CHAPTER THREE
FOUNDATIONS
According to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (published in 1910–11), ‘the Eastern Question is the expression in diplomacy from about the time of the Congress of Verona [1822] to comprehend the international problems involved in the decay of the Turkish Empire and its supposed impending dissolution’.1 Behind this problem lay five phenomena: the fourth-century division of the Roman Empire into Western and Eastern halves, with capitals in Rome and Constantinople (Byzantium); the growing separation of the Latin (Catholic) and Greek (Orthodox) Churches, which spread to different parts of Europe; the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Constantinople, the Balkans, the Holy Land, and most of the rest of the Arab world, by the early sixteenth century; the rise of both Western Europe and Russia as threats to that empire in the course of the eighteenth century; and the strategic location of Constantinople on the Bosphorus at the entrance to the Black Sea.
So long as the Ottoman Empire was a successful Great Power, the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects enjoyed a modus vivendi with him. The Ecumenical Patriarch became the administrative chief of the Orthodox. Wealthy ‘Phanariot’ (Lighthouse District) Greeks became tax-farmers and part of the Ottoman elite. The Serbs, and the Romanians even more so, enjoyed a great deal of ecclesiastical autonomy from the Greek Patriarchate. Some Ottoman Christians dreamed of liberation by Russia, but for most of them the Sultan was the secular protector of their Church. In the eighteenth century, however, the nationality question among the Ottoman Orthodox Christians became a serious factor. The growing European orientation of educated Ottoman Christians, moreover, produced the anomaly that a very large subordinate minority was becoming more advanced than the ruling Turks and the other Muslims, and just as likely to look to Europe as to Russia for support.
When the Turks took over Byzantine territory they confirmed the commercial privileges of the Europeans or ‘Franks’, who already resided in Galata, across the Golden Horn directly north of Constantinople, where the European legations would eventually be located. The first Franco-Turkish treaty or ‘capitulations’ (literally, titles, chapters or articles) of 1535 also confirmed judicial autonomy and special procedures for the Grand Vizier or someone else of high rank to handle problems between French and Turks. The articles did not create onerous conditions for the Ottomans or give the foreign powers any rights to interfere in Ottoman affairs. For example, the Turks expressly denied Louis XIV the right he sought to protect the Catholics who were Ottoman subjects. The French did obtain in 1740 some new promises concerning the older, vague rights of the Catholic missions and possessions in the Holy Land, but no more.2
As Ottoman power waned in the face of European progress, the Turks had to make concessions to some Europeans in order to obtain protection against others. The net result was the broadening of the use of the capitulations and the weakening of Ottoman commercial monopolies and also sovereignty, as European embassies started granting passports to Ottoman subjects. There are no certain statistics, but some historians believe that by the mid-nineteenth century as many as one million inhabitants of the Sultan’s realm were using the protective powers of the European legations to escape the full authority of Ottoman magistrates.3
THE GREAT POWER BREAKTHROUGH AGAINST TURKEY (1767–1821)
It was Russian military power from the north-east, not Austria’s from the north-west or the commercial and naval prowess of France or England, that broke the Ottoman monopoly on Black Sea trade, dating from the late fifteenth century, and initiated the abuses of the passport system. Catherine the Great’s First Turkish War (1767–74) resulted in Russia’s gaining territory at the mouth of the River Dnieper and the right to sail commercial vessels in the Black Sea and through the Turkish Straits into the Aegean and the Mediterranean Seas. Other Europeans demanded similar rights for their ships to pass the Straits and navigate the Black Sea. Russia developed her Black Sea commerce by granting passports to Christian Ottoman subjects to sail under the Russian flag, and as the trade grew, so did the number of Russian consuls in Ottoman Greece and the Balkans. The commerce and number of consuls of other European states grew there too.4
The Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji (Küük-Kainarca), which ended the war, contained another set of clauses concerning the protection of Ottoman Christians and constituted a potential time bomb. The Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman government was called) absolutely rejected Russia’s original demand during the negotiations that all Ottoman (Orthodox) Christians be placed under Russian protection. However, the Turks did grant an amnesty to Christians who sided with Russia, promised future protection to the Church, and allowed the Russian envoy to the Porte the crucial (and abusable) right to petition on behalf of the Romanian Principalities and of an Orthodox Church that the Russians could build near their mission in Pera (in the hills north of Galata).5 The Turks certainly displayed no ‘imbecility’ in these negotiations, as has been claimed,6 but the strategic implications of Russian rights regarding overwhelmingly Orthodox Moldavia and Wallachia were immense. The Polish-Russian Treaty of 1686 had mentioned the respect for the Orthodox cult and its property within the Ukrainian and Belarus regions of the Polish realm, as well as reciprocally for the Catholics in provinces recently ceded by Poland to Russia. Subsequent Russian diplomacy used this clause as a pretext to intervene in Poland,7 setting the stage for the eventual partition of that ill-fated realm, starting in 1772.
Catherine the Great did not stop with her 1772–74 gains, but devised her ‘Greek Project’, or plan to create a separate kingdom of Dacia out of Moldavia and Wallachia and, if Turkey collapsed, a new Byzantine Empire. She also schemed with the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II, to partition Turkey. France, which was losing its commercial hegemony in the Mediterranean to Britain, was envisioned as the maritime partner. News of such talk contributed to the increasingly expansionist reputation that Russia under Catherine had acquired.8
Meanwhile the Turks were forced to accept Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in 1783, while Russia also proclaimed a protectorate over the Orthodox Kingdom of Georgia, located in nominally Persian central Transcaucasia and having historic claims to the Turkish-controlled eastern coast of the Black Sea. The Porte then pre-empted Catherine by launching a war of revenge under favourable diplomatic conditions in 1787. The English Cabinet toyed with the idea of sending a fleet to help the Turks in the Black Sea, but Parliament would not go along with that, so the Russians were victorious once more. Distracted by other problems in Europe, the Russians limited their peace terms to recognition of the annexation of the Crimea, the cession of a small part of coastal ‘Bessarabia’, from the Dnieper to the Dniester, and a reconfirmation of Kuchuk-Kainarji. Soon afterwards, Catherine engineered the final partitioning of Poland with Prussia and Austria.9 Among other results, now virtually all of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarus Orthodox and Uniates lived under the Russian rule - a vivid example of how legal ‘protection’ of foreign Orthodox Christians by Russia was followed by annexation within 110 years.
The French Revolution complicated matters immensely by challenging the entire European order based on monarchy and aristocracy. Russia, in particular, now faced a real danger from the fact that the thrust of her Balkan policies eroded Ottoman authority, but the disorders that might result could undermine the prevailing system at home. The Austrians grasped far better their reciprocal dependency upon the Turks for regional stability and had an Oriental Academy (founded in 1754) for training interpreters and diplomats for service in the Ottoman Empire.10 Simultaneously, Ottoman rule in the Balkans and Ottoman-Phanariot rule in the Principalities had become more brutal, rapacious and disorderly than usual, with provincial warlordism and a ‘civil war within the establishment’ compounding the abuses of tax-farming.11 Hence some foreign intervention in domestic Ottoman affairs was inevitable.
The international complications engendered by the French Revolution led to shifting alliances and set several precedents. At various times France, Russia and England were either allied to or at war with Turkey, the French trying to take Egypt and the British and Russians opposing a later Franco-Turkish alliance. The Russians at one point negotiated as an ally with Turkey and at the same time tried to interest the British in partitioning Turkey.12 The British actually forced the Dardanelles in 1807, but then made a treaty in 1809 that upheld the ‘ancient’ principle of keeping the Straits closed to all foreign warships and secretly allied with Turkey.13 Henceforth, Britain would treat this agreement as the foundation of a policy that implicitly linked support of the Turks with their excluding the warships of other states. Similarly the Russo-Turkish alliances of 1799 and 1805 mandated open Straits for Russian ships during the war against France, the latter treaty demanding strict closure to the warships of all other states. A separate agreement of 1802 required Russian approval of the appointed Hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia.14 On the other hand, the Russo-Turkish War of 1806–12 was preceded by a Russian occupation of Moldavia in an unsuccessful attempt to exert diplomatic pressure on the Porte.
Curiously, as Napoleon prepared to invade Russia in 1812, a twenty-five-year-old English charge d’affaires, Stratford Canning, helped arrange the compromise Treaty of Bucharest, which, however, left a few ticklish issues unresolved. The Turks ceded Bessarabia (eastern Moldavia) and Anapa in Kuban (east of the Crimea); promised amnesty and autonomy for rebellious Serbia, which Russia had been forced to abandon, and for the Principalities, which Russia had occupied for over five years; and pledged to cease harassing Russian commerce through the Straits. Secret clauses, never ratified by the Porte, gave the Russians several forts on the eastern end of the Black Sea. This treaty was also a compromise between Russian and British imperialism, since it implicitly renewed the 1805 alliance, while England still had her 1809 agreement. However, the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which ended the Napoleonic Wars, did not touch the Eastern Question, in part because the Turks would not grant more commercial concessions to the British and other Europeans in return for the general guarantee that everybody else desired to replace Russia’s exclusive pretensions.15
RUSSIA’S FURTHER ASCENT (1821–33)
A Greek revolt in 1821 against the Ottomans set off a twelve-year crisis. The Russians found quickly that neither Britain nor Austria would allow them to invoke their alleged rights under Kuchuk-Kainarji and that no one, not even the Greeks, favoured Tsar Alexander’s so-called ‘Greek solution’ of six autonomous Greek and Balkan Christian principalities under the Sultan. A swing of British opinion in favour of the Greeks, though, enabled the Russians to extract unilateral concessions from the Turks in their bilateral relations and in conjunction with Britain and France to broker a settlement of the rebellion. The unplanned Anglo-French-Russian sinking of a Turko-Egyptian naval squadron in Greek waters in 1827 led the angry Turks, who hoped for British support, to denounce their recent agreement with Russia.16
The new Tsar Nicholas I declared war in 1828, but then, advised by special ministerial council, was careful not to try a march on Constantinople or to exceed his assurances to the other powers in his peace demands. The upshot was the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople, whereby the earlier political and commercial agreements and Russian acquisitions in Transcaucasia were confirmed and Russia obtained more rights in the Black Sea and lower Danube. Now Moldavia, Wallachia and Serbia had genuinely guaranteed autonomy, and so did Greece, which, as a result of a British initiative, was about to become independent. The Hospodars were to be Romanians appointed for life by the Sultan with Russian approval and have full power within the confines of established treaties and charters – an elastic provision that opened the door further to direct Russian interference and for Romanian resistance.17
The Turks only agreed to recognize Greek independence because of the threat of a French-backed Egyptian rebellion that aimed to establish a separate realm that included Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon and Palestine). By December 1832 the Egyptians had occupied Syria and taken Konya in central Anatolia, thereby threatening Constantinople. The English did not act, but Tsar Nicholas took a defensive, interventionist attitude, due to the recent Polish uprising, and backed the Sultan on the grounds that the combination of emigre Poles in Constantinople and French-backed Egyptians were actually a threat to Russia. Rejecting the suggestion that he ask for a fortress on the Bosphorus, Nicholas proffered military and naval support, which the Turkish ministers were reluctant to accept, but, as the Sultan allegedly said: ‘A drowning man clings to a serpent.’18 The British and French had no formal grounds to oppose the Russians, whose troops the Sultan had invited in order to save his throne. Ten thousand of them, led by Count Alexander Orlov, passed the Bosphorus in May 1833 and landed in a northern suburb, safe from the fanatically anti-Russian Turks of Constantinople.
By then the British had recovered their decisiveness; Palmerston dispatched the anti-Russian John Ponsonby as ambassador to the Porte, and both Western powers sent fleets to the Aegean and induced the Turks to compromise with both the Egyptians and the Russians. The British did not pass the Dardanelles this time, but the arrangements were worked out, and the Russian regiments packed up in July and went home, thus ending the possibility of an Anglo-French-Russian clash of arms.
The English did not like either deal. The Egyptian Pasha obtained the lifetime governance of Syria as well as hereditary rule in Egypt and was in a position to bid for the allegiance of the Sultan’s other Arab subjects and thus threaten British land communications to India via the Persian Gulf.19 The Russo-Turkish Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi (Hünkâr-Iskelesi) provided for an eight-year defensive alliance, Russia pledging openly to grant military aid upon request, and the Turks promising in an officially but not effectively secret article to render their help when needed by closing the Dardanelles to foreign warships.20 Essentially this clause gave the Russian alliance legal primacy over any other arrangement Turkey might make. However, due to Russian attempts to control Turkish interpretation of the treaty, the British immediately suspected that the Russians had obtained the right to close the Straits to others and open them for themselves. The Russians never officially and explicitly said that they had obtained such a right, though many of them believed that they had.21
Palmerston did not want the Turks to ratify the Russian treaty because of its political implications, but was not ready to start a war, as Napoleon I had been in 1805–06, when he urged the Turks to duck out of an agreement with Russia. The immediate crisis blew over, but genuine russophobia began to develop in certain British circles.22
Meanwhile, Nicholas, the Austrian Emperor Francis I, and the Prussian Crown Prince William met on the Tsar’s initiative for ten days at Münchengrätz (in Bohemia). Earlier that year Nicholas had tried to interest the Austrians in a hypothetical disposition of European Turkey. Now, by a special convention, Austria and Russia pledged to uphold the integrity of the Ottoman Empire under its present dynasty and, in the secret articles, keep the Egyptian pasha out of European Turkey and to act in concert in case Turkey collapsed.23 Metternich was also rightly concerned that the Russians would use their new influence in the Romanian Principalities and their control of the mouth of the Danube to obstruct Austria’s commercial outlet to the Black Sea, but he could not interest Palmerston in an anti-Russian combination.
ENGLAND’S LEAP FORWARD (1833–41)
The British made a three-pronged response to Unkiar-Skelessi and Munchengratz. They actively fostered a Turkish resurgence in the Black Sea; they demanded commercial concessions from Turkey; and they pressed for domestic reform that would undercut Russian claims that the native Christians needed protection.
The dangerous Black Sea moves came first, since Ponsonby, under the influence of his deputy, David Urquhart – a fiery russophobe – and some Polish patriots, began helping the Turks ship munitions to the Muslim Circassian, Daghestani and other opponents of Russian rule in the Caucasus. At one point the Russians captured the Vixen, a British vessel that ostensibly carried salt, but also delivered arms to the insurgent tribesmen. Ponsonby then wished to call up the English fleet and risk hostilities with the Russians over the vessel, while Nicholas was ready, in turn, to launch an expedition to the Bosphorus.24 Back at home, some French and English were frightened by the heavily fortified Russian naval base at Sevastopol. Although they themselves were hardly innocent of aggressive schemes, they had reason to be worried. The Naval Minister, Prince Alexander Menshikov, wished to send two battleships from the Baltic fleet through the Straits in order to reinforce the Black Sea squadron, while the Russian Admiral M.P. Lazarev had already drawn up an operational plan for a 10,000-man surprise landing at the Bosphorus.25 The Russians also essentially violated their 1809 treaty with Sweden, by which Finland and the Aland Islands were transferred to Russia, by starting to fortify Bomarsund. In the last analysis, it was the moderates on both sides who prevented an Anglo-Russian war. Neither the Russian Tsar nor the majority of British cabinet ministers were ready to push things that far in the 1830s.26
Britain’s commercial and reformative prongs were more serious because of their lasting consequences. By 1835, against Russian opposition, Britain obtained permission to develop steamship traffic on the Euphrates to facilitate communications with India. Then in 1838, when it was apparent that the Egyptians planned to break away completely from the Sultan, the British were able to extort from the Porte the commercial convention that ended a series of Ottoman monopolies and reduced the duties that British merchants had paid.27 After some striking Egyptian successes on the battlefield the next year, the brilliant young Ottoman official, Mustapha Reshid, bidding for a British alliance, induced the new Sultan, Abdülmecid, to grant the Hatt-i Sherif of Gulhane (Gulhane), a solemn programmatic declaration of the intention to create a legislative council and the rule of law on an equal basis for all of his subjects. Thus were launched the celebrated Turkish Tanzimat reforms.
Reshid never got his alliance with London, but rather an agreement among England, Austria and Russia to support the Sultan against the Egyptians, England and Russia each having the right to send warships temporarily into the Straits to defend Turkey. Common opposition to France’s Egyptian policy induced Nicholas and Palmers ton to agree that Russia would relinquish Unkiar-Skelessi in exchange for Great Power support of the Sultan and a general guarantee of the closure of the Straits to foreign warships. The Anglo-Russian combination created a diplomatic showdown, leading to a humiliating French retreat, while a British-Austrian-Turkish force drove the Egyptians from Syria, thereby securing the Sultan’s power. A four-power agreement, made in London in the summer of 1840, was reworked into the five-power Straits Convention of 1841, which generalized the British and Russian treaties of 1809 and 1833 by removing the bilateral alliances with Turkey. Its preamble asserted the ambiguous goal of strengthening the Ottoman Empire,28 which could be seen as a guarantee of its integrity or just empty rhetoric.
Following the 1841 agreement there were still several problems. French national pride was hurt, and the naval arms race with England on the basis of the new steam technologies picked up. Russian nationalists, who had already written off Turkey and were in the process of dismissing Austria as well, thought that the Tsar had conceded too much. Few people anywhere, apart from a faction of Englishmen, believed that Turkey was reformable. Certainly no Russians and not many Turks believed that the Tanzimat could work, and most saw it as destructive modernization. The Ottomans themselves were more interested in improving their army and navy than in changing anything else.29 Perhaps the English belief in Ottoman reform was no more than a useful myth for keeping the Russians and their Kuchuk-Kainarji out and establishing a British-led European protectorate in the interest of commerce.
THE WIDER CONTEXT: THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN ‘GREAT GAME’ (TO 1847)
The Anglo-Russian rivalry in the Ottoman Empire was part of a ‘Great Game’ that pitted the world’s richest, most industrialized and greatest maritime power against the biggest and strongest land power on the globe after the defeat of Napoleon. It was a rivalry which by the 1840s stretched from the boundaries of the Russian-American and Hudson Bay Companies (Alaska and Canada) in North America to eastern China, and from Central Asia to Persia and Turkey and across Europe to the Baltic and Sweden. It was a rivalry based on the fact that British commercial and imperial expansion, with two loci of power, England and India, as well as commerce with the Americas as a logistical reserve, threatened to carry British influence to most of Russia’s borders. And it was a rivalry based on the fact that after the fall of Napoleon, only Russia could conceivably threaten British power in India. Although Constantinople was within Russia’s reach, and India was not, it was fear for Britain’s position in India more than anything else that animated the rise of British russophobia on the part of colonial officials, diplomats, members of the Board of Control in London that oversaw Indian affairs until 1858, and their publicists.30
The British also had two not so little games: one with France, the other with the United States, each possessing advanced industrial and maritime technologies and no more prepared than Russia to let London determine who expanded where, when, and under what conditions. The Anglo-French rivalry stretched from the Low Countries and Spain through the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East, reappearing in the South Pacific. An Anglo-American rivalry persisted in the Western Hemisphere and northern Pacific. The British thus had no particular reason to seek out a conflict with Russia. For most of the 1840s, especially, France and the United States appeared to Britain as more dangerous rivals.31
The British imperialists desired the impossible from Russia – a Russian Empire that would not attempt to expand into the backward territories and political vacuums that lay to Russia’s south, and would content itself with its assigned role of supporting the status quo in Europe, while Britain pursued commercial ascendancy in many distant lands including Russia. Russian imperialists, on the other hand, accepted the British Empire and commercial and maritime supremacy as a fact of life, but saw themselves as the natural masters or protecting power in the Balkans, the entire basins of the Black and Caspian Seas and Central Asia. Except for a mad statesman such as Tsar Paul (1796–1801) or a few poetic dreamers, a Russian thrust toward India was a diplomatic card to be used to counter England’s maritime supremacy, rather than a programme for expansion.32
The English, for their part, defined a vast expanse of territory as vital for the security of India and communications between India and England: north-eastern Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and coastal Arabia, all nominally under the Sultan, and also coastal Persia, as well as Afghanistan. This explains rival British and French attitudes toward Egypt, British fears of a Russian takeover of the Turkish Straits and Russian expansion towards the historic overland trade routes linking the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean or Black Sea, and the guarded British support of the anti-Russian rebels in the Caucasus.33
The Anglo-Russian competition produced some tense moments in the 1820s and 1830s. British agents had prompted Persia to go to war with Russia in both 1804 and 1826, resulting in Russia’s annexation of what are now the Republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia. Thereupon Russian nationalists aimed to increase Russian influence in the Central Asian khanates and compensate Teheran by backing a Persian conquest of the Khanate of Herat in western Afghanistan and the anti-British factions in the other Afghan khanates, Kabul and Kandahar. Russia’s anglophobic minister in Teheran, Colonel A.S. Simonich, actually directed the siege of Herat in 1837–38.34 Meanwhile, Governor-General Perovsky of Orenberg hoped to time the siege of Herat with an expedition from Orenberg to Khiva. Palmerston thus knew what he was doing when he asked the Russian ambassador if Foreign Minister Nesselrode, with his assurances, or Simonich represented official Russian policy.
Thinking in terms of Alexander the Great and Tamerlane, the British feared that the Russians could sail up the Amu Darya (Oxus) from Khiva and then march along the Kabul River in Afghanistan and down through the Hindu Kush into the Indus Valley. London’s new envoy to Persia, Sir John McNeill, was a russophobic mirror-image of Simonich, and persuaded the Earl of Auckland, Governor-General of India, to dispatch a fleet from India to the Persian Gulf. The British also occupied the island of Kharg in the Persian Gulf and Aden on the Arabian Peninsula at the mouth of the Red Sea to secure the overland connection. Nesselrode meanwhile induced the Tsar to replace Simonich with a less fiery envoy and to appoint a more moderate head of the Asiatic Department. Without Russian support, the Persian Shah had to call off the siege of Herat the next year. Palmerston’s plain-speaking had worked.35
As a sequel to the Herat crisis, both sides overextended themselves and lost badly. Auckland sent an Anglo-Indian expeditionary force to Afghanistan in 1838 and installed proteges in Kandahar and Kabul. To counter this, the Tsar sent Perovsky and 5,000 men in November to bring Khiva to heel. Few Russians and even fewer English made it back alive.36
Nicholas’s decision in 1839 to cooperate with Britain against France and Egypt meant that the British imperialists’ nightmare – a coalition of Russia, Persia, Afghan princes, and French-backed Egypt to take over the Middle East and threaten India – never materialized. On the other hand, he did engineer a sequel to the 1841 Straits Convention at Turkey’s expense, perhaps as a result of serious differences over the governance of Serbia. From late 1843 through late 1844, Nicholas tried in vain to interest the Austrians in a partition scheme allowing Austria to be ‘heir to European Turkey’, while Constantinople became a free city, Russia gaining a stretch of territory down to the Bosphorus.37
The Tsar also obtained an invitation to visit Britain, where he was lavishly fêted. He and Orlov held several discussions with the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Commander-in-Chief – Peel, Aberdeen, and Wellington – and tried for an Anglo-Russian agreement at French expense regarding Turkey. Nicholas promised to uphold that realm and consult Britain in case it collapsed, but also warned of a powerful faction that advocated a French alliance and predicted a future Russo-British war. Nothing concrete resulted from his efforts. Nesselrode’s follow-up visit to England that year, where Aberdeen recorded a non-binding personal agreement to consult in any future Ottoman crisis, did not dispel British misgivings. Nicholas, for his part, never seems to have understood that he had not obtained a serious agreement from these three British statesmen.38
The ‘Great Game’ between England and Russia, however, was not dormant anywhere. In 1842 Stratford Canning returned to Constantinople, wholeheartedly supported Reshid’s reforms, and encountered the opposition of the Russian legation. On the other hand, in 1843 the Russian Black Sea squadron obtained five war steamers, and Nicholas threatened to send 20,000 troops to Serbia to uphold a reasonably friendly regime there.39 The Russians, however, could not get what they wanted in cultural matters or even control administrative developments where they had protectorate rights. They could not block Western secular and religious influences that came into the Romanian Principalities, Serbia and the Ottoman Bulgarian provinces, where American Protestant missionaries promoted native-language bibles. Serbs from Habsburg territory and with an essentially German education developed the educational and scientific infrastructure of the Belgrade regime right under the nose of the Russian consul. Young educated Romanians gravitated toward Paris and pursued a consciously Latin orientation, negating the political significance of their Orthodoxy – their only emotional tie to Russia.40
In East Asia, though, the Russians responded to the Anglo-Indian victory over China by consolidating their North Pacific holdings, the Russian America Company abandoning Fort Ross in California and any claims to North American territory below Alaska.41 Moreover, Rear Admiral E.V. Putiatin started in 1843 to exert pressure in St Petersburg for a military thrust south of the Russo-Chinese border, which had been established in 1689. He wanted to take over the River Amur in order to counter the British advance in South China, and this lobbying paid off. In 1847 the Tsar appointed another experienced great gamesman, N.N. Muraviev, to be Governor-General of Eastern Siberia, with instructions to implement Putiatin’s plan.42
The British, too, were not sleeping after 1842, but rather taking over the Indus valley. Aberdeen may have adopted a different line to Palmers ton; nevertheless, in 1843 he annexed Sind. And Stratford bought a little insurance at the Straits in 1846 by prearranging the requisite authorization for English warships to enter the Dardanelles quickly.43
The period of 1842–47, however, drew to a close without any special Anglo-Russian or Eastern crisis. British russophobia had peaked, as had the Russian naval budget. The Russians and English had learned to tolerate each other’s influence in the Ottoman Empire. Neither the Russell-Palmerston duo that dominated the London Cabinet as of 1846 nor the Nicholas-Nesselrode pair who managed Russian diplomacy were seeking a scrape. Their ministers plenipotentiary at the all-important post on the Bosphorus, Stratford Canning and Vladimir Titov, got on quite well. The British were bickering with both the French and the Americans over a series of overseas interests. But no one could control the domestic forces that shape human affairs.
NOTES
1.EB 1911 VIII: 831.
2.Philip Marshall Brown, Foreigners in Turkey. Their furidical Status (Princeton/London 1914), pp. 3–37; G. Pélisse du Rausas, Le régime des capitulations dans VEmpire Ottoman (Paris 1902), p. 70; Testa I: 15–21, (1535 Fr.-Turk. Treaty), trans. MENA I.1; CTS XXXVI (Fr.-Turk. Tr. 28 May 1740).
3.S. Rosenthal, The Politics of Dependence. Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies 3 (Westport CN 1980), pp. 6–7, 103–5; Sheremet: 103.
4.E.I. Druzhinina, Kuchuk-Kainardzhiiskii mir 1114 goda (?ë podgotovka i zakliuchenie) (Moscow 1955), pp. 294–5; Norman Saul, Russia and the Mediterranean, 1191–1801 (Chicago 1970), pp. 1–21.
5.CTS XLV (Italian, French Texts), trans., MENA I.32.
6.Druzhinina, Kuchuk-Kainardzhiiskii mir, pp. 217–21, 295–301; PRO SP 97–50, No. 18: 147–8 (from Constantinople, 17 Aug. 1774); for the standard view, Albert Sorel, La question orientale au XVIII siècle (Paris 1878), p. 291, and Marriott: 137; cf. Roderick Davison, ‘“Turkish Imbecility and Russian Skill?” The Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardji Reconsidered’, Slavic Review 35.3 (Sept. 1976): 463–83.
7.CTS XVII 491–504, especially art 9: with divergent Russian/Latin and Polish/French versions; also Herbert H. Kaplan, The First Partition of Poland (New York 1962), pp. 7–12, 50–82, 147–73.
8.B.A. Georgiev, N.S. Kiniapina, M.T. Panchencko, V.I. Sheremet, Vostochnyi vopros v o vneshnei politike Rossii honets XVIII-nachalo XX v. (Moscow 1978), pp. 42–4; O.P. Markova, ‘O proiskhozhdenii tak nazyvaemogo grecheskogo proekta (80-e gody XVIII v.)’, Problémy metologii i istochnikovedeniia istorii vneshnei politiki Rossii, ed. A.L. Narochnitskii (Moscow 1986), pp. 7–18.
9.Isabel De Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven/London 1981), pp. 416–26; R.H. Lord, The Second Partition of Poland (Cambridge MA 1915), pp. 377–505; ‘The Third Partition of Poland’, SR/SEER III.9 (March 1925): 483–98.
10.Heinrich Pfusterschmid-Hardtenstein, ‘Von der Orientalishen Akademie zur k. u. k. Konsularakademie. Ein mariatheresianische Institution und ihre Bedeutung für den Auswärtigen Dienst der Osterreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie’, HMVI.1: 137–43.
11.Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1804 (Seattle/ London 1977), pp. 140–1, 238–47.
12.Alexander I to Novosil’tsev, 11/23 Nov. 1804 (VPR I.II).
13.Nouradounghian 11.27 (Ang.–Turk. Tr., 6 Jan. 1809), especially art. 11, trans. MENA I.52.
14.CTS LIV, LVII (Russ.-Turk. Trs., et al., 23. Dec. 1798/3 Jan. 1799, 9/21 Nov. 1805), trans. MENA 1.40, 48; cf. J.C. Hurewitz, ‘Russia and the Turkish Straits: a Reevaluation of the Origin of the Problem’, World Politics XIV (1961–62): 609–29; VPR I: 713–5.
15.Temperley ENEC: 30–1; Lane-Poole I: 149–76; CTS LXII (Russ.-Turk Tr., 16/28 May 1812), trans. MENA L54. VPR I.8:652nl29.
16.Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of Balkan National States, 1804–1920 (Seattle/London 1977), pp. 38–44; Paul W. Schroeder, Metternich’s Diplomacy at Its Zenith, 1820–1823 (Austin 1962), pp. 123–4, 164–87; Lane-Poole I: 324; Harold Temperley, The Foreign Policy of Canning, 1822–1827: England, the Neo-Holy Alliance, and the New World (London 1925, repr. Hamden CN 1966), pp. 329–55; Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, The Foreign Ministers of Alexander L Political Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy, 1801–1825 (Berkeley/Los Angeles 1969), pp. 284–5; Schiemann II: 126–42; CTS LXXVI (Russ.-Turk. Conv., 25 Sept./7 Oct. 1826), trans. Hertslet 1.131.
17.Schiemann II: 367; CTS LXXX (Russ.-Turk Tr., 2/14 Sept. 1829), trans. Hertslet 11.145; Radu Florescu, The Struggle against Russia in the Roumanian Principalities, 1821–1854 (Munich 1962), pp. 135–60.
18.Barbara Jelavich, St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814–1914 (Bloomington IN 1974), p. 85.
19.Martens IV: 442–5. Schiemann III: 208–22; G.H. Bolsover, ‘Lord Ponsonby and the Eastern Question (1833–1839)’, SR/SEER XIII (July 1934): 98–102; Webster, Palmerston I: 303; Maria Todorova, ‘Russian Policy in Constantinople: the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi, 1833’ (Manuscript, Oct. 1989).
20.Nouradounghian, 11.27, CTS LVII (Russ.-Turk. Tr., 26 June/8 July 1833); trans., Hertslet 11.168, MENA I.72.
21.Bolsover, ‘Lord Ponsonby and the Eastern Question (1833–1839)’, pp. 102–6; Todorova, ‘Russian Policy’, pp. 3–8; S.M. Gorianov, Le Bosphore et les Dardanelles (Paris: 1910).
22.MENA I.73 (Ponsonby to Subl. Porte, 26 Aug. 1833); Webster, Palmerston I: 306; V.N. Vinogradov, Velikobritaniia i Balkany, pp. 158–60; John H. Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain (Cambridge MA 1950).
23.G.H. Bolsover, ‘Nicholas I and the Partition of Turkey’, SR/SEER XXVIII (1948): 116–23; CTS LXXXIV, also ZP 1.14 (Conv. of Münchengrätz, 6/18 Sept. 1833), trans. MENA I.74.
24.C.W. Crawley, ‘Anglo-Russian Relations, 1815–1840’, CHf 3 (1930): 60–1; ?u??ear ERSQ: 30, note 69; Sir Charles Webster, ‘Urquhart, Ponsonby, and Palmerston’, EHR 62 (1947): 327–51. In 1833 Urquhart published his programmatic Turkey and Its Resources and England, France, Russia, and Turkey.
25.Mnsh. to Nes., Nes. to Nich. I, 4/16, 18/30 Jan. 1838 (MENA 1.79); Ingle: 97–8; Lazarev memo, 1835 (TsGAVMF 19/4/92); cf. Col. A.A. Samarov (ed.), M.L. Lazarev. Dokumenty (3 vols, Moscow 1952–1961) 11.149–73; Puryear ERSQ: 30–1.
26.Paul Knaplund, ‘Finnmark in British Diplomacy, 1836–1855’, AHR 30 (1925): 479–90; Bolsover, ‘Lord Ponsonby and the Eastern Question, (1833–1839)’, pp. 111–12; Webster, Palmerston I: 318–19, II: 558–81; Ingle: 65–72, 156–7.
27.Vinogradov, Velikobritaniia i Balkany, pp. 185–7; Sheremet: 86–7; CTS LXXXVIII (Conv. of Balta Liman, 16 Aug. 1838), trans. MENA 1.80.
28.Webster, Palmerston II: 644–64; Ingle: 101–47; Temperley ENEC: 119–130; CTS XLII (London Conv., 13 July 1841), trans. MENA 1.87.
29.Ralston, Importing the European Army, pp. 54–64; L. Carl Brown, The Tunisia of Ahmad Bey, 1837–1855 (Princeton 1974), pp. 6–7, 261–303.
30.David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia, 1828–1914 (London 1977/80), pp. 27–42.
31.Kenneth Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815–1908 (Berkeley/Los Angeles 1967), pp. 75–178.
32.E.L. Steinberg, ‘Angliiskaia versiia ? “russkoi ugroze” v XIX–XX vv.’ Problemy, metodologii i istochnikovedeniia istorii vneshnei politiki Rossi, pp. 67–8.
33.Steinberg, ‘Angliiskaia versiia? “russkoi ugroze”’, pp. 59–69; Gillard, The Struggle for Asia, 1828–1914, pp. 18–82.
34.Ingle: 77–8.
35.Webster, Palmerston II: 742–51. In 1836 McNeill published his alarmist Progress and Present Position of Russia in the East.
36.M. Ivanin, Opisanie zimniago pokhoda 1839–1840g. (St Petersburg: 1873); A. Lobanov-Rostovsky, Russia and Asia (Ann Arbor 1933, repr. 1951), pp. 153–4.
37.David MacKenzie, Ilija Garašanin: Balkan Bismarck (New York/Boulder, 1985), pp. 24–33; Bolsover, ‘Nicholas and the Partition of Turkey’, SR/SEER XXVIII (1948): 124–35.
38.Schiemann IV: 44–55; ZP 1.15–23 (8/20 Aug. 1844 to ‘21’ Jan. 1845 memos); MENA 1.94 (Nes. memo, 16/28 Dec. 1844, trans.); for an alternative view, Puryear ERSQ: 1–73.
39.ZP 1.189 (from Morskoi sbornik, 1880); Schiemann, IV: 34.
40.MacKenzie, Ilija Garašanin, pp. 24–38; Jelavich and Jelavich, The Establishment of Balkan National States, pp. 94–5.
41.Bolkhovitinov: 39–49.
42.Ingle: 152, 164; R.K. Quested, The Expansion of Russia in East Asia, 1857–1860 (Kuala Lumpur 1968), pp. 30–58.
43.Gillard, The Struggle for Asia, 1828–1914, pp. 72–7; Puryear ERSQ: 155–6.