 12:240. 86. S.A. Vengerov, Kritiko-biograficheskii slovar’ russkikh pisatelei i uchenykh (St Petersburg, 1897– 1904), 2:121– 3. 87. A.T. Bolotov, Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia A.T. Bolotova, opisannye im samim dlia svoikh potomkov (St Petersburg: Golovin, 1870), 1:10. 88. Ibid., 13 – 14, 17. 89. Ibid., 18. 90. Ibid., 20 – 1. 91. A.G. Krasnokutskii, Dnevnye zapiski poezdki v Konstantinopol’ A.G. Krasnokutskogo v 1808 g. (Moscow: Selivanskii, 1815), 11.

236

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76 –78

92. The most highly placed of these prisoners of war was Lieutenant-General P.V. Repnin, the brother of the future ambassador extraordinary to Constantinople, captured during an unsuccessful venture to the south of the Danube in May 1773. See Rumiantsev to Obreskov, 24 May 1773, ChIOIDR, no. 2 (1865): 270. Negotiations on the conditions of the captivity and release of Repnin and other Russian officers went on between the two belligerent sides despite the on-going military operations. See Rumiantsev to Obreskov, ibid., 277. 93. Levashev, Plen i stradanie rossiian u turkov. 94. V.A. Safonov, ‘Vypiski iz zhurnala V. Safonova, leitenanta korveta Flory’, P.P. Svin’in, Vospominaniia na flote (St Petersburg: Plavil’shchikov, 1819), 3:92–117; N.M. Klement, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera o plavanii v Sredizemnom more i prebyvanii v plenu u albantsev i turok’, Severnyi arkhiv 7, no. 17 (1823): 265–86; no. 18 (1823): 337–57 (Other publications: N.M. Klement, ‘God v plenu u turok’, Morskoi sbornik 28, no. 3 (1857): 32–62; N.M. Klement, ‘Gibel’ korveta ‘Flory’ i prikliucheniia liudei na nem byvshikh, 1806–1807’, Russian Archive, no. 8 (1891): 464–500); A.G. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera, pobyvavshego v plenu u turok’, Voennyi sbornik 3, no. 5 (1858): 173–220, no. 6 (1858): 351–86, no. 7 (1858): 17–34; A.O. Diugamel’, Avtobiografiia (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1885). 95. On the Russian accounts of captivity from the same period in places other than the Ottoman Empire, see Barbara Maggs, ‘Imprisoned! Two Russian Narratives of Travel and Captivity in Asia in the late Eighteenth and the Early 19th Century: Filip Efremov in Central Asia and Vasilii Golovin in Japan’, Canadian Slavonic Papers 52, nos. 3 – 4 (2010): 331– 51. See also Paul M. Austin, ‘The Exotic Prisoner in Russian Romanticism’, Russian Literature 16 (1984): 217– 74. 96. Levashev, Plen i stradanie, 42 – 4. For other accounts of this incident, see Elias Habesci, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London: Baldwin, 1784), 298– 301; Hammer, Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, 16:203 – 5. 97. Levashev, Plen i stradanie, 47. In 1807, the Muslim population offered the same reception to the Russian diplomats P.A. Fonton and P.P. Svin’in dispatched ashore to conclude a truce after a confrontation between the Russian and Ottoman navies in the Aegean. See Svin’in, Vospominaniia na flote, 2:161. 98. Levashev, Plen i stradaniia, 47 – 8. Having to sleep on the muddy soil for the lack of a proper bed upon hours of waiting under pouring rain, Levashev became convinced that ‘everything was arranged for our greater torment’. Ibid., 49. 99. Klement, ‘God v plenu u turok’, Morskoi sbornik, no. 3 (1857): 38 –9. 100. Ibid., 43 – 4. 101. Safonov, ‘Vypiski iz zhurnala V. Safonova’, 96; See also Klement, ‘God v plenu u turok’, 42. 102. Safonov, ‘Vypiski iz zhurnala V. Safonova’, 97. 103. Klement, ‘God v plenu u turok’, 42 – 3; Safonov, ‘Vypiski iz zhurnala Safonova’, 103– 4.

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104. Klement, ‘God v plenu u turok’, 46. 105. Safonov, ‘Vypiski iz zhurnala V. Safonova’, 116; See also Klement, ‘God v plenu u Turok’, 54. 106. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera’, 208– 9. 107. Diugamel’, Avtobiografiia, 24. 108. Levashev, Plen i stradanie, 63. 109. Ibid., 81 – 2. 110. Ibid., 64, 115. 111. Klement, ‘God v plenu u turok’, 44. 112. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera’, 191. 113. Ibid., 180. 114. Ibid., 191. 115. Klement, ‘God v plenu u turok’, 42. 116. Safonov, ‘Vypiski iz zhurnala V. Safonova’, 105– 6. 117. P.S. Kuprianov, ‘Maskulinnost’ i plen’, Muzhskoi sbornik, no. 3 (2007): 199– 116. 118. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera’, 179. 119. Klement, ‘God v plenu u turok’, 41. 120. Ibid., 47. 121. Ibid., 47 – 8. Safonov also reports being chained together with the Don cossack Ivanov, until the prison guards were apprised of his officer’s status. See Safonov, ‘Vypiski iz zhurnala V. Safonova’, 113. 122. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitera’, Voennyi sbornik 3, no. 5 (1858): 215; no. 7 (1858): 19. 123. Diugamel’, Avtobiografiia, 25. 124. ‘Vypiski iz zhurnala V. Safonova’, 98. 125. Ibid., 101. 126. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera’, 179. 127. Ibid., 181. 128. Diugamel’, Avtobiografiia, 21. 129. Unlike the other four accounts, which were published soon after the described events, Diugamel’s autobiography came out posthumously in 1885. 130. Ibid., 22 – 3. 131. Safonov, ‘Vypiski iz zhurnala Safonova’, 98 –9. 132. Ibid., 103. 133. Ibid., 107. 134. Ibid., 117; Klement, ‘God v plenu u turok’, 49 – 50. 135. Levashev, Plen i stradanie, 53. 136. Ibid., 84. 137. Ibid., 85 – 6. 138. Safonov, ‘Vypiski iz zhurnala V. Safonova’, 86. 139. Klement, ‘God v plenu u Turok’, 40 – 1. 140. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera’, 182, 184. 141. Svin’in, Vospomianiia na flote, 2: 166– 9.

238 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

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Levashev, Plen i stradanie, 126. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 158. Klement, ‘God v plenu u turok’, 49. Ibid., 56. Klement, ‘God v plenu u turok’, 56 – 7. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera’, 189– 90. Ibid., no. 7 (1858): 19. Diugamel’, Avtobiografiia, 28.

Chapter 3 The ‘Turkish Campaigns’ 1. Joseph de Ligne to Louis-Philippe de Segur, 10 August 1788, The Prince de Ligne: His Memoirs, Letters and Miscellaneous Papers (New York: F.F. Collier and Son, 1899), 2:84. 2. On the campaign of 1711, see E.Ia. Vodarskii, Zagadki Prutskogo pokhoda Petra I (Moscow: Nauka, 2004); Brian L. Davies, Empire and Military Revolution: Russia’s Turkish Wars in the Eighteenth Century (London: Continuum, 2011), 111– 23. 3. On the Russian army prior, during and after the reforms of Peter the Great, see John L. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462– 1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). For the post-Petrine period, see Janet L. Hartley, Russia, 1762– 1825: Military Power, the State and the People (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008). 4. The military development of early modern Europe has been the subject of a fruitful historiographic controversy. See, Clifford J. Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, CO: The Westview Press, 1995). For a comparison of early modern Europe and other regions in miltiary terms, see Geoffrey Parker, ‘Europe and the Wider World, 1500– 1700: The Military Balance’, in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 161– 95. For the military change in Pre-Petrine Russia that echoed some of the Western European developments, see Michael C. Paul, ‘The Military Revolution in Russia, 1550– 1682’, The Journal of Military History 68, no. 1 (2004): 9– 45. 5. A.I. Martos, ‘Otryvok iz pisem russkogo ofitsera’, Syn otechestva 57, no. 44 (1819): 165. 6. On Ottoman warfare, see Virginia H. Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700– 1870: An Empire Besieged (Harlow: Longman/Pearson, 2007); Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500– 1700 (London: USL Press, 1999); Mesut Uyar and Edward

NOTES

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

TO PAGES

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J. Erikson, A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Ataturk (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Group International, 2009). Among the modern scholars of the Ottoman Empire, research on Russian – Ottoman wars was done by Virginia H. Aksan, ‘The One-Eyed Fighting the Blind: Mobilization, Supply and Command in the Russian-Turkish War of 1768–1774’, The International History Review 15, no. 2 (1993): 221– 38. O.Ia. Sapozhnikova and I.Iu Sapozhnikova, eds, Mechta o russkom edinstve. Kievskii sinopsis (Moscow: Evropa, 2006), 217, 220. Ibid., 223. In a 1679 work on the reasons of the spread of Islam, another representative of the pro-Moscow current within the Ukranian Orthodox hierarchy Ioannikii Galiatovskii listed forty war ruses that could allow Christians to win over the Muslims, ranging from the Trojan horse to the stratagems that the Ottomans themselves employed against their Christian rivals. Galiatovskii’s work, however, did not attribute the possibility of victory over the Ottomans to their military decline. See N. F. Sumtsev, ‘Ioannikii Galiatovskii. K istorii iuzhno-russkoi literatury XVII veka’, Kievskaia starina, no. 4 (1884): 577– 80; Daniel Clarke Waugh, ‘Ioannikii Galiatovs’kyi’s Polemics against Islam and Their Muscovite Translations’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3 – 4, no. 2 (1979 – 1980): 909–18. A.I. Lyzlov, Skifskaia istoriia, eds, E.V. Chistiakova and A.P. Bogdanov (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 267. There were two eighteenth-century editions of Lyzlov’s history, both of them by N.I. Novikov. P.A. Syrku, ‘Opisanie Turetskoi imperii, sostavlennoe russkim, byvshim v plenu u turok vo vtoroi polovine XVII v.’, Pravoslavnyi palestinskii sbornik 30 (1890): 23. For the different strategies and tactics employed by the Austrians against the European and Ottoman armies, see Alexander Balisch, ‘Infantry Battlefield Tactics in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries on the European and Turkish Theatres of War: The Austrian Responses to Different Conditions’, Studies in History and Politics 3 (1983– 84): 43 – 60. See also S.T. Christensen, ‘The Heathen Order of Battle’, in Violence and the Absolutist State: Studies in the European and the Ottoman History, ed. S.T. Christensen (Copenhagen: Center for Research in the Humanities, Copenhagen University, 1990), 75 –138. B.K. Minikh, Zapiski fel’dmarshala grafa Minikha, ed. S.N. Shubinskii (St Petersburg: Bezobrazov, 1874), 56 – 7. S.R. Vorontsov to (his father, the senator) R.I. Vorontsov, 18 June 1770, Arkhiv kniazia Vorontsova, 16:118. A.A. Prozorovskii, Zapiski general-fel’dmarshala kniazia A.A. Prozorovskogo, ed. A.K. Afanas’ev (Moscow: Rossiiskii arkhiv, 2004), 291– 2, note. Prozorovskii was a corps commander in the war of 1768– 74, who ended his career as the commander-in-chief of the Russian army on the Danube in 1807– 9. G.A. Potemkin to Catherine II, beginning of 1784, in Ekaterina II i G.A. Potemkin. Lichnaia perepiska, 1769– 1791, ed. V.S. Lopatin (Moscow: Nauka, 1997), 191.

240

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96 – 99

16. Cited in A.N. Petrov, Vliianie russko-turetskikh voin s poloviny proshlogo stoletiia na razvitie russkogo voennogo iskusstva (St Petersburg: Voennaia tipografiia, 1894), 2:332. 17. ‘Mysli generala Kutuzova zamechennye v razgovore s nim’, M.I. Kutuzov. Sbornik materialov, 3:351– 2. 18. Raimondo Montecuccoli (Memorile, 1704, Russian ed. 1760), Luigi Fredinando Marsigli (L’Etat militaire de l’e´mpire ottoman, 1732, Russian ed. 1737). 19. See, Charles de Warnery, Remarques sur le militaire des turcs et des russes, sur la fac
on la plus convenable de combattre les premiers (Breslau: Korn, 1771); Louis-Fe´lix Guinement de Keraglio, L’Histoire de la guerre des russes et des impe´riaux contre les turcs en 1736, 1737, 1738 et 1739. 2 vols. (Paris: Debures, 1780); idem, Histoire de la dernie`re guerre des Russes contre les Turcs en 1769. 2 vols. (Paris: Dasaint, 1777); Chaussin de Perceval, Pre´cis historique de la guerre des turcs contre les russes, depuis l’anne´e 1768 jusqu’au l’anne´e 1774 (Paris: Le Normant, 1822); Georg Wilhelm von Valentini, Pre´cis des dernie`res guerres des russes contre les turcs (Paris: Schubart and Heideloff, 1828); Friedrich von Ciriacy, The´aˆtre de la guerre autrichien et russe dans la Turquie d’Europe (Paris: F.G. Levirault, 1828); Helmuth von Moltke, Der russisch-tu¨rkische Feldzug 1828 – 29 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1845); Xavier Raymond Sainte-Ange, Pre´cis historique et ge´ographique des deux dernie`res guerres de la Russie contre la Turquie, 1810– 1811 et 1828– 1829 (Bruxelles: Meline, Cans et al., 1853); Francis Rawdon Chesney, The Russian-Turkish Campaigns of 1828 and 1829: With a View of the Present State of Affairs in the East (New York: Redfield, 1854); William Monteith, Kars and Erzeroum: with the Campaigns of Prince Paskiewitch in 1828 and 1829 (London: Longman et al., 1856). 20. Ia.I. de Sanglen, O voennom iskusstve drevnikh i novykh narodov s pribavleniem o pol’ze teorii voennogo iskusstva (Moscow: Drekhsler, 1808), 42. 21. De Sanglen, Kratkoe obozrenie voinskoi istorii XVIII-go stoletiia (St Petersburg: Imperatorskaia tipografiia, 1809), 8. 22. Ibid., 112. 23. De Sanglen, O voennom iskusstve, 4 – 5. 24. Quoted in A.K. Baiov, Kurs istorii russkogo voennogo iskustva (St Petersburg: Skachkov, 1909), 3:90. 25. De Sanglen, O voennom iskusstve, 5. 26. Ibid., 16. 27. Jomini’s first and most influential work, Traite´ des grandes ope´rations militaries (1804) was translated into Russian as Rassuzhdeniia o velikikh voennykh deistviiakh ili kriticheskoe i sravnitel’noe opisanie pokhodov Fridrikha i Napoleona. 8 vols. (St Petersburg: Shnorr, 1809– 17). 28. On this project, coordinated by the head of staff of the 2nd army P.D. Kiselev, see Alexander Bitis, Russia and the Eastern Question. Army, Government, and Society, 1815 –1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 129– 34. As the military advisor of Nicholas I, Jomini took an active role in the preparation of

NOTES

29.

30.

31.

32.

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the 1828 campaign against the Ottomans as well as in the foundation of the Russian Academy of the General Staff. Gerhard Anton Halem, Zhizn’ grafa Minikha, imperatorskogo rossiiskogo generalfel’dmarshala. 2 vols. (St Petersburg: Universistetskaia tipografiia, 1806); S.I. Sozonovich, Zhizn’, kharakter i voennye deianiia general-fel’dmarshala grafa Petra Aleksandrovicha Rumiantseva-Zadunaiskogo (Moscow: Beketov, 1803); Zhizn’ kniazia Grigoriia Aleksandrovicha Potemkina-Tavricheskogo. 3 vols. (Moscow: Dubrovin and Merziakov, 1808). I.F. Anting’s, Zhizn’ i voennye deianiia generalissimusa, kniazia Italiiskogo, grafa Suvorova Rymnikskogo. 3 vols. (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1800) was the first of a dozen of biographies and collections of anecdotes about Suvorov published in the first half of the nineteenth century. Finally, at Kutuzov’s death in 1813, there appeared six different accounts of his life and activities, which could not fail to discuss the three Russian – Ottoman wars in which he had participated. While the Russian military biographers shared this assumption, they could disagree on the importance of individual contributions of their respective heroes. Thus, the biographer of Suvorov N.A. Polevoi argued that Minikh ‘belonged to the school of old tactics’, that Potemkin was incompetent, and that even Rumiantsev, despite several brilliant victories in 1770, ‘did not understand the true method of fighting the Turks’, as his passivity in the subsequent campaigns demonstrated. See N.A. Polevoi, Istoriia kniazia Italiiskogo grafa Suvorova Rymnikskogo, generalissimusa rossiiskikh voisk (St Petersburg: Journal de Petersbourg, 1843), 49 – 51. While many could agree with Polevoi’s criticism of Minikh and Potemkin, his portrayal of Rumiantsev provoked passionate protests. See N.I. Kutuzov, ‘Vospominanie o general-fel’dmarshale grafe Petre Aleksandroviche Rumiantseve-Zadunaiskom’, Otechestvennye zapiski 39, no. 3 (1845): 35 – 80. D.P. Buturlin, Kartina voin Rossii s Turtsieiu v tsarstvovanie Ekateriny II i imperatora Alexandra I. 2 vols. (St Petersburg: Imperatorskii vospitatel’nyi dom, 1829); A.I. Khatov, Turetskii pokhod russkikh pod predvoditel’stvom generala ot infanterii Golenishcheva-Kutuzova v 1811 (St Petersburg: Voennaia tipografiia, 1840); A.I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, Opisanie turetskoi voiny v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra Pervogo s 1806 po 1812 gg. 2 vols. (St Petersburg: Shtab otdel’nogo korpusa vnutrennei strazhi, 1843); M.I. Bogdanovich, Pokhody Rumiantseva, Potemkina i Suvorova protiv Turtsii (St Petersburg: Veimar, 1852); P.M. Sakovich, Deistviia Suvorova v Turtsii v 1773 godu (St Petersburg: Krai, 1853). A.N. Pushkin, ‘Vzgliad na voennoe sostoianie turetskoi imperii’, Syn Otechestva 107, no. 9 (1826): 76. Andrei Nikiforovich Pushkin was an artillery officer who made his mark with Notes on Military Fortifications (1827) based on works of the European experts in this field and approved by the Military Educational Committee of the Chief Staff. Pushkin’s ‘Review’ described the qualities of different branches of the Ottoman forces drawing on the works of Busbecq, Marsigli and the Scottish historian William Robertson.

242

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100 –102

33. Ibid., no. 10 (1826): 179. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., no. 9 (1826): 75–6. Pushkin borrowed this comparison of ways of war of the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbarous’ nations from the Scottish historian William Robertson. Russian edition: V. Robertson, Istoriia gosudarstvovaniia Imperatora Karla Piatogo. 2 vols. Trans. S. Smirnov (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1778). 36. Cf. P.N. Glebov, ‘Dunaiskaia ekspeditisiia 1829 goda’, Zhurnal dlia chteniia vospitannikam voenno-uchebnykh zavedenii 40, no. 159 (1843): 358. 37. Pushkin, ‘Vzgliad’, Syn otechestva 107, no. 10 (1826): 187. 38. Ibid., 182. This idea was first articulated by Montecuccoli and reproduced by the eighteenth-century Western writers, e.g. by Warnery, whose work, first published in 1764, was known to P.A. Rumiantsev and other Russian commanders alongside whom he served in Russia for three decades. See Remarques sur le Militaire des Turcs et des Russes, 186 and Preface. 39. Cf. P.N. Glebov, ‘Osada Silistrii v 1829 godu’, Zhurnal dlia chteniia vospitannikam voenno-uchebnykh zavedenii 40, no. 157 (1843): 60. 40. Pushkin, ‘Vzgliad’, Syn otechestva 107, no. 11 (1826): 268, 274. 41. Ibid., 266. 42. Ibid., no. 9 (1826): 75 – 6. See Franc
ois de Tott’s statement that ‘the Turkish Government may always be considered an army encamped, the General of which issues orders, from his headquarters, to forage the Country’. Franc
ois de Tott, Me´moirs of Baron de Tott (London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1786), 2:20. 43. Pushkin, ‘Vzgliad’, Syn otechestva, part 107, no. 9 (1826): 75 – 6. 44. As a military intelligence agent of the Russian 2nd Army, Liprandi knew about the work of the staff officers under the command of P.D. Kiselev and at some point even presented his own study as the continuation of their project. 45. Liprandi, Obozrenie prostranstva sluzhivshego teatrom voiny Rossii s Turtsiei s 1806 po 1812 god (St Petersburg: General’nyi shtab, 1854), v. 46. Idem, Nekotorye zamechaniia po povodu dvukh sochineii, vyshedshikh pod zaglaviem ‘Malaia Voina’ (St Petersburg: Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, 1851), 17. 47. Ibid., 20. Cf. Liprandi, Obozrenie prostranstva, x. 48. Ibid., viii and note 2. 49. Idem, Nekotoryie zamechaniia, 28. 50. Idem, Obozrenie prostranstva, ii. 51. Idem, Vzaimnoe deistvie pekhoty, konnitsy i artilerii u turok (St Petersburg: Voennaia tipografiia, 1854), 1. 52. Ibid., 2 – 5. 53. Ibid., 6 – 7. 54. Idem, Obozrenie prostranstva, i. 55. Idem, Nekotorye zamechaniia, 7. Von Valentini even upheld the opinion that ‘great generals who have been victorious over the Turks have not maintained their reputation, when called upon to act against other nations’ and vice versa. See Georg von Valentini, Military Reflections on Turkey by Baron von Valentini (London: Rivlington, 1828), 61. Another translation from

NOTES

56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

TO PAGES

102 –106

243

Western sources on this subject was ‘Voennoe iskusstvo i voennye sily Turok’, Voennyi zhurnal, no. 5 (1829): 201 – 10. An anonymous German author pointed to many military innovations that came into European armies from the Ottomans (the use of riflemen, attack by columns, numerous and effective light cavalry etc.), praised the high moral qualities of its soldiers and generally advised ‘not to underestimate the Turks’. See Liprandi, Obozrenie prostranstva, x-xi; idem, Nekotorye zamechaniia, 21 – 5, for examples of such deviations. By contrast, in his military review of ‘Turkey in Europe’, the Prussian author Ludwig Frederic von Ciriacy argued that ‘the conquest of European Turkey can only be done in a methodical manner’. According to Ciriacy, numerous fortified places and their stubborn defence by the Ottomans constituted a threat for the communications of the invading army. See, Ciriacy, Theatres des guerres, 33. Liprandi, Osady turetskikh krepostei (St Petersburg: Voennaia tipografiia, 1855), 2 – 3. Idem, ‘Obshchie svedeniia o Evropeiskoi Turtsii. Iz zapisok I.P. Liprandi’, ChIOIDR, no. 4 (1876): 19 – 21. Liprandi describes the activities of his detachment in ‘Otriad volonterovpartizan v 1829 g.’, in Liprandi, Osobennosti voin s turkami, 91 –108, written in 1833. See V.V. Ishutin, ‘Ivan Petrovich Liprandi (1790 – 1880)’, Sovetskoe slavianovedenie, no. 2 (1989): 89. ‘Zapiski Moro-de-Braze (kasaiushchiesia do turetskogo pokhoda 1711 g.)’, in A.S. Pushkin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1950), 10:329. The original French edition: Jean Nicole Moreau de Brasey, Me´moires politiques, amusants et satiriques de messire J.N.D.B.C. de Lion, colonel du re´giment de dragons de Casanski et brigadier des arme´es de Sa M. Czarienne. 3 vols. (Veritopolie: Jean Disant-vrai, 1735). A.I. Martos, ‘Zapiski inzhenernogo ofitsera Martosa’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 7 (1893): 353. Glebov, ‘Osada Silistrii v 1829 godu’, 67 – 8. ‘Razlichnye zapiski kasaiuschiesia do turok’, Rastushchii vinograd, no. 69 (1785): 41 –2. See, I.O. Otroshchenko, ‘Zapiski generala Otroshchenko’, Russkii vestnik, no. 10 (1877): 531. F.F. Tornau, Vospominaniia russkogo ofitsera (Moscow: Ario-XX, 2002), 31 –2. Pushkin, ‘Vzgliad’, Syn otechestva 107, no. 11 (1826): 265. See Valentini, Military Reflections on Turkey, 9, note. [Franc
ois Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville], ‘Kartina Turetskogo voiska’, Vestnik Evropy 123, no. 17 (1822): 228–30. See Franc
ois Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville, Voyage dans la Gre`ce (Paris: Didier Firmin, 1822), 5:447–8. A.I. Martos, ‘Otryvok iz pisem russkogo ofitsera’, Syn otechestva 57, no. 44 (1819): 166–7.

244

NOTES

TO PAGES

107 –110

71. M.L. von Raan, Perechen’ iz sobstvennogo svoiego zhurnala v prodolzhenie proshedshei voiny (St Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia voennaia kollegiia, 1792), 25. 72. Tornau, Vospominaniia russkogo ofitsera, 101. 73. K.K. Zeidlits, ‘Vospominaniia doktora Zeidlitsa o Turetskom pokhode 1829 g. (v pis’makh druz’iam)’, Russkii Arkhiv, no. 1 (1878): 424. 74. Glebov, ‘Osada Silistrii v 1829 godu’, 50. 75. Liprandi, Vzaimnoe deistvie pekhoty, konnitsy i artillerii u turok, 1. 76. Idem, Nekotorye zamechaniia, 7 and note. 77. M.Ia. Ol’shevskii, ‘Russko-turetskaia voina za Kavkazom’, Russkaia starina 44 (1884): 512. Among the Western observers, Georg von Valentini attributed the cases of panic among the Ottoman troops to the lack of discipline. See, Valentini, Military Reflections on Turkey, 52. 78. N.N. Murav’ev, ‘O voine 1855-go v Maloi Azii’, Russkii vestnik, no. 1 (1862): 325. 79. Liprandi, Osady turetskikh krepostei, 5 – 6. 80. Levashev, Plen i stradanie rossiian u turkov, 80 –1. 81. R.M. Tsebrikov, ‘Vokrug Ochakova. 1788 g. (Dnevnik ochevidtsa)’, Russkaiia starina, no. 9 (1895): 186. 82. Ibid., 176. According to A.I. Martos, after an unsuccessful Russian assault on Rustchuk in 1810, the Ottoman defenders of the fortress embellished the walls with the heads of 7,500 fallen Russian soldiers. See Martos, ‘Zapiski inzhenernogo ofitsera Martosa’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 7 (1893): 328. The practice of severing heads is confirmed by Prince de Ligne, who represented Joseph II at the headquarters of Potemkin’s army besieging Ochakov in 1788. See de Ligne to Segur, August 1788, in Vestnik Evropy 48, no. 21 (1809): 23. 83. Tsebrikov, ‘Vokrug Ochakova’, 205. The Russians were not alone in succumbing on this occasion to the practice that they saw as the proof of barbarity of their enemies. The pamphlets written during the Thirteen Years War between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburgs (1593– 1606), report that Christians rejoiced in cutting Muslim heads and displaying them on pikes. C.D. Rouilliard, The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature, 1520– 1660 (Paris: Boivin and Co., 1938), 79. 84. Future hospodar of Wallachia Girgore IV Ghica (r. 1822– 8). 85. A.F. Langeron, ‘Zapiski grafa Lanzherona. Voina s Turtsiei 1806– 1812 gg.’, Russkaia starina, no. 6 (1907): 588. Langeron was a French royalist e´migre´ who pursued a distinguished military career in Russia for over four decades and died a Russian subject in 1831, by which time his French name Louis Alexandre Andrault was russified as Aleksandr Fedorovich. 86. Tornau, Vospominaniia, 57. 87. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera, pobyvavshego v plenu u turok’, Voennyi sbornik 3, no. 5 (1858): 183. Among Western authors with direct experience of service in the Ottoman army, the custom of cutting and collecting noses and tips of the ears of the enemies is confirmed by Georg von Valentini, according to whom they served as substitutes of severed heads when

NOTES

88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

93. 94.

95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105.

TO PAGES

110 –114

245

there were too many of them. See, Military Reflections on Turkey, 55. Whereas Von Valentini’s testimony refers to the war of 1806– 12, Chesney mentions the same practice during the Ottoman sorties from Varna besieged by the Russian troops in 1828. See Chesney, The Russian-Turkish Campaigns of 1828 and 1829, 107– 8. Zeidlits, ‘Vospominaniia doktora Zeidlitsa’, 424. Ibid. F.P. Fonton, Vospominaniia. Iumoristicheskie, politicheskie i voennye pis’ma iz glavnoi kvartiry dunaiskoi armii v 1828 i 1829 gg (Leipzig: Frantz Wagner, 1862), 1:139. P.V. Alabin, Chetyre voiny. Pokhodnye zapiski v 1849, 1853, 1854– 56 i 1877– 1878 gg (Moscow: Kushnarev, 1890), 2:147– 8. For the discussion of these tendencies, see Daniel A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 44 – 51. G.E. fon Shtrandman, ‘Zapiski’, Russkaia starina, no. 5 (1882): 306. John L. Keep, ‘Russian Army in the Seven Years War’, in The Military and Society in Russia, 1497– 1917, eds, Erik Lohr and Marshall Poe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002), 197– 220; Duffy, Russia’s Military Way to the West, 71 – 120. Bolotov, Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia A.T. Bolotova, 1:476– 477. Rumiantsev to G.G. Orlov, February 1770, ChIOIDR, no. 2 (1865): 22 – 3. Rumiantsev apparently referred to the poisoning of wells by the Budjak Tatars during the Pruth campaign of Peter the Great and by the Crimean Tatars during Munnich’s invasion of the Crimea in 1736. Rumiantsev to Catherine II, 18 March 1770, ibid., 34. See Kutuzov to (the Russian war minister) M.B. Barklai-de-Tolli, 14 December 1811, in M.I. Kutuzov. Sbornik materialov, 3:751. Martos, ‘Zapiski inzhenernogo ofitsera Martosa’, 355. Ibid., 316. Cf. A.F. Lanzheron, ‘Zapiski grafa Lanzherona’, Russkaia starina, no. 6 (1908): 683. A.Kh. Berkendorf, ‘Iz memuarov grafa A.Kh. Berkendorfa’, Rossiiskii arkhiv, vol. 18 (Moscow: ‘Rossiiskii arkhiv’, 2009), 292. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera’, 175. Memoirs of the Comte Roger de Damas, trans. Rodolph Stawell (London: Chapman and Hall, 1913), 74, 141. In Langeron’s estimation, there were 38,000 people in Ismail at the moment of the siege. Although only 20,000 of these were soldiers, all other men took up arms. During the assault, 22,700 Turks were killed, 10,000 were taken prisoner, and the rest managed to escape. Langeron, ‘Journal des campagnes faites au service de la Russie’, Documente privitoare la istoria romaˆnilor, Suppliment 1 (Bucures¸ti: Socecu, 1886 – 95), 3:97. Martos, ‘Zapiski inzhenernogo ofitsera Martosa’, 328. Tsebrikov, ‘Vokrug Ochakova’, Russkaia starina, no. 9 (1895): 210.

246

NOTES

TO PAGES

115 –118

106. Richelieu, ‘Journal de mon voyage en Allemagne’, SIRIO 54 (1886): 189. 107. N.P. Ignat’ev, Vzgliad na postepennoe izmenenie obraza deistvii russkikh voisk protiv turok (St Petersburg: Veimar, 1852), 14. Liprandi similarly argued that the ‘war in Turkey is not so much bloody as perilous in all other respects’. Liprandi, Obozrenie prostranstva, viii, 77. 108. ‘Vypiska iz zhurnala Aleksandra Andreevcha Iakovleva, nakhodiashchegosia pri imperatore Petre Velikom vo vremia srazheniia pod Prutom, v 1711 godu’, Otechestvennye zapiski 19, no. 51 (1824): 16, 20. 109. ‘Zapiska o tom skol’ko pomiatuiu o krymskikh i turetskikh pokhodakh’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 3 (1878): 258, 260. General Christoph Herman von Manstein (1711– 57), who was a captain in Munnich’s army, wrote about lack of fresh water and oppressive heat as a result of which one third of the army became ill. See K.G. fon Manshtein, Zapiski Manshteina o Rossii (St Petersburg: Balashev, 1875), 82, 84 (The Original French edition: Christoph Herman von Manstein, Me´moires historiques, politiques et militaires sur la Russie. 2 vols. (Leipzig: Weidmann et Reich, 1771). For a recent discussion of the war of 1735– 39, see Davies, Empire and Military Revolution, 190– 232. 110. Manshtein, Zapiski Manshteina o Rossii, 95 – 6. 111. Shtrandman, ‘Zapiski’, 296. 112. Rumiantsev to Catherine II, 29 May 1770, ChIOIDR, no. 2 (1865): 79; See also Bogdanovich, Pokhody Rumiantseva, 57 – 8. 113. Raan, Perechen’ iz sobstvennogo svoego zhurnala, 19, 29. 114. Ibid., 39. General S.A. Tuchkov also drew the attention of future Russian commanders to the unstable climate of Moldavia, where thaws alternated with freezes and snowfalls. S.A. Tuchkov, ‘Zapiski S.A. Tuchkova’, Russkii vestnik, no. 8 (1906): 375. 115. Liprandi, Obozrenie prostranstva, 76. 116. Idem, ‘Obshchie svedeniia’, 26. 117. Ibid., 30 – 32. 118. Voenno-statisticheskoe obozrenie gosudarstv i zemel’ prilezhashchikh k Rossiiskoi imperii. Kniazhestvo Moldaviia (St Petersburg: General’nyi shtab, 1855), 5 – 6. The survey was originally composed by Colonel E.I. Dietmars in 1828– 30 and complemented by Colonel E.V. fon Ruge, Lieutenant-Colonel A.I. Bergengeim and Staff-Captain I.I. Chodzko in 1834– 5 as well as by Staff Captain A.Ia. Chemerzin in 1850– 52. 119. Ibid., 6 – 7. 120. Thus, in the war of 1806– 12, a century after Peter’s debacle at the Pruth, the problem of supplies seriously limited the Russian military operations, while the transportation duties imposed by the Russian command upon the local population seriously strained the relations between the latter and the army. A.N. Petrov, Voina Rossii s Turtsiei, 1806 –1812 (St Petersburg: Voennaia tipografiia, 1885– 87), 1:76 – 8, 2:448– 9. 121. Idem, Voina Rossii s Turtsiei. Dunaiskaia kampaniia, 1853 – 1854 (St Petersburg: Voennaia tipografiia, 1890), 1:89. The necessity to substitute

NOTES

122. 123.

124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

130.

131.

132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138.

TO PAGES

118 –121

247

wheat for rye was mentioned as one of the negative factors in the campaign of Munnich against the Crimea. See Manshtein, Zapiski Manshteina, 82. M.K. Marchenko, Rossiia i Turtsia v XIX stoletii (Obstanovka chetyrekh poslednikh voin) (St Petersburg: Berezovskii, 1898), 47. Liprandi, ‘Obshchie svedeniia’, 23 and note 12. In his correspondence with Catherine the Great, P.A. Rumiantsev argued that it was impossible to plan a campaign against the Ottomans as one could plan a European war. In his testimony, every venture to the right side of the Danube revealed the imprecision of the existing maps and the reliable geographical knowledge extended only to those territories that were occupied by the Russian troops. Rumiantsev to Catherine II, 28 October 1773, ChIOIDR, no. 2 (1865): 293. Liprandi, ‘Obshchie svedeniia’, 23 – 4, note 12. Cf. Raan, Perechen’ iz sobstvennogo svoego zhurnala, 92 – 3. Khristian Vitt, O svoistvakh klimata Valakhii i Moldavii, i o tak nazyvaemoi Valashskoi iazve (St Petersburg: Grech, 1842), v –vi. Raan, Perechen’ iz sobstvennogo svoego zhurnala, 26 – 7. Martos, ‘Zapiski inzhenernogo ofitsera Martosa’, 318– 19. V.B. Bronevskii, Zapiski morskogo ofitsera (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1838), 3:148. See Krasnokutskii, Dnevnye zapiski poezdki v Konstantinopol’, 5; P.I. Panafidin, Pis’ma morskogo ofitsera, 1806– 1809 (Petrograd: Morskoe ministerstvo, 1916), 55. See, for example, P.P. Svin’in’s descriptions of the Muslim houses at Tenedos in 1807, Svin’in, Vospominaniia na flote, 2:48, or the description of Adrianople in A.I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, ‘Zapiski’, Russkaia Starina, no. 8 (1893): 374. Martos, ‘Zapiski inzhenernogo ofitsera Martosa’, 318– 19; Svin’in, Vospominaniia na flote, 2:49. See also V.G. Tepliakov, Pis’ma iz Bolgarii (Moscow: Semen, 1833), 118. Fonton, Vospominaniia, 40. Liprandi, Nekotorye zamechaniia, 10 – 11. L.N. Engel’gart, Zapiski, ed. I.M. Fediukin (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1997), 83. Tuchkov, ‘Zapiski’, 378. Lanzheron, ‘Zapiski grafa Lanzherona’, Russkaia starina, no. 7 (1907): 85 – 6. A.N. Murav’ev, Puteshestvie ko Sviatym Mestam v 1830 godu. 2 vols. St Petersburg: Tret’e otdeleniie Sobstvennoi E. I. V. kantseliarii, 1832), 1:18 – 19. For these reasons, one can assume together with Tornau that the failure of the Russian troops to capture Constantinople was not the only cause of the disappointment of the Russian officer corps at the precipitous conclusion of the Adrianople treaty in 1829. Tornau, Vospominaniia russkogo ofitsera, 108. The dissatisfaction of the Russian army with the peace of Adrianople is reported by other Russian and foreign writers. See, for example, Zeidlits, ‘Iz vospominanii doktora Zeidlitsa’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 5 (1878): 88; George Thomas Keppel,

248

139. 140.

141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

147.

148. 149. 150. 151.

152. 153.

154.

NOTES

TO PAGES

122 –125

Earl of Albemarle, A Narrative of a Journey Across the Balkan (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831), 1:233. P.V. Zhadovskii, ‘Moldaviia i Valakhiia v sovremennosti’, Panteon 25, no. 1 (1856): 53. Martos, ‘Zapiski inzhenernogo ofitsera Martosa’, 452. Tornau and Zhadovskii describe their engagement in such flirtation. See Tornau, Vospominaniia russkogo ofitsera, 75 – 7; Zhadovskii, ‘Moldaviia i Valakhiia v sovremennosti’, 35 – 6. Lanzheron, ‘Zapiski grafa Lanzherona’, Russkaia starina, no. 3 (1908): 715. Ibid., no. 7 (1910): 167– 8; no. 8 (1911): 257– 60. D.M. Bantysh-Kamenskii, Puteshestviie v Moldaviiu, Vlakhiiu i Serbiiu v 1808 (St Petersburg: Reshetnikov, 1810), 71 –2. F.W. Bauer, Zapiski povestvovatel’nye i zemleopisatel’nyie o kniazhestve volosskom (St Petersburg: Imperatorskaia tipographiia, 1791), 23. Tornau, Vospominaniia russkogo ofitsera, 128. Zhadovskii, ‘Moldaviia i Valakhiia v sovremennosti’, 71. Russian perceptions of the Romanian principalities are discussed in Victor Taki, ‘Moldavia and Wallachia in the Eyes of Russian Observers in the First Half of the 19th Century’, East Central Europe/L’Europe Du Centre Est. Eine wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 32, nos.1 – 2 (2005), 199– 224. Keppel, A Narrative of a Journey, 2:228, 230– 1. The author attributes the rebelliousness of Turkish women to the effects of the reforms of Mahmud II that undermined traditional Muslim institutions. Tornau, Vospominaniia russkogo ofitsera, 114. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Zapiski russkogo ofitsera’, 180. Ibid., 190. Bronevskii cites the work of William Eton, A Survey of the Turkish Empire (London: Cardel and Davies, 1798), on the reasons of the spectacular assent and subsequent decline of the Ottoman Empire. See Bronevskii, Zapiski morskogo ofitsera, 3:157– 62, but his familiarity with Western orientalist literature probably extended beyond that. Ibid., 147– 8. See Predskazanie o padenii Turetskogo tsarstva araviiskogo zvezdoslova MustaEddina (St Petersburg: Bogdanovich, 1789). In parallel, the Russians discovered the so-called Agathangelos prophecy about the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the end of the Ottoman dominance ca. 400 years later. Attributed to the fictional thirteenth-century Sicilian monk Hieronymus Agathangelos, the prophecy was actually the work of the Greek ecclesiastical writer Theoklitos Polyides, who lived in the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1783, the Russian ambassador in Constantinople Ia.I. Bulgakov sent the text of this prophecy to Potemkin. See ‘Bumagi Bulgakova’, SIRIO 47 (1885): 74 – 8. N.V. Putiata, ‘Pis’mo N.V. Putiaty k E.A. Baratynskomu iz Adrianopolia v 1829 g.’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 1 (1878): 217.

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155. Tornau, Vospominaniia russkogo ofitsera, 103. The sparing of mosques in 1828– 29 is confirmed by Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, ‘Zapiski A.I. MikhailovskogoDanilevskogo’, Russkaia Starina, no. 8 (1893): 369, 376. The testimony of Russian authors is both confirmed and disproved by George Keppel. The British author mentions the efforts of the Russian command aimed at the preservation of order and protection of Muslim property and mosques. A Narrative of a Journey, 2:218– 19. At the same time, he saw in those measures a calculated policy which was otherwise at variance with the ‘the habits of violence and rapine that have made [Russians] a by-word with civilized Europe’. According to Albemarle, sometimes the mosques were desecrated by those very troops that were assigned to guard them. The way Russians used the Turkish baths also offended Muslim sensibilities. Ibid., 172. 156. Murav’ev, Puteshestvie ko Sviatym Mestam, 1:11. 157. Ibid., 12. 158. This applies to the overwhelming majority of entries in M.K. Baskhanov’s Russkie voennye vostokovedy do 1917: Biobibliograficheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 2005). For Russian military orientalism in late Imperial Russia, see A.A. Vigasin, A.N. Khokhlov and P.M. Shastit’ko, eds, Istoriia otechestvennogo vostokovedeniia s serediny XIX veka do 1917 goda (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1997), 134– 56. See also Alex Marshal, The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800– 1917 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 46 – 66.

Chapter 4 ‘The Sick Man’ 1. Nicholas I to the British ambassador in St Petersburg Sir G.H. Seymour as reported by the latter to the British minister of foreign affairs Lord John Russell, 11 January 1853, Correspondence Respecting the Rights and Privileges of the Latin and Greek Churches in Turkey (London: Harrison and Sons, 1854), 5:876–7. 2. According to Harold Temperley, the Blue Book did not report the tsar’s true words out of a ‘mistaken sense of decorum’. In Seymour’s original reports, Nicholas I compared the Ottoman Empire to a sick or dying bear rather than a sick or dying man. Harold Temperley, England and the Near East: The Crimea (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936), 272. 3. [V.V. Grigor’ev], ‘Poezdka v Konstantinopol’ Izafeti Makluba’, Odesskii al’manakh na 1840 g., ed. D.M. Kniazhevich (Odessa: Gorodskaia tipografiia, 1839), 642–701; I.N. Berezin, ‘Obzor trekhletnego puteshestviia po Vostoku’, Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 55, no. 7 (1847): 1–24. 4. Accordingly, ‘Orientalism’ is taken here, as everywhere in this book, in its broader meaning of a ‘style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”’; see Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 7. 5. In the words of Adeeb Khalid, Russian orientalism was at least as much about Russia’s ‘unrequited relationship’ with ‘Europe’ as about its relations

250

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

NOTES

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with ‘Asia’; see his ‘Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism’, Orientalism and Empire in Russia, 29. Khalid’s piece originally appeared in the debate on Russian orientalism in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 691 – 727; Khalid was responding to Nathaniel Knight, ‘Grigor’ev in Orenburg, 1851 – 1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?’, Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 74 – 100. Marshall Poe, A People Born To Slavery; Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. Said, Orientalism, 7. Nestor Iskander’s mid-fifteenth-century ‘Tale of the Capture of Tsar’grad by the Turks’ (in Medieval Russia: A Source Book 850 – 1700, ed. Basil Dmytryshin [Fort Worth: Holt, Reinhardt and Wilson, 1991], 214–21) can perhaps be called the earliest Russian account of the Ottoman Empire, or rather of the circumstances of its foundation; it influenced many subsequent authors. The ‘Tale’ reproduces the standard Church interpretation of the fall as God’s punishment for Greek apostasy, in which ‘the Godless Mehmed’ was but a weapon of divine retribution. I.S. Peresvetov, ‘Bol’shaia chelobitnaia’, in Biblioteka literatury Drevnei Rusi, eds, D.S. Likhachev et al. (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1997 – 2006), 9:441. On Peresvetov see, A.V. Karavashkin, Russkaia srednevekovaia publitsistika (Moscow: Prometei, 2000), 27 – 126; A.A. Zimin, I.S. Peresvetov i ego sovremenniki (Moscow: Nauka, 1958). This coincides with positive evaluations of the Ottoman political system, or at least an absence of dismissive attitudes, in the writings of Machiavelli or Jean Bodin. Zimin, I.S. Peresvetov i ego sovremenniki, 291. Daniel Clarke Waugh, ‘Seventeenth Century Muscovite Pamphlets with Turkish Themes: Towards a Study of Muscovite Literary Culture in its European Settling’ (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1972). Idem, The Great Turkes Defiance. On the History of the Apocryphal Correspondence of the Ottoman Sultan in its Muscovite and Russian Variants. Foreword by D.S. Likhachev (Columbus, Ohio: The Slavica Publishers, 1978), 6, 10. Published in ibid., 213–14. Cited in B.M. Dantsig, Blizhnii Vostok v russkoi nauke i literature (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), 28. Greek clergymen and laymen living in Constantinople sent such reports since the beginning of the Candian war in 1645. See B.N. Florea, ‘Rossiia, stambul’skie greki i nachalo Kandiiskoi voiny’, Slaviane i ikh sosedi, vyp. 6. Grecheskii i slavianskii mir v seredine veka i rannee novoe vremia, ed. B.N. Florea (Moscow: Indrik, 1996), 174– 87. N.F. Kapterev, Kharakter otnoshenii Rossii k Pravoslavnomu Vostoku v XVI i v XVII stoletiiakh (Moscow: Snegirev, 1885), 262– 3. The founder of the Bogoiavlenskii monastery, Arsenii Sukhanov, who travelled across the Ottoman Empire in 1649– 53 and again in 1654, added ‘that all Christians are

NOTES

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

TO PAGES

133 –136

251

envisioning Aleksei Mikhailovich taking Constantinople’; Dantsig, Blizhnii Vostok, 32. Kapterev, Kharakter otnoshenii, 265. Ibid., 271; see also A.A. Kochiubinskii, Snosheniia Rossii pri Petre Pervom s iuzhnymi slavianami i rumynami (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1872), 6 – 7. Sapozhnikova and Sapozhnikova, eds, Mechta o russkom edinstve. Kievskii synopsis, 233. Cited in Sumtsev, ‘Ioannikii Galiatovskii’, 578. Lyzlov, Skifskaia istoriia, 268– 70. On the mutual perceptions of the Russians and the Ottomans in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, see V.I. Sheremet, ‘Vzaimnye predstavleniia russkikh i turok (XVIII – XIX vv.)’, Chelovek v kontekste kul’tury. Slavianskii mir, ed. I.I. Svirida (Moscow: Indrik, 1995), 219– 34; idem, ‘Russkie i turki: razvitie vzaimnykh predstavlenii’, Rossiia i Balkany: Iz istorii obshchestvenno-politicheskikh i kul’turnykh sviazei (XVIII – 1878 g.), ed. I.S. Dostian (Moscow: Indrik, 1995), 278– 99. Tolstoi, Russkii posol v Stambule, 48. Ibid., 37 – 8. Ibid., 58. [Claude Alexandre de Bonneval], Izvestie o dvukh vozmushcheniiakh, sluchivshikhsia v Konstantinopole 1730 i 1731 goda pri nizlozhenii Akhmeta III i vozvedenii na prestol Magometa (St Petersburg: n. p., 1738), after the original French edition [Claude Alexandre de Bonneval], Relation de deux rebellions arrive´es a Constantinople en 1730 en 1731 dans la de´position d’Ahmed III et l’e´le´vation au troˆne de Mahomet V (La Haye: Clousier, 1737). ‘Pervaia reliatsiia A.A. Veshniakova s Bosfora’, in Kochiubinskii, Graf Andrei Ivanovich Osterman i razdel Turtsii, xiv. Cited in ibid., 150. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Voennoe sostoianie Ottomanskoi imperii s ee prirashcheniem i upadkom (St Petersburg: n. p., 1737); [Paul Rycaut], Monarkhiia Turetskaia opisannaia cherez byvshego angliiskogo sekretaria posol’stva pri Ottomanskoi Porte. Perevod s Pol’skogo (St Petersburg: n. p., 1741). Written in Latin in 1716, Cantemir’s work was published in English in 1734 (The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire, trans. N. Tindal, 2 vols [London: Knapton, 1734– 35]) and again in 1756; French and German editions followed in 1743 and 1744. On the Russian translation of Cantemir’s main historical work, see P.V. Gusterin, ‘Ob odnom istoricheskom trude Dmitriia Kantemira’, in idem, Pervyi rossiiskii vostokoved Dmitrii Kantemir (Moscow: Vostochania kniga, 2008), 32 – 9. Remarkably, eighteenth-century Russians had little use for Cantemir’s scholarly work. Thus, more than a century elapsed before the appearance of the Russian edition of the excerpts from Cantemir’s magnum opus, History of Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire, by which time the work had lost its

252

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

NOTES

TO PAGES

137 –139

scholarly value. See Istoriia Turetskogo gosudarstva ot samogo osnovaniia onogo do noveishikh vremen. Perevod s nemetskogo. 2 vols. (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1828). This edition was an abriged translation from the German edition of 1744, rather than an earlier Russian translation of the Latin original, which was made in 1719. Cantemir’s rather dispassionate description of Islamic law translated into Russian in 1722 provoked the ire of the Russian Holy Synod for deviating from a standard Orthodox perspective and it took the tsar’s personal intervention to get the book published. See Kniga Sistima, ili Sostoianie mukhamedanskiia religii (St Petersburg: n. p., 1722). Although the author never visited the Ottoman Empire himself, he perused the available eyewitness accounts such as Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq’s Turkish Letters (1581), Guillaume-Joseph Grelot’s Relation nouvelle d’un voyage de Constantinople (1680) and Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s L’Etat militaire de l’Empire Ottoman (1732) in order to provide the readers ‘with such a pristine looking glass through which they could from their warm quarters observe the Ottoman Porte and see the extensive Turkish state with its major cities, the political organization of this Empire as well as the way of life and habits of the inhabitants in war and peace’. ‘O turetskoi zemle i o turkakh’, Primechaniia k vedomostiam, no. 23 – 4 (1739): 82. The author followed Lyzlov in drawing an unfavourable comparison between Turkey and the European countries in terms of population. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 95. [Prokudin-Gorskii], Pis’ma, 77. A.F. Emin, Kratkoe opisanie drevneishego i noveishego sostoianiia Ottomanskoi Porty (St Petersburg: Morskoi shliakhetskii kadetskii korpus, 1769), 9. Ibid., 78 – 9. Ibid., 80 – 1. For a recent discussion of the role of the Phanariots in the Ottoman governance, see Christine M. Philliou, Biography of an Empire: Governing the Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 5 – 37. Emin, Kratkoe opisaniie, 81 – 2. On Voulgaris, see A.S. Sturdza, ‘Euge`ne Boulgaris et Nice´phore Teotokis, Pre´curseurs du re´veil intellectuel et national de la Gre`ce’, in idem, Oeuvres posthumes religieuses, historiques, philosophiques et litte´raires (Paris: Dentu, 1858– 61), 3:267 – 311; Stephen K. Batalden, Catherine II’s Greek Prelate: Eugenios Voulgaris in Russia, 1771– 1806 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1982). Voulgaris wrote his piece in 1772, still before the end of the war. [Eugenios Voulgaris], Rassuzhdeniia na deistvitel’no kriticheskoe sostoianie Ottomanskoi Porty (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1780), 4. Ibid., 51 – 2. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 62. See Izobrazhenie taktiki, ili iskusnyi obraz voisk ustanovleniia, obnarodovannoe i napechatannoe v Konstantinopole na turetskom iazyke Ibragimom

NOTES

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

TO PAGES

139 –142

253

Effendiem Muteferrikom (St Petersburg: Kleen and Geike, 1777), after the French edition Traite´ de tactique: ou, Me´thode artificielle pour l’ordonnance des troupes (Vienna: Trattenern, 1769). On the Ottoman perception of Petrine reforms in the context of the early attempts at Westernization of the Ottoman Empire, see A.V. Vitol, ‘Osmanskaia imperiia nachala XVIII v. i preobrazovaniia Petra I v Rossii (voennyi aspekt)’, in XVIII vek: Slavianskie i balkanskie narody i Rossiia, ed. I.I. Leshchilovskaia (Moscow: Institut slavianovedeniia i balkanistiki RAN, 1998), 91 – 8. [Voulgaris], Rassuzhdeniia, 19. Ibid., 75, 77 – 8. Puteshestviia po Vostoku v epokhu Ekateriny II, 11 note 1. [Levashev], ‘Tsaregradskie pis’ma’, in Puteshestviia po Vostoku v epokhu Ekateriny II, 39 – 40. The envoy in question was probably the French ambassador Charles Gravier de Vergennes (1755– 68), whose activities precipitated the Russian – Ottoman war of 1768– 74 and Levashev’s imprisonment in Yedikule. [Levashev], ‘Tsaregradskie pis’ma’, 60. In 1774, Levashev also wrote Kartina ili opisanie vsekh nashestvii na Rossiiu tatar i turkov (St Petersburg: n. p., 1792), in order to ‘incite compatriots to pay greater attention than before to these savage, but numerous and very harmful’ adversaries. See Alan F. Fisher, ‘Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine II’, Slavic Review 27, no. 4 (1968): 542 – 53; Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 31 – 91. On the classification of different peoples of empire according to their level of civilization, see Yuri Slezkine, ‘Naturalists vs. Nations: Eighteenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity’, in Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, eds, Daniel Brower and Edward L. Lazzerini (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 28 – 57. P.P. Ostrogorskii, ‘Preduvedomlenie’, in [Madeleine Ange´lique de Gomez], Anegdoty ili dostopamiatneishie istoricheskie deianiia ottomanskogo Dvora, trans. P.P. Ostrogorskii (St Petersburg: Ovchinnikov, 1787), 1:9. Stat’i iz Entsiklopedii prinadlezhashchie k Turtsii. 2 vols. (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1769); Osmanskoe gosudarstvo v Evrope i Respublika Raguzskaia. Iz Bishingovoi geografii (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1770). The original German edition: Anton Friedrich Bu¨sching, Erdbeschreibung. 7 vols. (Hamburg, 1754 –61); English edition: idem, A New System of Geography. 6 vols. (London, 1762). John Bell, Belevy puteshestviia cherez Rossiiu v razlichnye aziatskie zemli: V Ispagan, v Pekin, v Derbent i Konstantinopl’. 3 vols. (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1776), after the French edition Jean Bell d’Antermony, Voyages depuis St. Petersbourg en Russie dans diverses contre´es d’Asie. 3 vols. (Paris: Robin, 1766); F. Kalvert, Puteshestvie angliiskogo lorda Baltimura iz Konstantinopolia cherez Rumeliiu, Bolgariiu, Moldaviiu, Pol’shu, Germaniiu i Frantsiiu v London

254

56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

NOTES TO PAGES 142 –143 (St Petersburg: Voennaia kollegiia, 1776), after the original English edition Frederick Calvert, Lord Baltimore, A Tour to the East in the Years of 1763 and 1764 with Remarks on the City of Constantinople and the Turks (London: Richardson and Clerk, 1767); Nicolaus Ernst Kleeman, Kleemanovo puteshestvie iz Veny v Belgrad i Novuiu Kiliu, takozh v zemli budzhakskikh i nogaiskikh tatar i vo ves’ Krym s vozvrashcheniem cherez Konstantinople, Smirnu i Triest v Avstriiu v 1768– 1770 gg. (St Petersburg: Voennaia kollegiia, 1783), after the original German edition Nicolaus Ernst Kleemans Reise von Wien nach Belgrad bis Kilianowa, durch die Butschak Tatarey u¨ber Kauschan, Bender durch die Nogay Tatarey in die Crimm, dann von Kaffa nach Konstantinople nach Smyrna. 2 vols. (Leipzig: Kraus, 1773). [Johann Gottlieb Seidenburg], Noveishie Izvestiia o Turetskoi imperii dlia tekh koi zhelaiut imet’ svedeniia o sostoianii onoi, osoblivo pri sluchae nyneshnei ee s Rossiiskoiu i Rumskoiu Imperiiami voiny (St Petersburg: Breitkopf, 1789), after the original German edition Johann Gottlieb Seidenburg, Neueste Nachrichten vom Tu¨rkischen Reiche (Berlin: Wever, 1788); Ignace Mouradja d’Ohsson, Polnaia kartina Ottomanskoi imperii. vol. 1 (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1795), after the original French edition Ignace Mouradja d’Ohsson, Tableau Ge´neral de l’Empire Ottoman. 4 vols. (Paris: Monsieur, 1787– 91). See also Frantsuz v Konstantinopole ili iasnoe i tochnoe opisanie turetskogo naroda (St Petersburg: Selivanskii, 1794). Constantin-Franc
ois Chassebœuf de Volney, Puteshestvie Vol’neia v Siriiu i Egipet byvshee v 1783, 1784 i 1785 godakh. 2 vols. (Moscow: Gippius, 1791– 93), after the German edition C. F. Volney’s Reise nach Syrien und Aegypten in den Jahren 1784, 1785 und 1786 (Jena: Maute, 1788); M. Kraven’, Puteshestvie v Krym i Konstantinopol’ v 1786 godu (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1795), after the French edition Elizabeth Berkley Craven, Voyage en Crimee et a` Constantinople en 1786 (Paris: Maradan, 1789). The drafts of memoranda that the Russian envoy in Constantinople, Baron G.A. Stroganov addressed to the Porte in 1816– 21 give a clue to the reading list of the Russian diplomats who served in the Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s. Stroganov’s papers contain the excerpts from the works by Elias Habesci, Etat actuel de l’Empire Ottoman (1792, original English edition: 1784); Volney’s, Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie (1787), John Griffith’s Nouveau voyage dans la Turquie d’Europe, en Asie et en Arabie (1812; original English edition: London, 1805), Williams Eton’s Tableau Historique, Politique et moderne de l’Empire Ottoman (1801; original English edition, 1798); Franc
ois Pouqueville’s Voyage en More´e, en Constantinople et en Albanie, anne´es 1798– 1801 (1805), Charles Sigisbert Sonnini’s Voyage en Grece et en Turquie fait par ordre du Louis XVI avec l’autorization de la cour Ottoman (1801) and Thomas Smart Hughes’s Voyage a` Janina en Albanie par la Sicile et la Gre`ce (1821; original English edition 1819). See RGADA, fond 15, op. 1, file 376, ll. 46 – 83. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism, 31 – 5, 38 – 43. Ibid., 91 – 109.

NOTES

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143 –145

255

61. Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance Orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950), 20 and passim. 62. On Uvarov, see Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786– 1855 (DeKalb, IL: Northern European University Press, 1984). See also Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism, 154– 9. 63. Ibid., 160– 9; G.F. Kim and P.M. Shastitko, eds, Istoriia otechestvennogo vostokovedeniia do serediny XIX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 202– 6. 64. B.M. Dantsig, Izuchenie Blizhnego Vostoka v Rossii (XIX – nachalo XX vv.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), 33, 40 –1, 53– 4, 63. 65. Ibid., 83 – 5. 66. Kim and Shastitko, eds, Istoriia otechestvennogo vostokovedeniia, 206. Following the premature death of V.F. Dittel’ in 1849, A.O. Mukhlinskii held the chair for Ottoman Turkish at St Petersburg University until 1866. Dantsig, Izuchenie Blizhnego Vostoka, 65 – 7. However, the first Russian osmanist was V.D. Smirnov, who was appointed to the chair for Ottoman Turkish in 1873. Smirnov not only had the Ottoman Empire as a primary field, but also left a significant scholarly legacy, including, among other things, the renowned ‘Compilation of the Works of Ottoman Literature’ and ‘History of Turkish Literature’. Besides language and literature, he also systematically taught the history of the Ottoman Empire. Ibid., 138– 9. 67. O.I. Senkovskii, ‘Rasskaz Rezmi effendia, ottomanskogo ministra inostrannykh del, o semiletnei bor’be Turtsii s Rossiei (1769– 1776)’, Biblioteka dlia chteniia 124 (1854): 1– 78. 68. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Turkish was also occasionally taught at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow, originally founded as a school for poor Armenian children in 1815. Kim and Shastit’ko, eds, Istoriia otechestvennogo vostokovedeniia, 206. 69. Nathaniel Knight, ‘Grigor’ev in Orenburg, 1851– 1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?’, Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 74 – 100; Adeeb Khalid, ‘Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 691– 9. 70. For a recent discussion of academic orientalism in late Imperial Russia, see Vera Tolz, ‘European, National and (Anti-) Imperial: The Formation of Academic Oriental Studies in Late Tsarist and Early Soviet Russia’, Orientalism and Empire in Russia, 107– 34, as well as her Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 71. Karamzin argued that with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, ‘a true and easy way to Asia will be opened to European enlightenment’. See ‘O vnutrennem polozhenii Turtsii’, Vestnik Evropy 6, no. 14 (1802): 157– 8. 72. Those not cited below include William Wittman’s Travels in Turkey, AsiaMinor, Syria, and across the desert into Egypt (1803), Antoine-Franc
ois Andre´ossy’s Voyage a` l’embouchure de la Mer-Noire (1813), Otto von Ranke’s

256

73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88.

89.

90.

NOTES TO PAGES 146 –150 Fu¨rsten und Vo¨lker von Su¨d-Europa (1827), Joseph-Franc
ois Michaud’s Correspondance d’Orient (1830 – 34), etc. ‘O nyneshnem sostoianii Turtsii’, Vestnik Evropy 89, no. 20 (1816): 295. The passage was taken from Travels of Ali Bey in Morocco, Tripoli, Cyprus, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Turkey, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: James Maxwell, 1816); the book’s true author was Domingo Badia y Leblich (1766– 1818), a Spanish explorer who adopted a Muslim identity (Ali Bei al-Abbassi) in order to facilitate his travels through the Muslim world. [Antoine Juchereau de St Denys], ‘Otryvki o Turtsii’, Syn otechestva 72, no. 36 (1821): 102–3. Ibid., 74, no. 49 (1821): 112. [K.I. Arsen’ev], ‘Turetskaia konstitutsiia’, Dukh zhurnalov, no. 11 (1818): 169 – 76. Ibid., 173. See [Conrad Malte-Brun], ‘Stat’ia o Turtsii iz Parizha’, Vestnik Evropy 121, no. 20 (1821): 302– 8. The original is [Conrad] Malte-Brun, ‘Aperc
us sur la grandeur et la de´cadence de l’Empire Ottoman’, in Nouvelles annales des voyages, de la ge´ographie et de l’histoire 11 (1821), 284– 327. [Malte-Brun], ‘Stat’ia o Turtsii iz Parizha’, 306. Malte-Brun, ‘Aperc
us sur la grandeur’, 300, 327. [Charles Deval], ‘Dva goda v Konstantinopole i Moree’, Syn otechestva 117, no. 3 (1828): 302. Charles Deval, Deux anne´es a` Constantinople et en More´e (1825 – 26) (Paris: Nepveu, 1827), 107. For the Russian edition of Deval’s book, see Dva goda v Konstantinopole i Moree (St Petersburg: Pliushar, 1828). [Louis de Bonald], ‘O Turtsii’, Vestnik Evropy 121, no. 19 (1821), 211. De Bonald, ‘Sur la Turquie’, Journal des De´bats (20 September 1821), 3. Charles MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828 (London: Saunders and Otley, 1829), 2:328. Interestingly, MacFarlane’s French translator rendered ‘improvement’ as ‘civilization’; see Charles MacFarlane, Constantinople et la Turquie en 1828, trans. M.M. Nettemment (Paris: Moutardier, 1829– 30), 3:18. MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828, 2:331. See Sharl’ Mak-Farlan, ‘O prichinakh nyneshnego polozheniia Turtsii’, Vestnik Evropy 168, no. 17 (1829): 63 – 7. I.G. Gur’ianov, Russkii v Tsar’grade ili istoricheskoe, topograficheskoe i statisticheskoe obozrenie Konstantinopolia i ego okrestnostei (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1828), 33. F. Luginin, ‘Vzgliad na turetskoe pravlenie’, Syn otechestva 118, no. 20 (1827): 389– 96. [S.N. Glinka], Kartina istoricheskaia i politicheskaia Porty Ottomanskoi (Moscow: Stepanov, 1830), 25 – 6; John Godfrey Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 2nd ed. (London: Luke Hanfard, 1803), 2:355. [S.N. Glinka], Obozrenie vnutrennosti Turtsii Evropeiskoi pocherpnutoe iz drevnikh i novykh pisatelei (Moscow: Reshetnikov, 1829), 9 – 10, citing Robert Val’sh,

NOTES

91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98.

TO PAGES

150 –152

257

Puteshestvie po Turtsii iz Konstantinopolia v Angliiu cherez Venu (St Petersburg: Pliushar, 1829), 189– 90. The Russian edition was translated from the French (Robert Walsh, Voyage en Turquie et Constantinople [Paris: Moutardier, 1828], 168– 9), which was in its turn translated from the original English edition: Robert Walsh, Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England (London: Westley and Davis, 1828), 221. I quote the original English edition. Istoricheskoe, statisticheskoe i politicheskoe obozrenie Porty Ottomanskoi (Moscow: Stepanov, 1829), 4 – 5. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 64 – 5. The parallel between the Janissaries and the Russian strel’tsy can be traced to Voltaire, L’Histoire de la Russie sous Pierre le Grand (Paris: Librairie de la Bibliothe`que Nationale, 1880), 1:45 – 6. Westernization of dress was another aspect of juxtaposition between the tsar and the sultan. Some observers, including Napoleon’s Marshall Auguste de Marmont, found that the new demi-kaftans, fezzes and narrow pants lacked the majesty of traditional Oriental vestments. See Auguste de Marmont, Puteshestviia Marshala Marmona, Gertsoga Raguzskogo (Moscow: Stepanov, 1841), 2:46; the original French edition: Auguste de Marmont, Voyage du mare´chal duc de Raguse, 4 vols. (Paris: Ladvocat, 1837). Others defended the adoption of European fashions by the ‘brave reformer of the Orient’. According to Alphonse Rouillet, the criticism levelled at Mahmud II for the change of dress was all the more unjust since ‘nobody blamed [Peter the Great] for the fact that the Russians shaved their beards and clipped their long caftans in order to become Europeans’; see ‘Sultan Mahmud i ego ministry’, Syn otechestva 4 (vtoroe dvadtsatipiatiletie), no. 3 (1838): 66. The Ottoman writers of the period also discussed the figure of Peter the Great in the context of the modernizing policies of the sultans. See Ilber Ortaily, ‘Rossiia posle reform Petra I i osmanskaia obshchestvennaia mysl’ XIX – nachala XX v.’, in Osmanskaia imperiia: problemy vneshnei politiki i otnosheniia s Rossiei, 222– 6. Senkovskii, ‘Sposobnosti i mneniia evropeiskikh puteshestvennikov po Vostoku’, Biblioteka dlia chteniia 13 (1835): 130. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 131. Some Western observers also praised Mahmud II’s measures against the separatist derebeys (lords of the valley). An article in the British Chronicle, republished in Russian as ‘Vzgliad na vnutrennee sostoianie Turetskoi Imperii’, Vestnik Evropy 165, no. 12 (1829): 298, claimed that ‘the situation of Turkey became different after Mahmud II abolished all hereditary immunities and governorships ( pashalyks) and started to govern them directly’. According to Alphonse Rouillet (‘Sultan Mahmud i ego ministry’, 80), the derebeys were not unlike French feudal lords: ‘After Mahmud has suppressed them, only Muhammad Ali (the ruler of Egypt) opposes his sovereign, just as the Duke of Burgundy opposed Louis XI.’ Naturally, such comparisons were supposed to

258

99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115.

116. 117.

NOTES

TO PAGES

152 –156

leave French (and Russian) readers with little doubt as to Mahmud’s eventual success. Senkovskii, ‘Sposobnosti i mneniia’, 137– 8. K.M. Bazili, Ocherki Konstantinopolia (St Petersburg: Grech, 1835), 1:69. Konstantinopol’ i turki (St Petersburg: Borodin, 1841), 1:43. Ibid., 44. N.S. Vsevolozhskii, Puteshestvie cherez Iuzhnuiu Rossiiu, Krym i Odessu v Konstantinopol’, Maluiu Aziiu, Severnuiu Afriku, Mal’tu, Sitsiliiu, Italiiu, Iuzhnuiu Frantsiiu i Parizh (Moscow: Semen, 1839), 201. The role of mimicry in colonial discourse has been explored by Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in his The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 85 – 92; in the Russian context, the phenomenon of colonial mimicry is addressed by Susan Layton, ‘Colonial Mimicry and Disenchantment in Alexander Druzhinin’s ‘A Russian Circassian’ and Other Stories’, The Russian Review 60, no. 1 (2001): 55 – 71. N.N. Murav’ev-Karskii, ‘Iz zapisok Nikolaia Nikolaevicha Murav’evaKarskogo’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 7 (1894): 370. Ibid., 373. Ibid., 373– 4. Ibid., 385. A.G. Cross, Peter the Great through British Eyes: Perceptions and Representations of the Tsar since 1698 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 43. Murav’ev-Karskii, ‘Iz zapisok Murav’eva-Karskogo’, 384– 5. ‘Istoricheskii i statisticheskii vzgliad na poslednee desiatiletie Turtsii’, Moskovskii Telegraf, no. 14 (1832): 262. Zeidlits, ‘Iz vospominanii doktora Zeidlitsa’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 5 (1878): 110. Vsevolozhskii, Puteshestvie, 267. Marmont was skeptical about Mahmud’s ability to emulate the reformer tsar, whose success, in Marmont’s opinion, was due to the fact that unlike the sultan, he ‘was uninvolved in the political affairs of Europe’ and dealt with a people who formed ‘a homogenous mass’. Marmont, Puteshestviia Marshala Marmona, 2:96. Vsevolozhskii, Puteshestvie, 268– 9. Ibid., 267. See also, I.N. Berezin, Poseshchenie tsarigradskikh dostoprimechatel’nostei vo vremia prebyvaniia v Konstantinopole Ego Vysochestva Velikogo Kniazia Konstantina Nikolaevicha v 1845 godu (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1854), 88. Marmont described the new Ottoman army as hastily assembled and poorly trained – a ‘motley crew of miserable and timid people’ commanded by officers ‘who lacked abilities and talents’; Marmont, Puteshestviia Marshala Marmona, 2:63. By contrast, the above-mentioned article in the British Chronicle cited approvingly the growing numbers of the new Ottoman army. ‘Vzgliad na vnutrennee sostoianie Turetskoi Imperii’, 298. [Grigor’ev], ‘Poezdka v Konstantinopol’ Izafeti-Makluba’, 680. Ibid., 678– 9.

NOTES

TO PAGES

156 –163

259

118. Auguste Marmont, The Present State of the Turkish Empire, trans. and ed. Frederick Smith (London: Oliver, 1839), 63. 119. K.M. Bazili, Siria i Palestina pod Turetskim pravleniem v 1847 godu (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1962 [1861]), 168. 120. [Grigor’ev], ‘‘Poezdka v Konstantinopol’ Izafeti-Makluba’, 681. 121. This was confirmed by Western reviewers of Mahmud II’s military reforms. See ‘Sravnitel’noe sostoianie turetskikh i egiptskikh voennykh sil’, Voennyi zhurnal, no. 2 (1837): 115, which was a Russian translation of an article from Le spectateur militaire. 122. Alabin, Chetyre voiny, 150. 123. M.P. Vronchenko, Obozrenie Maloi Azii v nyneshnem ee sostoianii (St Petersburg: Krai, 1839– 40), 1:247. Marmont, Puteshestviia Marshala Marmona, 2:89 – 90, criticizes the abolition of the timars and claims that the reform of local administration had been a failure as ‘the new officials appointed by the sultan lacked the authority that the lords of estates used to have over the people’. 124. Vronchenko, Obozrenie Maloi Azii, 261– 2. 125. Ibid., 267. 126. Vsevolozhskii, Puteshestvie, 271. See also Marmont’s remark that Mahmud’s imitation of Christian institutions and practices alienated Muslims, who no longer ‘religiously venerate the descendant of the Ottomans’: Marmont, Puteshestviia Marshala Marmona, 2:90. 127. See, respectively, Vsevolozhskii, Puteshestvie, 270, and N.N. Murav’ev-Karskii, Turtsiia i Egipet v 1832 i 1833 gg. (Moscow: Mamontov, 1869), 1:6. 128. Ibid. 129. Bazili, Bosfor i novye ocherki Konstantinopolia, 2:225 –6. 130. Tit Kosmokratov [V.P. Titov], ‘Vostochnaia zhizn’, Sovremennik, no. 4 (1837): 27 – 8. 131. Ibid. 132. [Grigor’ev], ‘Poezdka v Konstantinopol’ Izafeti-Makluba’, 670– 1. 133. Ibid., 671. 134. Ibid., 671– 2. 135. Ibid., 660– 1. 136. Ibid., 673. 137. [A.I. Davydov], Zhivopisnyie ocherki Konstantinopolia (St Petersburg: Prats, 1855), 85. 138. [M.A. Gamazov], ‘Ot Bosfora do Persidskogo zaliva’, Vremia, no. 6 (1861): 516. 139. Ibid., 517. 140. [Davydov], Zhivopisnyie ocherki Konstantinopolia, 85 – 6. 141. Ibid., 86. 142. E.P. Kovalevskii, ‘Stranstvovatel’ po sushe i po moriam. Part. 4. Nizhnii Dunai i Balkany’, Biblioteka dlia chteniia 94 (1849): 56, 64. 143. Ibid., 19.

260

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TO PAGES

163 –169

144. Ibid., 21. For similar perspective on the decay of the Ottoman provinces see, [Naiden Gerov], ‘Pis’ma iz Bolgarii’, Moskvitianin, no. 8 (1854): 110– 11. 145. N. Poliakov, Turtsiia v ee proshedshee i nastoiashchee vremia (Moscow: Stepanov, 1855), 60 – 7, 71 – 80. 146. Ibid., 61 – 3. 147. [Gamazov], ‘Ot Bosfora do persidskogo zaliva’, Vremia, no. 7 (1861): 514 – 15. 148. Senkovskii, review of E. Serchevskii’s Obozrenie Ottomanskoi imperi, Valakhii i Moldavii (1854) in Biblioteka dlia chteniia 124 (1854): 50. 149. [Davydov], Zhivopisnye ocherki Konstantinopolia, 45 –6. 150. Ibid., 112, 118– 19. The authors cited the reports of the wounded British soldiers about the hostility of the local population. 151. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 23 –4, 87 – 8. 152. The phenomenon was first explored in the Balkan context. See Milica BakicHayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917– 93. An even more interesting case is provided by orientalist representations of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire: Ussama Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768– 96; Christoph Herzog and Raoul Motilka, ‘Orientalism “alla Turca”: Late Nineteenth– Early Twentieth Century Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim “Outback”’, Die Welt der Islams 40, no. 2 (2000): 139– 95. In the Russian context, the same phenomenon is analyzed by Sara Dickinson, who uses the example of the symbolic construction of Crimea in the late eighteenth century in her ‘Russia’s First “Orient”: Characterizing Crimea in 1787’, Orientalism and Empire in Russia, 85 – 106. 153. As Dickinson does in ibid., 86 – 7.

Chapter 5 Peoples of Empire 1. Cypien Robert, ‘Le monde gre´co-slave’, Revue de deux mondes 29 (1842): 383. 2. Turetskaia imperiia v drevnem i nyneshnem ee sostoianii (Moscow: Kuzentsov, 1829), 7. Another description claimed, just as erroneously, that Turks constituted the majority of the population of Rumelia. See ‘O teatre voiny, slavno konchivsheisia mirom Adrianopol’skim’, Vestnik Evropy, no. 18 (1829): 152. Finally, M.V. Ladyzhenskii’s Vzgliad na Evropeiskuiu Turtsiiu i okrestnosti Konstantinopolia v topograficheskom i voennom otnoshenii s prisovokupleniem opisaniia glavneishikh postanovlenii Ottomanskoi imperii (St Petersburg: Sveshnikov, 1828) did not even discuss the Christian subjects of the sultan, which constituted the majority of the population of ‘Turkey in Europe’. 3. ‘O Turetskoi zemle i o Turkakh’, Primechaniia na Vedomosti, nos. 21 –2 (1739): 81 – 8; nos. 23 – 4 (1739): 89 – 96; nos. 25 – 6 (1739): 97 – 108. 4. Evropeiskaia Turtsia v sovremennom ee sostoianii (Moscow: Ernst, 1854). The size and composition of the population of ‘Turkey in Europe’ remained a matter of considerable speculation. M.A. Ubicini’s Lettres sur la Turquie (Paris: Dumaine,

NOTES

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

TO PAGES

169 –170

261

1853, Russian edition: M.A. Ubichini, Izobrazhenie sovremennogo sostoianiia Turtsii (St Petersburg, 1854), which was perhaps the most authoritative midnineteenth century statistical description of the Ottoman Empire, set the Muslim population in Europe at 2.1 million and the Christian Slavic at 6.2 million. Ubicini’s data were challenged by the Russian orientalist I.N. Berezin in ‘Sovremennaia Turtsia’, Zhurnal dlia chteniia vospitannikov voenno-uchebnykh zavedenii, no. 474 (1856): 149– 63. For an analysis of the discourse of Balkanism as distinct from orientalism, see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. Apart from the diplomatic histories of the Russian foreign policy in the Balkans, there is a voluminous literature on the subject of Russia’s relations with the Balkan peoples. See, A.P. Bazhova, Russko-iugoslavianskie otnosheniia vo vtoroi polovine XVIII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1982); eadem, Rossiia i iugoslaviane v kontse XVIII – nachale XIX veka (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1996); I.S. Dostian, ed., Rossia i Balkany. Iz istorii obshchestvenno-politicheskikh i kul’turnykh sviazei; I.I. Leshchilovskaia, ed., XVIII vek: Slavianskie i balkanskie narody i Rossiia; eadem, Serbskii narod i Rossiia v XVIII veke (St Petersburg: Aleteia, 2006). Studies of Russian perception of particular Balkan peoples are fewer and they focus on the early philological and ethnographical studies of Southern Slavs and their languages in Russia. M.M. Kerimova, Iugoslavianskie narody i Rossiia. Etnograficheskie siuzhety v russkikh publikatsiakh i dokumentakh pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii im. N.N. Miklukho-Maklaia, 1997); I.A. Kaloeva, Izuchenie iuzhnykh slavian v Rossii v XVIII – pervoi polovine XIX v. (Moscow: INON RAN, 2002). I.S. Dostian’s Russkaia obshchestvennaia mysl’ i balkanskie narody. Ot Radishcheva do dekabristov (Moscow: Nauka, 1980) constitutes an exception in this respect as it examines the writings of Russian diplomats and officers as well as press publications. In contrast to Dostian’s book, this chapter focuses on the Russian perception of the interethnic relations within the Orthodox community of the Ottoman Empire rather than on the Russian views of Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians as such. Paul Bushkovich, Religion and Society in Russia. The Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 51 –73. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in the Making of Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Harold B. Segel, ‘Classicism and Classical Antiquity in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature’, in The Eighteenth Century in Russia, ed. J.G. Garrard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 48– 71. Stephen Baehr, ‘From History to National Myth: Translatio Imperii in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, Russian Review 37, no. 1 (1978): 1 –13. For two different approaches towards the role of classical imagery in the relations between the eighteenth century Russian rulers and elites, see Wortman, Scenarios of Power, and Cynthia H. Whittaker, Russian Monarchy: Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political Dialogue (DeKalb, IL:

262

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

NOTES

TO PAGES

171 –175

Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). On the consolidation of the dynasty, see Richard S. Wortman, ‘Russian Imperial Family as a Symbol’, in Imperial Russia: New Histories for Empire, eds, Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 60 – 85. See David L. Ransel, The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). For the role of the aristocratic parties during the reign of Catherine, see also John L. LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762– 1796 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). V.O. Kliuchevskii, O russkoi istorii (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1993), 509; Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla, 39. Voltaire and Catherine II, Correspondance, ed. Alexandre Stroev (Paris: Non Lieu, 2006), 68, 76, 79, 83, 105, 130, 143, 155, 159, 221–2. Proskurina, Mify imperii, 149– 63. Ibid., 163– 74. Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla, 40 – 1. Batalden, Catherine’s Greek Prelate, 24. For the merging of the Christian and classical imagery in the odes of Gavriil Derzhavin, who became the most important Russian poet by the time of the second Russian – Ottoman war of Catherine’s reign, see Proskurina, Mify imperii, 192. Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla, 36. Tolstoi, Russkii posol v Stambule, 38, [Levashev], ‘Tsaregradskie pis’ma’, 80. See also A.A. Titov, Konstantinopol’ v opisanii russkogo puteshestvennika v polovine XVIII veka (Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1911), 16. [Levashev], ‘Tsaregradskie pis’ma’, 80 – 4. [Prokudin-Gorskii], Pis’ma, 77. Ibid., 78. ‘Zhurnal Stepana Petrova syna Khmetevskogo o voennykh deistviiakh russkogo flota v arkhipelage i u beregov Maloi Azii v 1770–1774’, Sovremennik, no. 1 (1855): 73, 81. A.G. Orlov to Catherine II, cited in SIRIO 1 (1867): 43, note. Kokovtsev, Opisanie Arkhipelaga i Varvariiskogo Berega, 70 – 71. Tolstoi, Russkii posol v Stambule, 43. [Struve], Travels in the Crimea, 90. Ibid., 267. Langeron, ‘Journal des campagnes faites en service de Russie’, Documente privitoare la istoria romaˆnilor, supplement 1 (Bucures¸ti: Socecu, 1885–96), 3:73. Konstantin Kantakuzin, ‘Kartina Valakhii’, Vestnik Evropy 52, no. 14 (1810): 147– 8. Although the Cantacuzino family claimed to be the descendants of the Byzantine emperor John V Cantacuzene, they had long been assimilated into the Wallachian aristocracy and by the eighteenth century had become the leaders of the ‘autochthonous’ boyar opposition to the Phanariots.

NOTES

TO PAGES

175 –177

263

33. Ibid., 150. 34. See, ‘O sile fanariotov v Turetskom pravitel’stve’, Syn otechestva, no. 19 (1828): 381– 91. This text, taken from Revue Etrange`re, described the involvement of the Phanariot Greeks in the distribution of appointments in the Ottoman government in which they were important mediators by virtue of their possession of great capitals. 35. Krasnokutskii, Dnevnye zapiski puteshestviia v Konstantinopol’, 89. 36. [Franc
ois Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville], ‘Obychai, poveriia i predrassudki nyneshnikh grekov’, Vestinik Evropy 152, no. 5 (1827): 52 – 3. Original edition: Franc
ois Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville, Voyage dans la Gre`ce (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1822–1827), 6:123. 37. ‘Otryvki iz puteshestviia g-na Shatobriana’, Vestnik Evropy 35, no. 18 (1807): 83. This was a translation of excerpts that Chateaubriand published in French journals four years prior to the first complete edition of Rene´ Chateaubriand’s Itine´raire de Paris a` Je´rusalem et de Je´rusalem a` Paris, 3 vols. (Paris: Le Normant, 1811). For the French original of the cited passage, see ibid., 1:263. 38. Panafidin, Pis’ma morskogo ofitsera, 49 – 50. 39. On the discussion of the policy towards the Ottoman Empire in the early years of Alexander I’s reign, see Dostian, Rossiia i balkanskii vopros, 43 – 4; A.M. Stanislavskaia, Russko-angliiskie otnosheniia i problemy sredizemnomor’ia, 1798 – 1807 (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1962), 197– 203; 343– 4. 40. On Kapodistrias’ career in Russia, see Paricia Kennedy-Grimstead, ‘Capodistrias and a ‘New Order’ for Restoration Europe: The ‘Liberal Ideas’ of a Russian Foreign Minister, 1814– 1822’, The Journal of Modern History 40, no. 2 (1968): 166– 92; G.L. Arsh, I. Kapodistriia i grecheskoe natsional’noosvoboditel’noe dvizhenie 1809– 1822 (Moscow: Nauka, 1976). 41. G.L. Arsh’s Eteristskoe dvizhenie v Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), remains the definitive study of the subject. For a recent discussion of the Philiki Etaireia uprising within a broader context of Romantic rebellions of the post-Napoleonic period, see Richard Stites, The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 186–239. 42. See Theophilus C. Prousis, Russian Society and the Greek Revolution (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), 26 – 54. On the ‘parting of ways’, see N.V. Riasanovsky, A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801– 1855 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). 43. See, for example, ‘Vzgliad na postupki Turkov s podvlastnymi Grekami’, Severnyi arkhiv 26, no. 5 (1827): 56 – 75, which is an excerpt from the voyage to Greece of Demetrios and Nikolai Stefanopoli that offers a characteristic example of monopolization of victimhood by the Greek intellectuals. 44. ‘Vozrozhdenie Grekov’, Vestnik Evropy 137, no. 13 (1822): 57 – 67, which adopted the perspective of Pouqueville’s Histoire de la regeneration de la Gre`ce. 4 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1824). The same line of argument was continued by Istoriia grecheskikh proisshestvii (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1824),

264

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58.

NOTES

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177 –180

based on Claude Denis Raffenel’s Histoire des e´ve`nements de la Greˆce (Paris: Dondey & Dupre´, 1822). Putiata, ‘Pis’mo N.V. Putiaty k E.A. Baratynskomu’, 215. This is confirmed by the Greek relief aid to which representatives of virtually all social segments of the Russian society made a contribution during the 1820s. See Prousis, Russian Society and the Greek Revolution, 55 – 83. I.V. Sabaneev to P.D. Kiselev, 22 February 1821, cited in I.F. Iovva, Bessarabiia i grecheskoe natsional’no-osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie (Kishinev: Shtiintsa, 1974), 174. See Theophilus C. Prousis, Russian Society and the Greek Revolution, 84 – 160. Tepliakov, Pis’ma iz Bolgarii, 60 – 1. Ibid., 62. Apparently, the first Russian who noticed the existence of Montenegrins was Peter the Great’s ambassador to Constantinople P.A. Tolstoi, who prior to his appointment studied the naval techniques in Italy and visited the Adriatic coast. See, ‘Putevoi dnevnik P.A. Tolstogo’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 5 (1888): 13. Although Tolstoi referred to the inhabitants of the Black Mountain as a ‘free people’, that was ‘subject to no one’, formally Montenegro was part of the Ottoman Empire to which it would occasionally pay tribute. In the course of the eighteenth century, the Russian government dispatched a number of military – diplomatic missions to Montenegro, including those of M.I. Miloradovich and Ivan Lukashich in 1711, Counsellor S. Puchkov in 1758– 60, Sub-lieutenant Mikhailo Tarasov in 1766 and Prince Iu.V. Dolgorukii in 1769. For a general discussion of these relations, see N.I. Khitrova, ‘Russkochernogoskie sviazi v XVIII v.’, XVIII vek: Slavianskie balkanskie narody i Rossiia, 6 – 26. Bazhova, Russko-iugoslavianskie sviazi vo vtoroi polovine XVIII v., 72 – 4. Cited in ibid., 82. See ‘Zhurnal’naia zapiska proisshestviam vo vremia ekspeditsii ego siiatel’stva kniazia Iuriia Vladimirovicha Dolgorukogo v Chernuiu Goru’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 4 (1886): 403. For another unflattering contemporary description of the Montenegrins, see Iu.V. Kostiashov, ‘Iovan Balevich i ego “Opisanie Chernogorii”’, Slavianovedenie, no. 1 (1998): 41 – 2. Michael B. Petrovich, ‘Catherine II and a False Peter III in Montenegro’, American Slavic and East European Review 14, no. 2 (1955): 169– 94; M.M. Freidenberg, ‘Stepan Malyi iz Chernogorii’, Voprosy istorii, no. 10 (1975): 118 – 32. On Karazin’s mission see, V.N. Vinogradov, ed., Vek Ekateriny II. Dela Balkanskie (Moscow: Nauka, 2000), 147– 8. Dostian, Rossiia i Balkanskii vopros, 40. See the 1784 address of the knezes of Raska to Catherine II complaining about the Ottoman abuses and signaling their readiness to rebel in A.L. Narochnitskii, N. Petrovich, eds, Politicheskie i kul’turnye otnosheniia Rossii s iugoslavianskimi zemliami v XVIII v. Dokumenty (Moscow: Nauka, 1984), 329. On Catherine’s relations with the Serbs during this period, see Bazhova,

NOTES

59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

TO PAGES

180 –181

265

Russko-iugoslavianskie otnosheniia; Vinogradov, ed. Vek Ekateriny II, 197– 200. For Pan-Slavic schemes of Alexander I, see George Vernadsky, ‘Alexandre Ier et le proble`me Slave pendant la premie`re moitie´ de son re`gne’, Revue des e´tudes Slaves 7 (1927): 94– 111. Thus, the Russian translation of Mavro Orbini’s Kingdom of the Slavs, published by the Herzegovinian nobleman in the Tsar’s service, Sava Vladislavic Raguzinskii, asserted that Ragusa retained its original liberty after its brave resistance to Suleiman II and Murad III, but failed to mention that the representatives of the republic were bringing the yearly tribute to the sultan on their knees. See Kniga istoriografiia pochatiia imeni, slavy i rasshirenia naroda slavianskogo (St Petersburg: n. p., 1722), 176. Vasilije Petrovic´, ‘Istoria o Chornoi Gory’, ChIOIDR, no. 2 (1860): 14. Jovan Rajic´, Istoriia raznykh slovenskikh narodov, naipache zhe bolgar, khorvatov i serbov (Moscow: Korpus chuzhestrannykh edinovertsev, 1795), xii– xiii, 22 – 5. I.A. Kaloeva, Izuchenie iuzhnykh slavian v Rossii v XVIII – pervoi polovine XIX vv. (Moscow: INION RAN, 2002); M.I. Kerimova, Iugoslavianskie narody i Rossiia: Etnograficheskie siuzhety v russkikh publikatsiakh i dokumentakh pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii im. N.N. Mikliukho-Maklaia RAN, 1997), 23 – 40. ‘Zhiteli oblasti Montenegro ili Chernogortsy’, Vestnik Evropy 20, no. 7 (1805): 240– 9; ‘Statisticheskie svedeniia o chernogorskoi oblasti’, Vestnik Evropy 36, no. 22 (1807): 144– 9. Although the Ottoman authorities lost any effective control over Montenegrins in 1796, when the latter defeated the pasha of Skodr Mahmud Bushatli, the Porte refused to recognize the independence of this small country until 1878. V.B. Bronevskii, Zapiski morskogo ofitsera v prodolzhenii kampanii na Sredizemnom more pod nachal’stvom D. I. Seniavina ot 1805 po 1810 g. 4 vols. (St Petersburg: Morskaia tipografiia, 1818 –19). The description of Montenegro was initially published separately as ‘Opisanie Chernogorii’, Syn otechestva 46, no. 28 (1818): 50– 9, and was to a large extent the work of Semen Ivanovich Mazarovich, a native of Bocca di Cattaro and a graduate of an Italian university, who in 1807 entered the Russian diplomatic service, as well as of the Russian naval officers N.V. Korobka and P.I. Panafidin, to which Bronevskii added his own impressions. See Dostian, Russkaia obshchestvennaia mysl’, 155 – 7. Bronevskii disputed the honour of the first Russian author to provide the first published description of Montenegro with P.P. Svin’in. See the latter’s ‘Vospominaniia o plavanii rossiiskogo flota pod komandoiu vitse-admirala Seniavina v vodakh Sredizemnogo moria’, Syn otechestva 34, no. 47 (1816): 48 – 53. See also, Svin’in, Vospominaniia na flote. Svin’in used the same sources as Bronevskii, but without the permission of their authors. ‘Opisanie Chernogorii’, Syn otechestva 46, no. 29 (1818): 117– 24. Ibid., no. 31 (1818): 205– 11. E.P. Kovalevskii, ‘Chetyre mesiatsa v Chernogorii’, in idem, Sobranie sochinenii E.P. Kovalevskogo (St Petersburg: Glazunov, 1871– 72), 4:4– 157 (written in

266

68. 69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

NOTES

TO PAGES

181 –185

1841); N.A. Popov, Puteshestvie v Chernogoriiu (St Petersburg: Prats, 1847). See also ‘Chernogoriia i ee zhiteli’, Zhurnal dlia chteniia vospitannikam voennouchebnykh zavedenii, 81, no. 323 (1849): 275– 88. Krasnokutskii, Dnevnye zapiski poezdki v Konstantinopol’, 5. Ibid., 99. V.M. Istrin, Puteshestvie A.I. Turgeneva and A.S. Kaisarova po sliavianskim zemliam v 1804 g. (Petrograd: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1915), 55. See, M.V. Nikulina, ‘Pervye nauchnye puteshestviia v slavianskie zemli i ikh rol’ v istorii russkogo slavianovedeniia (pervaia tret’ XIX v.)’, Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii. Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo universiteta, no. 573 (1981): 43 – 61. Some of these texts were borrowed by Western periodicals. See, ‘Georgii Petrovich Chernyi, predvoditel’ serbov’, Vestnik Evropy 42, nos. 23 – 4 (1808): 164– 7; ‘Georg Petrovich Chernyi (Kratkaia biogafiia)’, Vestnik Evropy 95, no. 20 (1817): 287– 98. Others were provided by those Russian diplomats and officials who personally encountered the Serbian leader. See BantyshKamenskii, Puteshestvie v Moldaviiu, Valakhiiu i Serbiiu (Moscow: Reshetnikov, 1810); P.P. Svin’in, ‘Pis’mo k bratu iz Khotina’, Syn otechestva 31, no. 30 (1816): 141–50. For Turgenev’s view of the Philiki Etaireia uprising, see G.P. Barret, ‘Notices sur l’insurrection des Grecs contre l’Empire Ottoman. A Russian View of the Greek War of Independence’, Balkan Studies, no. 14 (1973): 78 – 9. Spiridov was perhaps in the best position to observe the events as they unfolded, since in 1817– 21 he served at the Russian Consulate General in Bucharest and stayed for two more years in Sibiu (Transylvania), where the Consulate retreated after the beginning of the outbreak of the revolt. A.M. Spiridov, ‘Kratkoe obozrenie narodov Slavianskogo plemeni obitaiushchikh v evropeiskoi chasti Turetskoi Imperii’, Severnyi arkhiv 16, no. 15 (1825): 87 –8. Ibid., 88 – 9. Cf. Liprandi, Opisanie prostranstva, 94 – 5. [Vuk Karadzˇic´], ‘Opisanie serbskogo naroda’, Vestnik Evropy 156, no. 18 (1827): 137–8. In May 1830, the Russian Commander-in-Chief I.I. Dibich dispatched A.G. Rozalion-Soshal’skii and several other Russian officers to Serbia with the task of making the military – topographical survey of the Serbian territory and, particularly, of the six disputed districts that the Porte had to return to Serbia according to the Adrianople treaty of 1829. On this mission, see RGVIA, fond VUA, op. 16, vol. 1, d. 1028, l.6 and passim. A.G. Rozalion-Soshal’skii, ‘Statisticheskoe opisanie Serbii do Adrianopol’skogo mira’, RGVIA, fond 439, op. 1, d. 6, l. 38v. Ibid., l. 36v. Ibid., l. 38. Ibid., l. 38v. Ibid., l. 60v.

NOTES

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185 –187

267

83. See, Leshchlovskaia, Serbskii narod i Rossiia v XIX v., 131– 71. 84. A.N. Pypin and V.D. Spasovich, Istoriia slavianskikh literatur (St Petersburg: M.M. Stasiulevich, 1879), 1:204. 85. On Russia’s loss of influence over Serbia during the 1830s and 1840s, see E.P. Kudriavtseva, Rossiia i Serbia v 30 – 40-kh godakh XIX veka (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2002). 86. On the early contacts of the Russian military command and the Bulgarian ecclesiastics and in particular the activities of Sofronii Vrachanskii, see N.I. Kazakov, ‘Iz istorii russko-bolgarskikh sviazei v period voiny Rossii s Turtsiei v 1806– 1812 gg.’, Voprosy istorii, no. 5 (1955): 42 –5; V.D. Konobeev, ‘Russko-bolgarskie otnosheniia v 1806– 1812’, in Iz istorii russko-bolgarskikh otnoshenii, 219–55. 87. Ioannis Kapodistrias to K.V. Nesselrode, 19 March 1828, cited in Dostian, Rossiia i Balkanskii vopros, 297– 9. 88. ‘Zapiska M.N. Bulgari, predstavlennaia Osobomu komitetu po vostochnym delam’, Vneshniaia politika Rossii v XIX – nachale XX vv., eds, A. L. Narochnitskii et als. (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1995), 16:294–301. 89. Murav’ev, Puteshestvie ko Sviatym Mestam, 1:13– 14. 90. On the Russian perceptions of Bulgarians, see I.I. Kaliganov, ‘Bolgary glazami russkikh v XIX stoletii’, in Slavianskii mir v glazakh Rossii: Dinamika vospriatiia i otrazheniia v khudozhestvennom tvorchestve, dokumental’noi i nauchnoi literature, ed. L.N. Budagova (Moscow: Institut slavianovedeniia RAN, 2011), 107– 37. 91. On Venelin, see James F. Clarke, ‘Venelin and the Bulgarian Origins’, in The Pen and the Sword: Studies in Bulgarian History by James F. Clarke, ed. Dennis P. Hupchick (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1988), 132–50; M.G. Smolianinova, ‘Iurii Venelin i Bolgariia’, Slavianskii mir v glazakh Rossii, 88–106. 92. Iu. I. Venelin, Drevnie i nyneshnie Bolgare v politicheskom, narodopisnom, istoricheskom i religioznom ikh otnoshenii k Rossianam. 2 vols. (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1829–41). 93. A.S. Myl’nikov, Kartina Slavianskogo mira: Vzgliad iz Vostochnoi Evropy (St Petersburg: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 1999), 104– 5. 94. ‘O putevykh zapiskakh Iu.I. Venelina’, Zapiski otdela rukopisei, vyp. 51 (Moscow: Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka, 2000), 217. On Venelin’s trip, see P.A. Bessonov, Nekotorye cherty puteshestviia Iu. I. Venelina v Bolgariiu (Moscow: Stepanov, 1857); M.V. Nikulina, ‘Puteshestvie Iu.I. Venelina v Bolgariiu i ego mesto v nachal’noi istorii bolgaristiki v Rossii’, in Iu.I. Venelin v bolgarskom vozrozhdenii, ed. G.K. Venediktov (Moscow: Institut slvianovedeniia i balkanistiki RAN, 1998), 122– 47. 95. ‘O putevykh zapiskakh Iu.I. Venelina’, 217. 96. On the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria during the Ottoman period, see James L. Hopkins, The Bulgarian Orthodox Church (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2009), 47 – 82. 97. Venelin, Drevnie i nyneshnie Bolgare, 12.

268

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188 –191

98. Ibid., 14 – 15. 99. V.I. Grigorovich, Doneseniia V.I. Grigorovicha ob ego puteshestvii po slavianskim zemliam (Kazan: Imperatorskii Universitet, 1915), 128. 100. Ibid., 209. Monk Parfenii (Konstantin Ageev), who travelled through Bulgaria to Mount Athos several years prior to Grigorovich confirms his observations by noting that Greek hierarchs prohibited the Bulgarians ‘to sing, read or teach Slavonic to their children’. According to Parfenii, the Bulgarians suffered from the Greeks ‘not much less than from the Turks’. Parfenii, Skazanie o stranstvovanii i puteshestvii po Rossii, Moldavii, Turtsii i Sviatoi Zemle (Moscow: Semen, 1855), 2:51. 101. Grigorovich, Doneseniia, 210. 102. I.P. Iakovenko, Moldaviia i Valakhiia s 1820 po 1829 g (St Petersburg: Grech, 1834), 128. 103. E.P. Kovalevskii, ‘Stranstvovatel’ po sushi i po moriam. Part IV. Nizhnii Dunai i Balkany’, Biblioteka dlia chteniia 94 (1849): 24. 104. Kovalevskii, ‘Stranstvovatel’ po sushe i po moriam’, 25. 105. Evropeiskaia Turtsiia v ee nyneshnem sostoianii (Moscow: Ernst, 1854), 121. 106. Konstantinopol’ i turki (St Petersburg: Baranov, 1841), 1:154. 107. Kovalevskii, ‘Stranstvovatel’ po sushe i po moriam’, 54. 108. Ibid., 53. 109. Another factor was Ivan Turgenev’s novel On the Eve (1860). 110. In 1840, Governor-General of New Russia M.S. Vorontsov persuaded Nicholas I to fund the education of Bulgarian students in Russia, whereupon a number of them were enrolled into the Kherson Theological Seminary in Odessa. See D.G. Peschanyi, ‘Russko-bolgarskie kul’turnye sviazi v 30 – 40-kh godakh XIX veka’, in Iz istorii russko-bolgarskikh otnosheni, 148– 9. On the Bulgarian perceptions of Russia in this period, see Michael Boro Petrovich, ‘The Russian Image in the Renaissance Bulgaria, 1760– 1878’, East European Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1967): 87 – 105. 111. On the factors that determined the Serbian leadership to stay neutral in 1853, see Kudriavtseva, Rossiia i Serbiia, 168– 72. 112. [Naiden Gerov], ‘Pis’ma iz Bolgarii’, Moskvitianin, no. 8 (1854): 96. Also published as N.G. Pis’ma iz Bolgarii (Odessa: Gorodskaia tipografiia, 1854). 113. [Naiden Gerov], ‘Pis’ma iz Bolgarii’, 97. 114. Ibid., 111. 115. For the references to the attachment of the Bulgarians to Orthodoxy, see, Murav’ev, Puteshestvie ko Sviatym Mestam, 1:9– 10. 116. [Naiden Gerov], ‘Pis’ma iz Bolgarii’, Moskvitianin, no. 8 (1854): 114– 15. Catholic and Protestant proselytism in Bulgaria after the Crimean War, was one of the main concerns of the Moscow Benevolent Slavic Society. See Hopkins, The Bulgarian Orthodox Chruch, 95 – 9. 117. S.P. Shevyrev, Antiokhiiskaia tserkov’ (St Petersburg: Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, 1850); I.N. Berezin, Pravoslavnaia i drugie khristianskie tserkvi v Turktsii (St Petersburg: Shtab otdel’nogo korpusa vnutrennei strazhi, 1855);

NOTES

118. 119.

120.

121.

122. 123.

124.

125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

TO PAGES

191 –194

269

‘O pravoslavii na Vostoke. Tri zapiski sostavlennye v 1848 g.’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 1 (1878): 111– 24. Fonton, Vospominaniia, 1:37. Ibid., 38. Constantin Braˆncoveanu was a hospodar of Wallachia, who in the course of the Pruth campaign failed to support Peter the Great despite a secret agreement to this effect. Braˆncoveanu’s decision to ally with the Ottomans was determined by his rivalry with Peter’s Moldavian ally Dimitrie Cantemir, the slowness of the Russian progress, as well as the quicker than expected mobilization of the Ottoman troops. See O.I. Fischer, ‘O proiskhozhdenii moldavtsev, o ikh iazyke, znatneishikh prikliucheniekh, vere, nravakh i povedenii’, Mesiatseslov, na leto ot Rozhdestva Khristova 1770 (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1769), 31 – 76. Fischer drew on Dimitrie Cantemir’s Descriptio Moldaviae, which the latter wrote in 1716 at the request of the Berlin Academy. Cantemir’s work was translated into Russian as Istoricheskoe, geograficheskoe i politicheskoe opisanie Moldavii only in 1789. The same refers to the French-language description of Wallachia produced in 1769 by a Swedish general in Russian service, F.W. Bauer. See Me´moires historiques et ge´ographiques sur la Valachie (Frankfort et Leipzig: Broenner, 1778). Its Russian edition appeared some two decades later; see Zapiski, povestvovatel’nye, zemleopisatel’nye i politicheskie o kniazhestve Volosskom (St Petersburg: Vil’kovskii, 1791). In this sense one can say that Russian occupations of Moldavia and Wallachia primarily helped Western European readers to expand their knowledge of Moldavia and Wallachia. Raan, Perechen’ iz sobstvennogo svoego zhurnala; [V. F. Malinovskii], ‘Zapiski o Moldavii’, Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni, no. 2 (1797): 417 – 25, no. 3 (1797): 213 – 29, no. 6 (1797): 33 – 9, no. 7 (1797): 56 – 71, no. 8 (1797): 90 – 123. A.F. Negri, ‘Pis’mo k izdateliu Vestnika Evropy’, Vestnik Evropy 62, no. 5 (1812): 55. ‘Private benefit reigns in their spirit and does not allow them to unite in a common unity of thought [blagomyslie]. They do not care for the ruin of their motherland as long as their private designs are successful, and as long as they can live gaily and luxuriously in huge mansions, dress in sumptuous apparels, take pride in their beautiful tableware, enjoy precious meals, whereas their simple wretched compatriot is oppressed, and dies from hunger.’ Ibid., 56 – 8. Cited in I.N. Khalippa, ‘Opisanie arkhiva gg. Senatorov, predesedatel’stvovavshikh v divanakh kniazhestv Moldavii i Valakhii s 1808 po 1813 god’, in Trudy Bessarabskoi Gubernskoi Uchenoi Arkhivnoi Komissii, ed. I.N. Khalippa (Kishinev: Shliomovich, 1900), 1:340 – 41. Iakovenko, Moldaviia i Valakhiia, 33 – 8. Ibid., 105– 25. Ibid., 126. Bauer, Me´moires historiques, 22. For an early recognition of the Latin origin of the Wallachians, see F.W. Bauer, Zapiski, 20 –1.

270

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194 –199

130. Spiridov, ‘Kratkoe obozrenie narodov Slavianskogo plemeni’, Severnyi arkhiv, no. 15 (1825): 93. 131. Venelin expressed his views on the importance of Bulgarians in the history of Moldavia and Wallachia in a commentary on I.P. Iakovenko’s Nyneshnee sostoianie turetskikh kniazhestv Moldavii i Valakhii i rossiiskoi Bessarabskoi oblasti (St Petersburg: Smirdin, 1828). See Iurii Venelin, ‘Zamechaniia na sochinenie gospodina Iakovenko o Moldavii i Valakhii i proch. (Pervoe pis’mo k izdateliu Moskovskogo Vestnika)’, Moskovskii vestnik, no. 15 (1828): 256–78, no. 16 (1828): 373–92, no. 17 (1828): 160–75. Venelin’s interpretation attracted the criticism of S.V. Russov in Otechestvennye zapiski 36, no. 102 (1828): 90–115. 132. Spiridov, ‘Kratkoe obozrenie narodov Slavianskogo plemeni’, Severnyi Arkhiv, no. 14 (1825): 209. 133. Ibid., 211– 12. 134. Ibid., 231– 2. 135. See Keith Hitchins, The Idea of Nation: The Romanian of Transylvania, 1691– 1848 (Bucharest: Editura enciclopedica˘ s¸i s¸tiint¸ifica˘, 1985), 94 – 140. 136. Ia.D. Ginkulov, Nachertanie pravil Moldovlakhiiskoi grammatiki (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1840), i –iii. Other works of Ginkulov are Sobranie sochinenii i perevodov, v proze i stikhakh, dlia uprazhneniia v valakho-moldavskom iazyke, s prisovokupleniem slovaria i sobraniia slavianskikh pervoobraznykh slov, upotrebliaemykh v iazyke valakho-moldavskom (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1841); idem, Vyvody iz vlakho-moldavskoi grammatiki (St Petersburg: n. p., 1847); idem, Karmannaia knizhka russkikh voinov v pokhodakh po kniazhestvam Moldavii i Valakhii 2 vols. (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk,1854). 137. See Vasil Aprilov, ‘Predislovie’, in Bolgarskie gramoty sobrannye, perevedennye na russkii iazyk i ob’iasnennye Vasiliem Aprilovym (Odessa: Gorodskaia tipografia, 1845), vi – vii. 138. The two hospodars in question were Grigore IV Ghica in Wallachia and Ion Sandu Sturdza in Moldavia both of whom ruled from 1822 to 1828. 139. [E.P. Kovalevskii], ‘Vospominaniia o beregakh nizhnego Dunaia’, Biblioteka dlia chteniia 65, no. 7 (1844): 1. (Summary in Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 44, nos. 10 – 12 (1844): 178– 9. On Kovalevskii’s 1838 mission to Montenegro, see Iu.P. Anshakov, Stanovlenie Chernogorskogo gosudarstva i Rossiia (1798– 1856) (Moscow: Institut slavianovedeniia, 1998), 222– 5. 140. [Kovalevskii], ‘Vospominaniia o beregakh nizhnego Dunaia’, 2. 141. Ibid. 142. See I.C. Filitti, Principatele Romaˆne de la 1828 la 1834. Ocupat¸ia ruseasca˘ s¸i Regulamentul organic (Bucures¸ti: Institutul de Arte Grafice ‘Bucovina’, 1934); V.Ia. Grosul, Reformy v dunaiskikh kniazhestvakh i Rossiia (Moscow: Nauka, 1966); Victor Taki, ‘Between Polizeistaat and Cordon Sanitaire: Epidemics and Police Reform during Russian Occupation of Moldavia and Wallachia, 1828– 1834’, Ab Imperio, no. 4 (2008): 75 – 112. 143. See Neagu Djuvara, Iˆntre Orient s¸i Occident. T¸a˘rile romaˆne la ıˆnceputul epocii moderne (Bucures¸ti, Humanitas, 1995); Pompiliu Eliade, Influenta franceza asupra

NOTES

144.

145.

146.

147. 148. 149.

150.

151. 152.

TO PAGES

199 –204

271

spiritului public ıˆn Romaˆnia. Originile: studiu asupra starii societatii romaˆnesti ıˆn vremea domniilor fanariote, translated from French by Aurelia Dumitrascu (Bucuresti: Humanitas, 2000 [1898]); idem, La Roumanie au XIX-e siecle, vol. 2. Les trois pre´sidents ple´nipotentiaires (1828–1834). (Paris: Hachette, 1914). Anatole Demidov, Voyage dans la Russie meridionale et la Crime´e par l’Hongrie, la Valachie et la Moldavie (Paris: Ernest Bourdin, 1840), 108. For the discussion of the Russian perception of Moldavia and Wallachia as the frontier of civilization, see Victor Taki, ‘Moldavia and Wallachia in the Eyes of Russian Observers’, East-Central Europe/L’Europe du Centre-Est 32, nos. 1 – 2 (2005): 199– 224. As some of the more Western-minded Russian observers noted not without embarrassment, the bearded, solemn and immobile Moldavian and Wallachian patriarchs looked not unlike the pre-Petrine Muscovite boyars. See Filipp Vigel, ‘Zamechaniia na nyneshnee sostoianie Bessarabskoi oblasti’, in idem, Vospominaniia (St Petersburg: Sytin, 1892), 6:1– 34 (separate pagination). I.P. Liprandi, Dunaiskie kniazhestva (Moscow: Imperatorskoe Obshchestvo Istorii i Drevnostei Rossiiskikh, 1877), 5. Although published in 1877, the description was written in 1854. Ibid., 6 – 8. Alabin, Chetyre voiny, 2:43. Prior to the Slavophile ‘Letter to the Serbs’ of 1858, the Russian authors saw the progress of enlightenment among them benignly. The author of a review of ‘Turkey in Europe’ published at the outbreak of the Crimean War praised their care for enlightenment as well as the fact that they send their children to the Russian universities. Evropeiskaia Turtsia v ee nyneshnem sostoianii, 99. On the role of Orthodoxy on the eve and during the Crimean War see, David Goldfrank, ‘The Holy Sepulcher and the Origins of the Crimean War’, in The Military and Society in Russia, 1450– 1917, 491– 505; Stephen M. Norris, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture and Russian National Identity, 1812– 1945 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 63 – 9, 86 – 100; Mara Kozelsky, Christianizing Crimea: Shaping the Sacred Space in the Russian Empire and Beyond (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 125– 40. Denis Vovchenko, ‘Modernizing Orthodoxy: Russia and the Christian East (1856 – 1914)’, Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 2 (2012): 295– 317. On Balkanism, see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans.

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INDEX

Abdul-Hamid I, Ottoman sultan, 34 Abdul-Mejid I, Ottoman sultan, 156, 160, 161 Abdulkerim Effendi, 30 Adrianople, 38, 39, 163 peace treaty of, 118, 121 Russian occupation of, 123, 125, 186 Albanians, 77, 84, 123 Alexander I, emperor of Russia, 48, 87, 98, 143, 176, 177, 186 Anna Ioannovna, empress of Russia, 27, 96 Aprilov, Vasil, 197 Arab Caliphate, 22 Austria-Hungary, see Habsburg Monarchy ayans, 189 Azov, 23, 26 – 8, 37, 116, 134 campaigns of Peter the Great, 91, 95 Bakhchisarai, 27 Balkanism, 169, 204 Balkans, 10, 88, 125, 179, 186, 204 Baltadji Mehmet Pasha, grand vizier, 92 Baltic provinces, 4 Baranshchikov, V.Ia., 66 – 74, 86, 88, 89 conversion to Islam, 68 – 71 Barbary States, 54, 55, 72 bashi-bazouks, 108

Bayer, Gottlieb Siegfried, 143 Bayezid II, Ottoman sultan, 17, 21, 25, 139 Bazili, K.M., 45, 152, 156– 9 Begichev, Ivan, 27 Belgrade, peace treaty of, 28 Berkendorf, A.Kh., 113, 119 Berlin Congress, 204 Bessarabia, 101, 122, 187, 195 Black Sea, 23, 33, 52, 53, 91, 93 Bolotov, A.T., 73 –6, 111 Bonald, Louis de, 147– 50 Bosnia, 180, 184 Bosphorus, 148, 159 boyars of Moldavia and Wallachia, 33, 122, 193– 200 of Muscovy, 25, 36, 53, 55, 131– 2 Bronevskii, V.B., 119, 124, 181 Bucharest, 33, 109, 121–2, 193, 199 Bulgakov, Ia.I., 44 – 9, 68, 125, 175 Bulgaria, 113, 178, 186– 9, 193, 199, 201, 204 Bulgarians, 101, 113, 133, 182, 186–92, 195, 202 Busbecq, Ogier Ghislain de, 241 Byzantines, 52, 183

298

TSAR

AND

Byzantium, 22, 131, 164, 172, 173, 178 Caffa, 23, 24, 33, 53, 54, 57 Cantacuzino, Constantin, 174, 175, 193 Cantacuzino, S¸erban, hospodar of Wallachia, 133 Cantemir, Dimitrie, hospodar of Moldavia, 92, 136, 143 captivity, 14, 15, 51 – 90 passim and apostasy, 56 – 9, 70, 72, 75 in Barbary States, 54, 55 in Crimea, 53, 54, 62, 73 high society perspectives on, 71 – 6, 88 –90 humiliation of the captives, 80, 81 moral ambiguity of, 81 – 3 psychological stress of, 79, 80 ransom money, 53, 54 ransom slavery, 54, 71 and religious pilgrimage, 63 – 5 Russian government’s efforts to liberate the captives, 53 – 4, 86 –8 Russian narratives of, 9, 15 – 16, 55 –6, 88– 90, 123 Russian officers in, 76 – 88 Catherine the Great, empress of Russia ‘Greek project’ of, 50, 140, 149, 171, 176, 180, 185 and Islam, 140 philhellenism of, 170, 176 and Southern Slavs, 180, 182 and Voltaire, 171 Catholicism, 61, 184, 197 Catholics, 3, 51, 52, 59, 105, 179 Caucasus, 12, 57, 128, 207, 217 Charles XII, king of Sweden, 40, 86, 91 Chateaubriand, Franc ois-Rene´, 172, 176, 177 Cheredeev, I.P., 26 Cherkassk, 23, 24 Chigirin, 64, 95, 133

SULTAN Choiseul-Gouffier, Marie-GabrielFlorent-Auguste de, 48 Christians co-religionists of Russia, 91 – 2, 113, 172– 3, 178– 9, 182, 191, 203– 4 population of the Ottoman Empire, 4, 33, 147, 168, 174, 181 Circassians, 57 classicism, 16, 170, 171 Constantinople (Istanbul) Ottoman conquest of, 111, 140, 178, 183, 188 Russian captives in, 54, 56 –60, 63, 64, 78 – 80, 83 tourists in, 160, 162 cossacks Don, 23 –4, 26– 7, 55, 60, 134 Nekrasovtsy, 66 in the Russian –Ottoman wars, 95, 111– 13 Zaporozhian, 26, 33, 38, 55, 66, 69, 94 Crimea, 22 – 4, 33, 116 captivity in, see captivity Russian annexation of, 44, 66 Crimean Khanate, 52, 206 Crimean khans, 22, 56 Crimean Tatars, 27, 33, 51, 53, 66 Crimean War, 5, 13, 18, 49, 164, 167 Dardanelles, 18, 48 Demidov, Anatole, 199 derebeys, 152 De Sanglen, Ia.I., 97, 98 Deval, Charles, 147, 148 Dibich, I.I., 88, 103, 121 diplomacy diplomatic ceremonial, 21, 25, 27 contestation of, 26, 30, 31, 35 in Muscovy/Russia, 25, 26, 36 in the Ottoman Empire, 26, 29, 34

INDEX diplomatic corps, 36, 37, 45 diplomatic culture, 24, 43, 48, 49 European diplomats in Constantinople, 20, 36, 42, 44–8, 71, 136 extraterritoriality, principle of, 48 Ottoman, 4, 9, 44, 46, 50, 129 reciprocity, principle of, 15, 29, 43, 44, 206 Russian, 11, 35 – 6, 206, 210 Diugamel, A.O., 76, 78, 80 – 2, 87 – 8, 90 Dniester, 31, 32, 92, 93 d’Ohsson, Ignace Mouradja, 142 Eastern Europe, 2, 5, 8, 166 Eastern Question, 5, 20, 49, 168, 186, 207 Egypt, 51, 52, 85, 142 Elizabeth, empress of Russia, 140, 179 embassies in early modern Europe, 20, 21 Ottoman, 24, 29, 30 Russian, 1, 21 – 4, 26 – 30, 32 – 6, 44, 45 Emin, A.F., 83, 137, 138 Engel’gart, A.L., 121 England, 41, 98 Etaireia, see Philiki Etaireia Ettingen, Count, Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, 29 Europeanization, 4, 159 Feodorit, Kamal (Kemal), 22, 24 Filipescu, Constantin, 122 Filofeus, Russian monk, 170 Fonton, F.P., 110, 120, 191, 192, 197 Foucault, Michel, 20 France, 7, 87, 97 – 9, 115, 139, 160, 199 Napoleonic, 99, 111, 127, 180 Russia’s wars against, 111, 127 Fuad Pasha, Reis-effendi, 18

299

Galiatovskii, Ioannikii, 133 Gamazov, M.A., 161, 163 Genghis Khan, 22 Georgia, 63 Germans, 3, 12, 143, 158 Germany, 4, 98 Gerov, Naiden, 191 Ghirays, dynasty of Crimean khans, 22 Ginkulov, Ia.D., 197 Giurgiu, 112 Gizel’, Innokentii, 95, 133 Glebov, P.N., 104, 107 Glinka, S.N., 150 Golitsyn, A.M., 47 Golitsyn, V.V., 95 Greece, 51, 147, 152, 168, 172– 3, 177–9 Greeks ancient, 138, 180 clergy, 172, 133, 184 Ottoman, 12, 101, 133, 146, 148 Russian ‘discovery’ of, 16, 169– 79, 202, 212 and Slavs, 180– 6, 188– 91, 201, 203 war of independence, 177 see also Phanariots Grigor’ev, V.V., 156, 161 Grigorovich, V.I., 188 Gur’ianov, I.G., 150 Habsburg Monarchy, 28, 41, 50, 61, 86, 204 grand embassies to the Ottoman Empire, 9, 29 internuncios, 40, 42, 76 Habsburg – Ottoman wars, 9, 16, 54, 79, 94, 182, 185 Haga, Cornelius van, 42 Halki Island, 80, 87 Herzogovina, 184 hospodar, 174, 193 Hotin, 30, 31, 83, 86 Hubsch, Baron Antoine von, 87

300

TSAR

AND

Hubsch, Baron Cazimir von, 87 Hungary, 54, 92 Hu¨srev Pasha, serasker, 153 Hussein Pasha, serasker, 84, 87, 124 Iakovenko, I.P., 189, 194 Iambol, 75 Ibrail, 108, 112 Ignat’ev, P.N., 116 Islam, 124, 168 conversion to, 56, 58 – 60, 64, 66, 81, 140 European perceptions of, 147 Russian perceptions of, 140, 141 Ismail, 63, 108, 114, 115, 121 Italinskii, A.I., 48 Italy, 37, 41, 48, 164 Ivan III, grand duke of Muscovy, 25 Ivan IV, tsar of Muscovy, 25, 131, 132, 135 Jaffa, 68 janissaries, 12, 26, 83, 92 destruction of, 147, 151, 152, 155, 157, 163 military qualities of, 93, 95 rebellions of, 135, 136, 145 Jerusalem, 63, 68, 133 Jews, 12, 54, 57, 134 Jomini, Antoine-Henri de, 98, 99, 102 Juchereau, Antoine de St Denys, 146 Kagul, the battle of, 96, 171 Kantakouzenos, Thomas, 24 Kapodistrias, Ioannis, 176, 186 Kara Mustafa Ko¨pru¨lu¨, grand vizier, 28 Karadzˇic´, Vuk, 184, 186 Karageorge Petrovic´, 182, 190 Karamzin, N.M., 145 Karazin, N.A., 180 Karlowitz congress of, 31, 37, 41, 46 peace treaty of, 29, 47, 135

SULTAN Kazem-bek, A.K., 143, 144 Kerch, 23, 24 Kerr, Georg Jacob, 143 Khmetevskii, S.P., 173 Khomiakov, A.I., 186 Kilia, 63 Kiselev, P.D., 199 Klement, N.M., 76, 77 – 9, 80, 83– 5, 87, 88 Kokovtsev, M.G., 71, 72, 173 Kondyrev, I.P., 26, 27 Kovalevskii, E.P., 162, 163, 189, 190, 198, 199 Krasnokutskii, A.G., 75, 76, 175, 182 Krizˇanic´, Juraj, 51, 179 Kuchuk-Kainarji, peace treaty of, 31, 33, 40 Kulevcha, battle of, 88, 110 Kutuzov, M.I., 96 – 7, 99, 100, 105, 113, 122 embassy of, 30 –2 Langeron, A.F. (Louis Alexandre Andrault de Langeron), 109, 115, 121, 174 Lashkarev, S.L., 47 Leibnitz, Gottfried, 142 Leskov, N.S., 72 Levashev, P.A., 42 – 4, 47, 108, 139–41, 172 captivity of, 71, 76, 77 – 9, 83, 86 – 8, 90 Liprandi, I.P., 101– 3, 107, 108, 117, 118, 120, 128, 200 Louis XIV, king of France, 21 Lyzlov, A.I., 95, 134, 187 Macedonia, 188 Macfarlane, Charles, 149 Mahmud II, Ottoman sultan, 46, 78, 145 compared to Peter the Great, 151– 3 military reforms of, 155– 7

INDEX Westernizing policies of, 157– 61, 163, 165, 166 Mali, Sˇc´epan, ruler of Montenegro, 180 Malte-Brun, Conrad, 147 Mameluk Egypt, 52 Mameluks, 148 Manstein, Christoph Hermann, 116 Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando, 97, 136 Martos, A.I., 114, 119, 122, 123 criticism of Russian war methods, 113 views of the Ottoman army, 95, 104, 106 Mavrocordatos, Alexander, 26, 31, 174 Mediterranean, 5, 52, 54, 173, 176, 181 Mehmed Ali Pasha, grand vizier, 18 Mehmed Emini Pasha, Ottoman ambassador to Russia, 30 Mehmed II, Ottoman sultan, 111, 131, 132 Mehmed IV, Ottoman sultan, 28, 63, 105, 132 Melik Mehmet Pasha, governor of Hotin, 30, 31 Menshikov, A.S., 17, 18 Messenger of Europe, 105, 144– 9, 174, 184 Messina, 60, 61 military art, 98 – 9, 102, 103, 111, 115, 127 in Europe, 93, 95, 98 – 9, 111, 115, 123 in the Ottoman Empire, 98 in Russia, 11, 94 military diaries and memoirs, 9, 16, 116 military literature, 94, 99, 103, 209 military writers, 16, 94, 99, 104, 118 Miloradovich, A.M., 109, 115, 122, 264 mimicry, 153, 166 Moldavia, 122, 137, 192– 5, 199, 200 as exotic place, 116– 19

301

Phanariot rule in, 174, 184 during the Pruth campaign, 91 – 2 Moldavians, 133, 187, 195– 98, 200 see also Romanians, Wallachians Moldovandzhi Ali Pasha, grand vizier, 47 Monastir, 77 Montecuccoli, Raimondo, 97 Montenegrins, 180, 181, 187– 90 Montenegro, 92, 179, 180, 181, 198 Montesquieu, Charles Louis, 85, 146, 174 Moreau de Brasey, Jean Nicolas, 104 Moshkin, I.S., 60– 2, 65 Mount Athos, 63, 133, 188 Muhammad Ali, governor of Egypt, 148, 153, 155, 159 Munnich, Burkhard Christoph von, 96, 98, 99, 116 Murav’ev, A.N., 125, 198 Murav’ev-Karskii, N.N., 107, 108, 153–5, 158, 159, 166 musketeers, 62, 148, 151, 152 Muslims Ottoman and the reforms of Mahmud II, 157– 8 and Russian captives, 56, 76 – 9, 82 – 6 in Russian –Ottoman wars, 101, 113, 123, 125 and Tanzimat, 163– 5, 191 Russian, 12, 140 Mustafa I, Ottoman sultan, 26 Mustafa III, Ottoman sultan, 83 Mustafa Rasih Pasha, 30, 32 Napoleon I, emperor of France, 81, 126, 149, 176 invasion of Russia, 99, 119, 159 wars of, 103, 211 Nashchekin, G.A., 132 nationalism, 16, 199

302

TSAR

AND

Navarin, battle of, 48 Negri, A.F., 193 Nepliuev, I.I., 41, 46, 135 Nepokoichitskii, A.A., 18 Nesterov, Ivan, 23 Nicholas I, emperor of Russia, 17, 129, 159, 186, 210 Nizam-i Jedid, 49, 151 Nizhnii Novgorod, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70 Njegosˇ, Vasilije Petrovic´, prince-bishop of Montenegro, 179, 180 Nogais, 26, 59, 62 Northern Africa, 55 Northern War, 2 Novosil’tsev, I.P., 25 Obrenovic´, Milosˇ, prince of Serbia, 189 Obreskov, A.M., 41, 42, 47, 48, 76, 86 Occident, 6, 128, 144, 145 Occidentalism, 130, 166, 167 Ochakov, 108, 109, 114 Odessa, 18 Ol’shevskii, M.Ia., 107 Oltenia (Little Wallachia), 95, 196 Orenburg, 144 Orient, 6 – 11, 105, 125– 8, 131, 163, 205, 210, 212 Oriental despotism, theory of, 146, 147, 156, 174 Oriental languages in Russia, study of, 128, 143, 144 Oriental luxury, representations of, 105, 120, 153 Oriental studies in Russia, 142– 4 Oriental travelogues, 76, 142, 209 Oriental war, 94, 100, 104, 108– 9, 115, 127 Orientalism, 6 – 10, 12, 110, 127, 130, 142, 159, 167, 209–11 military, 209, 210 Orientalist writings, 9, 85, 151, 166 Orientalists, 6, 8, 128, 144, 145 Orlov, A.G., 47, 173, 181 Orlov, G.G., 112

SULTAN Orthodoxy, 61, 65, 185, 191, 201, 208 apostasy from, 56 – 9, 70, 72, 75, 178 church in the Ottoman Empire, 133, 134, 172 conversions to, 140 in Muscovy and Russia, 3, 12, 59 in the Ottoman Empire, 169, 178, 184, 191, 192, 203 see also Christians: co-religionists of Russia osmanistika, 130, 143 Ostrogorskii, P.P., 141 Ostroumov, N.P., 144 Otroshchenko, I.O., 105 Ottoman Empire army and navy, 100–8, 110, 115, 126, 155– 6, 163 ‘barbarities’, 49, 111, 112, 115, 126 decline, 131– 4, 136, 145– 7, 151, 162, 165 elite, 160, 161 government, 135– 6, 152, 164, 191, 208 military organization, 96, 99, 156 ‘noble Turk’, image of, 84 –5, 123– 4 officers, 154, 156, 159 political system, 49, 128, 132, 173 slaves in, 51 – 60, 62 –4, 66– 67, 71 see also captivity, janissaries Paisios, patriarch of Jerusalem, 133, 134 Pan-Slavism, 2, 16 authors, 51, 181, 186, 187 ideas of, 52, 179, 189, 195, 197–8, 201, 203–4 Panafidin, P.I., 119, 176 Panin, N.I., 34, 47 pashalyks, 33 Patriarch’s Office, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 65, 89 Pazardjik, 86 Pazvantog˘lu, Osman Pasha, 145

INDEX peasants Bulgarian, 182 Moldavian and Wallachian, 117, 196 Russian, 55, 61, 62, 73, 74 Ukrainian, 79 Peresvetov, I.S., 131, 132, 134, 140, 165 Persia, 28, 57, 63 Persians, 98 Peter the Great, 2 –4, 27, 35 –7, 151– 6, 179, 192 Ottoman perceptions of, 139, 153 the Pruth Campaign of, 91 – 5, 104 reforms of, 3, 13, 91, 93 reign of, 27, 65, 66, 141, 207, 210 Western perceptions of, 147– 8, 151, 158 Phanariots, 33, 138, 173–5, 177, 178, 202 princes, 174, 184, 193 rule in Moldavia and Wallachia, 117, 174, 194– 7, 199, 200 see also Greeks philhellenism, 2, 171, 172, 176, 178, 181, 185 Philiki Etaireia, 176, 177, 182, 183, 194, 201 pilgrimage, 56, 63, 65, 68, 89, 208 pilgrims, 63, 64, 105, 106 pirates, 59, 68 – 70, 72 plague, 45, 163 Pleshcheev, M.A., 24, 25 Pogodin, M.I., 187 Poland, 4, 28, 41, 63, 69, 133, 134 Poles, 12, 41, 62 Polozov, V.V., 63, 65 Poltava, battle of, 40, 91 Potemkin, G.A., 96, 109, 115, 121, 180 Pouqueville, Franc ois, 105, 175 principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, 33, 112, 168, 174, 192 Prokudin-Gorskii, M.I., 45, 137, 172

303

Prozorovskii, A.A., 96, 97, 121 Prussia, 86, 97, 111, 127 Pruth campaign, 27, 47, 64, 93, 104, 136, 192 Pushkin, A.N., 99, 100– 3, 105, 128 Putiata, N.V., 125, 177 Raan, M.L., 106, 107, 119 Ragusa, republic of, 38 Rajic, Jovan, 181, 186, 187 reaya, 64, 168, 183, 190 renegades, 60, 69, 82, 88, 155, 164 Repnin, N.V., 30 – 6 Richelieu, Armand Emmanuel du Plessis, duke of, 115 Romanians, 2, 8, 16, 191, 192, 194–203, 212 see also Moldavians, Wallachians Rose, Hugh, 17, 18 Rozalion-Soshal’skii, A.G., 110, 114, 115, 123, 184, 185 captivity of, 76, 78 – 81, 84, 87, 88, 90 Rumiantsev, A.I., 28 – 30, 32, 33, 34, 36 Rumiantsev, P.A., 96, 97, 99, 112, 116, 171 Russian – Ottoman wars, 9, 11, 16, 169, 209, 210 atrocities Ottoman, 108– 11 Russian, 111– 15 climatic and geographical challenges, 116– 19 as escape into the exotic, 119– 23 see also military art, Ottoman Empire Rustchuk, 105, 108, 113, 114, 123 Safonov, V.A., 76 – 8, 80 – 5, 87, 88, 90 Said, Edward, 6, 7, 144, 209 Sebastiani, Horace, 80, 87 Selim I, Ottoman sultan, 22 Selim II, Ottoman sultan, 120

304

TSAR

AND

Selim III, Ottoman sultan, 46, 48, 49, 78, 145, 151 Seljuk sultanate, 22 Seniavin, D.M., 48, 181 Senkovskii, O.I. (Jo´zef Julian Se˛kowski), 143, 144, 151, 152, 164 Serbia, 181, 184, 186, 190, 193, 199 the first Serbian uprising, 77, 182 Serbian clergy, 181, 184 Serbs, 92, 181, 182, 184– 90, 192, 194 Serres, 82, 175 Sevastopol, 18 Shafirov, P.P., 47, 64, 93 Sheremet’ev, M.B., 47, 64 Shumla, Ottoman atrocities at, 110 Russian captives at, 78, 80 – 2, 84, 87, 88, 124 Silistria, 33, 104, 119 Sil’vestr, hieromonk, 63, 65 Slavs Eastern, 52, 195 Southern, 12, 16, 52, 212 Russian perceptions of, 179– 80, 182, 184– 92, 195– 9, 201, 202 Smyrna, 18 Sokollu, Mehmed Pasha, grand vizier, 25 Southeastern Europe, 5, 29, 91, 201 Southern Caucasus, 12 Spiridov, A.M., 183, 184, 195, 196, 197 Strandman, Georg Ernst von, 111, 116 Struve, Johann Christian von, 32, 174 Suleiman the Magnificent, Ottoman sultan, 5, 28 Svin’in, P.P., 84, 85 Sweden, 2, 41, 91, 93, 155 symbolic geography, 2, 10, 130 Tallmann, Johann Michael, 39, 40 Tanzimat, 49, 159, 160, 165–7

SULTAN Tepliakov, V.G., 178 timariots, 106, 163 Titov, 160 Tolstoi, P.A., 3, 37 – 41, 46, 135, 172 Tornau, F.F., 105, 107, 110, 122, 123, 125 Tott, Baron Franc ois de, 101 Transylvania, 196 Tsebrikov, R.M., 108, 109, 114, 115 Turgenev, S.I., 182, 183 Ukraine, 64, 79, 133 Ukrainians, 12, 53, 60, 133, 134, 170 in Russian Orthodox Church, 133, 134, 170 Ukraintsev, E.I., 26, 27, 37, 41, 64 Ukrainian cossacks, see cossacks: Zaporozhian Ulefeld, count, Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, 28, 29 ulema, 12, 146, 147 Uvarov, S.S., 143, 159, 255 Valentini, Georg Fridrich von, 105 Varlaam, hieromonk, 64, 65, 233, 282 Vasilii III, grand duke of Muscovy, 22, 25, 170 Venelin, Iu.I., 187, 188, 190, 195–7 Venice, 3, 52, 61, 68, 69 ambassadors of, 19, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45 involvement in slave trade, 52 Veshniakov, A.A., 41, 46, 47, 135, 136 Vladimirescu, Tudor, 194, 201 Volney, Constantine-Franc ois Chaussebeuf de, 142 Voltaire, Franc ois-Marie Arouet, 147, 171 Vorontsov, S.R., 96 Voulgaris, Eugenios, 138, 139 Voznitsyn, P.B., 37, 41, 228 Vronchenko, M.P., 157

INDEX Wallachia, 33, 92, 117–18, 122, 174– 6, 192– 7, 199– 200 Wallachians, 133, 187, 193– 8, 200 see also Moldavians, Romanians West, 2 – 4 Western Europe, 4, 8, 67, 142 Westernization of the Ottoman Empire, 46, 49, 130– 1, 151, 159– 61, 163– 6 of the Romanian upper classes, 199

305 of Russia, 1–4, 10, 13, 137, 141, 169 of the Russian army, 94, 97, 126, 127 of the Russian elites, 36, 50, 56, 67, 178, 205– 7

Yedikule, 42, 47, 48, 76, 108, 136 Ypsilantis, Alexander, 176, 182, 183, 193, 201 Zass, S.S., 121 Zeidlits, K.K., 107, 110, 155

Plate 1 The Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid I receives the Russian ambassador N.V. Repnin, 1775.

Plate 2 The plan of the naval battle between the Russian and the Ottoman navies, 24 June 1770 (The Battle of Chesme).

Plate 3 The Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II visits the Russian naval squadron during the latter’s stay at the Bosphorus in May 1833.

Plate 4

Russian officers at the Ottoman Porte, 1840s.