The Black Sea: A History by King Charles

Author:King, Charles [King, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

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Chernoe More, 1700–1860

Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the Enlightenment’s great compendium of human knowledge, contains a brief entry on the Black Sea. The “Pont-Euxin” is described as lying “between Little Tartary and Circassia to the north, Georgia to the east, Anatolia to the south, and European Turkey to the west.” The author of the entry adds helpfully that it is not a pont in the sense that an empty-headed French courtier might understand it—that is, not a “bridge”—but rather “an Asian sea.”1

That was in the 1750s. Over the next hundred years, Diderot’s geography became obsolete. From the second half of the eighteenth century, the Russian empire extended its reach to the warm ports of Crimea, pushing back the Ottomans and unseating their client, the Tatar khan. In the west and east, the empire also began to influence the kings and princes of the Balkans and the Caucasus, casting Russia first as the protector of eastern Christendom and later as the liberator of oppressed nations from the Turkish yoke. By the midnineteenth century, the Black Sea could no longer be described as “Asian” at all. It was now divided between the waxing and waning powers of eastern Europe, the Russians and the Ottomans, a waterway on which two sets of imperial ambitions came into intimate contact—something closer, in fact, to the pont in the courtier’s sense, not Diderot’s.

The sea’s sideways slide into Europe began with the changing strategic relationship between the sea and the steppe. For the Ottomans, keeping the sea peaceful and the northern steppe wild had been the twin imperatives of security since the fall of Constantinople. So long as most foreign vessels were barred from entering the Black Sea and a stable relationship could be maintained with client states along the littoral, the Ottomans held a virtual monopoly on the sea’s wealth; and the Eurasian steppe, traversed by nomads and Tatar raiding parties, represented a natural check on the ambitions of northern powers. For the Russians, the imperatives were exactly the reverse. As the Cossack sea raids had shown, the Ottomans were vulnerable to concerted attacks from the northern shore, but to reach the sea, Russia first had to move across the inhospitable grasslands on its own southern frontier. Inhabited by a shifting array of Cossacks, peasants, and Nogay nomads—and much of it inhabited by no one at all—the steppe had long been a source of irritation. It was from this “wild field,” as both Russian and Polish writers called it, that Tatar bands descended on Christian villages and made off with plunder and people, a land of brigands and outlaws, a refuge to which dissatisfied peasants could repair when they tired of working for one or another landlord farther north.

A central feature of Russian state policy from the reigns of Ivan the Terrible (1533—84) to Peter the Great (1689—1725) was the effort to make the steppe into something definite and controllable, to make the frontier, in other words, into a boundary. That plan, however, placed the Russians in direct competition with the Tatar khans and, by extension, with the Ottoman empire.

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