by Will Durant
V. TURKEY IN EUROPE
The days of Ottoman achievement in government, literature, and art were past, but the Turks in 1789 still held sway, however laxly, over Egypt, the Near East to the Euphrates, Asia Minor and Armenia, Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, and those Danubian principalities Wallachia and Moldavia (now Romania) which were among the disputed morsels released to Alexander by Napoleon (who did not have them) at the Peace of Tilsit. The sultans, weakened by economic stagnation and moral decay, allowed the pashas to rule and bleed the provinces with very little interference from Constantinople; we have noted, with Byron, Ali Pasha’s strong-arm rule in Albania (1788–1822). Ali overreached himself in plotting against the Porte; Sultan Mahmud II had him assassinated.
The Serbs fought for independence. When their popular Pasha was slain by Janissaries, a Serbian patriot, Karageorge, attempted (1804) to found a republic, with an elected assembly which would choose a senate; and in 1808 the senate elected Karageorge hereditary prince. Sultan Mahmud sent a substantial army to Belgrade to suppress the new republic (1813); Karageorge and thousands of his followers fled to Austria. A second revolt, under Prince Miloš Obrenovich, induced the Sultan to accept a compromise (1815) by which the Serbs were guaranteed freedom of religion, education, and trade. Miloš strengthened his rule by a mixture of politics and assassination, had his rival Karageorge executed, and obtained from the Sultan a recognition of his hereditary rule. By 1830 Serbia was in effect an independent state.
Greece had fallen to the Turks in 1452, and had now been so long under Ottoman rule that it had half forgotten its ancient pride. Conquest by “Franks” and immigration by Slavs mingled bloods, racial memories, and dialects until the popular “demotic” speech had substantially diverged from the Greek of Plato’s days. Nevertheless scholars, poets, and patriots had preserved some remembrance of classic Greece, and of the eleven centuries (395–1452) during which Greeks had ruled the Byzantine Empire and had continued to enrich scholarship, philosophy, and art. News of the French Revolution ignited these memories, and made many Greeks wonder, with Byron’s “Childe Harold,” why Greece might not again be free. Rhigas Pheraios (1757?—98), a Wallachian born in Thessaly and living in Vienna, wrote and spread a Greek adaptation of “The Marseillaise,” and organized a hetairia, or brotherhood, dedicated to bringing Greeks and Turks under a common bond of liberty and equality. He set out for Greece in 1797 with “twelve chestloads of proclamations,”17 was captured at Trieste, and was executed at Belgrade. Another hetairia was formed at Odessa, spread into Greece, and shared in preparing the Greek mind for revolt. Adamantios Koraës (1748–1833), a Greek of Smyrna, settled in Paris in 1788, and devoted himself to “purifying” current. Greek speech into closer harmony with ancient norms. He rejoiced over the French Revolution, and, in anonymous poems and tracts, as well as in his editions of the Greek classics, spread his republican and anticlerical ideas—though he warned that revolution might be premature. It came in 1821, and by 1830 Greece was free.
The Turkish government, so far as one can judge through the haze of time and space, of language and prejudice, was not clearly more oppressive than the governments of Europe before 1800. Byron was shocked (May 21, 1810) on seeing the severed heads of criminals exposed on either side of the gate to the Seraglio, but we may presume that the French Revolutionary government had guillotined more men and women than the sultans had ever in equal time beheaded. A majority of the wealth was in the hands of a small minority—as elsewhere. The Turks were a philosophical and poetical, as well as a warlike, people; they took the day’s fate as Allah’s will, not to be changed by grumbling, and they considered a beautiful woman, properly disciplined and perfumed, as more precious than anything but gold. They liked polygamy when they could afford it; why should not the ablest breed most? They had little need for prostitutes, but provided brothels for Christians. They were still producing good literature and art: poets abounded; the mosques sparkled; probably Istanbul was in 1800 the most beautiful city in Europe.
Politically the position of Turkey was perilous. Her economy and army were in disarray, while the material resources and military power of her enemies were growing. Her capital was the most strategic point on the map; all Christian Europe itched for that pearl. Catherine the Great had stretched Russia’s grasp to the Black Sea, had taken the Crimea from the Tatars, and, with Voltaire’s blessing, was dreaming of crowning her grandson Constantine in Constantinople.
Such was the situation when Selim III, at the age of twenty-seven, became sultan (1789). He had received a good education, had formed a close friendship with the French ambassador, and had sent an agent to France to report to him on West European policies, ideas, and ways. He decided that unless Turkish institutions were basically reformed his country could not hold off its enemies. He made peace with Catherine at Jassy (1792), recognizing Russian sovereignty over the Crimea and the rivers Dniester and Bug. Then he set himself to giving the Ottoman Empire a “New Organization” (Nizam-i-Jadid)—based on popular election of mayors and deputies. With the help of West European officers and experts he set up schools of navigation and engineering, and gradually formed a new army. His plans for a return engagement with Russia were aborted by Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and attack upon Turkish Acre. He joined England and Russia in war against France (1798). Peace was restored in 1802, but the war had been costly and unpopular; the local governors and venal officials rebelled against the new constitution; Selim allowed himself to be deposed (1807), but was assassinated nevertheless. After a year of chaos his party prevailed, and his nephew Mahmud II began, in 1808, a sultanate of thirty-one years.
The rival Powers of Christendom tried to control the policies of the Porte by money or force. Turkey survived as a state because none of them could afford to allow another to control the Bosporus. In 1806 Alexander I sent troops into Moldavia and Wallachia to appropriate these provinces for Russia; Napoleon’s ambassador at the Porte urged Selim to resist; Turkey declared war against Russia. At Tilsit, in 1807, Napoleon undertook to arrange peace. The resulting truce was repeatedly violated until Alexander, reconciled to war against Napoleon, decided to withdraw his army from the southern front. On May 28, 1812, one day before Napoleon left Dresden to join his gathering forces in Poland, Russia signed with Turkey the Peace of Bucharest, abandoning all her claims to the Danubian principalities. Now Alexander could gather all his battalions to meet the 400,000 men—French and others—who were preparing to cross the Niemen into Russia.
CHAPTER XXXIV
Russia
1796–1812*
I. MILIEU
FRANCE and Austria,” wrote Talleyrand in 1816, “… would be the strongest powers in Europe if, during the last century, another power had not risen in the North, whose terrible and rapid progress must make one dread that the numerous encroachments by which she has already signaled herself are but the prelude of still further conquests, which will end in swallowing up everything.”1
Space can make history. Run the eye across a map of the world from Kaliningrad (which Kant knew as Königsberg) on the Baltic to Kamchatka on the Pacific; then from the Arctic Ocean to the Caspian Sea, the Himalayas, Mongolia, China, Japan: all between is Russia. Let the map speak; or hear Mme. de Staël, driving from Vienna to St. Petersburg in 1812:
There is so much space in Russia that everything is lost in it, even the châteaux, even the population. You might suppose you were traveling through a country from which the people had just taken their departure…. The Ukraine is a very fertile country, but by no means agreeable…. You see large plains of wheat which appear to be cultivated by invisible hands, the habitations and inhabitants are so rare.2
The inhabitants huddled in scattered villages because memory had not died of Tatars who had ravaged there, killing joyfully; they had gone, but their like might come again; and they had left some of their violence in Russian ways, tempered by toil and discipline. Natural selection had been merciless, and had favored those men who had h
ungered and labored tirelessly for land and women. Peter the Great had made some of them into soldiers or navigators; his successors had brought in venturesome Germans and clever Czechs to help people the plains. Catherine the Great had pushed swelling armies and swilling generals ever farther south, driving Tatars and Turks before them, conquering the Crimea, and triumphantly sailing the Black Sea. Under Alexander I the expansion continued; Russians settled in Alaska, set up a fort near San Francisco, and established a colony in California.3
The hard climate of European Russia—unprotected by forests or mountains against arctic cold or tropical heat—made a tough people, ready to accomplish the impossible if given bread and time. They could be cruel, for life had been cruel to them; they could torture prisoners and massacre Jews. But these barbarities rose in part out of their own experiences and memories of insecurity and hostility; they were not irrevocably in their blood, for the increasing security of organized communal life made them gentler, pitying, wondering, like a million Karamazovs, why they killed or sinned. They looked with an abiding melancholy upon a violent and unintelligible world.
Religion appeased their wonder and tamed their violence. The priests played here—as Roman Catholic priests had done in the early stages of West European communities—the role of the “spiritual arm,” buttressing the forces of the law with the secret and diverse powers of the myth to mystify or explain, to terrify or console. The czars knew how vital these myths were to social order, patient labor, and self-sacrificing heroism in war and peace. They paid the higher clergy well, and the lower clergy enough to keep them alive and patriotic. They protected religious dissent if it remained loyal to the state and kept the peace; Catherine II and Alexander I winked an eye at Freemasonry lodges that cautiously proposed political reforms.
The Russian nobles claimed and used all feudal rights, and controlled almost every element in the life of their serfs. The feudal lord could sell his serfs, or lease them to work in town factories. He could imprison them, and punish them with rod or whip or knout (a knotted rope). He could hand them over to the government for labor or imprisonment in Siberia.4 There were some mitigations. The sale of a serf apart from his family was rare. Some nobles contributed to a serf’s education, usually for technical work on the owner’s property, sometimes for wider use; so we hear (c. 1800) of a serf who managed a textile enterprise employing five hundred looms—but most of these were in houses on the vast estates of the Sheremetev family. A census of Russia in 1783 reported a total population of 25,677,058; of the 12,838,529 males 6,678,239 were serfs of private landowners—i.e. (including one female for each male), over half the population. Russian serfdom reached its climax at this time; it worsened in the reign of the great Catherine, and Alexander I gave up his early attempts to lessen it.5
The same census reckoned Russia’s population as 94.5 percent rural, but this included peasants working and living in the towns. The towns were growing slowly, having only 1,301,000 inhabitants in 1796.6 Commerce was active and growing, especially along the coasts and the great canals; Odessa was already a busy center of maritime trade. Industry was growing more slowly in the town factories, for much of it was practiced in rural shops and homes. Class war was much less between a proletariat and its employers than between rising merchants, groaning over taxes, and the tax-free nobility.
Class differences were sharp, and were defined by law; nevertheless, they were blurred as the economy grew and education spread. Russian rulers before Peter the Great had usually frowned upon schools as opening avenues to West European radicalism and impiety; Peter, admiring the West, established lished schools of navigation and engineering for sons of the nobility, “diocesan schools” to prepare priests, and forty-two elementary schools opened to all classes but serfs, and oriented toward technology. In 1795 P. A. Shuvalov founded the University of Moscow, with two gymnasia, one for nobles, one for free commoners. Catherine, inspired by the French philosophes, spread schools widely, and advocated the education of women. She allowed private publishing firms; eighty-four percent of the books published in eighteenth-century Russia were issued during her reign. By 1800 Russia had already developed an intelligentsia that would soon be a factor in the nation’s political history. And by 1800 several merchants, or sons of merchants, had made their way into positions of influence, and even into the court.
Despite the fire-and-brimstone theology of the bishops and the papas, or local priests, the level of morals and manners was generally lower than in Western Europe, except in a minority at the court. Almost any Russian was at heart kind and hospitable, perhaps from seeing others as fellow sufferers in a hard world; but barbarism simmered in the soul, remembering times when one had to kill or be killed. Drunkenness was a common relief from reality, even in the nobility, and the precarious life of authors brought several of them to alcoholic addiction and an early death.7 Cunning, lying, and petty theft were common in the plebs, for any trick seemed fair against cruel masters, dishonest merchants, or inquisitive taxgatherers. Women were almost as tough as men, worked at least as hard, fought as fiercely, and, when accident allowed them, governed as well; what czar, after Peter, ruled as successfully as Catherine II? Adultery rose with income. Cleanliness was exceptional, and was especially difficult in winter; on the other hand, few peoples have been more addicted to hot baths and merciless massage. Venality ran its full course from serf to nobleman, from town clerk to imperial minister. “In no other country,” wrote a French ambassador in 1820, “is corruption so general. It is, in a sense, organized, and there is, perhaps, not a single government official who could not be bought at a price.”8
Under Catherine the court reached a degree of ease and refinement second only to Versailles under Louis XV and Louis XVI, though in some cases barbarism hid behind the bows. In Catherine’s court the language was French, and the ideas, barring ephemera, were those of the French aristocracy. French nobles like the Prince de Ligne were almost equally at home in St. Petersburg and Paris. French literature circulated widely in the northern capital; Italian opera was sung and applauded there as properly as in Venice or Vienna; and Russian women of money and pedigree held their heads and wigs as high, and pleased their men as variously, as the duchesses of the Ancien Régime. Nothing in the social festivities along the Seine surpassed the splendor of the gatherings that, in the sumptuous palace on the Neva, saw the summer sun lingering in the evening sky as if loath to leave the scene.9
II PAUL I: 1796–1801
At the pinnacle of this courtly splendor was a madman. Paul (Pavel Petrovich) was son of Catherine II, but genius skipped a generation, and left Paul little but morose suspicions and the dementia of absolute power.
He was eight years old when he learned that his father, Czar Peter III, had been slain through the connivance of Aleksei Orlov, brother to Grigori Orlov, the current paramour of Paul’s mother. Paul never quite recovered from this revelation. In the normal course of succession Paul should have inherited his father’s throne; Catherine bypassed him and assumed full power. Paul’s first wife, with his knowledge, plotted to dethrone Catherine and make Paul czar; Catherine discovered the plot, and forced Paul and his wife to confess. The Empress acknowledged him as heir to her authority, but he never felt sure that he too would not be snuffed out aforetime. His wife lived in constant fear, and died in giving birth to a dead child.
His second wife, Maria Feodorovna, bore him a son (1777), Alexander, whom Catherine for a time thought of naming her successor, bypassing Paul. She never developed the idea into action, but Paul surmised it, and it left him suspicious of his son. In 1783 Catherine gave Paul an estate at Gatchina, thirty miles from St. Petersburg; there Paul trained his own regiment, drilling it, after his father’s example, in the goose-step style of Frederick the Great. Catherine, fearing that he was planning another attempt to replace her, sent spies to watch him. He set spies to watch the spies. He had hallucinations of meeting, at night, the ghost of his ancestor Peter I the Great. His mind was already near br
eaking point when, in 1796, after forty-two unhappy years, he came at last to the throne that he had long considered rightfully his own.
In a flurry of good feeling he issued some benevolent edicts. He liberated several victims of Catherine’s senescent fears—Novikov and Radishchev, radical thinkers, and Kosciusko and others who had fought for Polish freedom. He was so horrified by conditions in the Moscow Hospital that he ordered its renovation and reorganization (1797), with the result that the New Moscow Hospital became one of the best in Europe.10 He reformed and stabilized the currency. He lowered the tariffs that had been stifling foreign trade, and he opened new canals to internal commerce.
However, he sent a flurry of commands to his troops about polishing buttons, repairing uniforms, and powdering wigs; to his subjects prescribing their dress and forbidding, under severe penalties, garments or styles of dress, that had been introduced into Europe after the French Revolution.11 In 1800 he prohibited the import of books published abroad, and discouraged the printing of new books in Russia. He checked the autocracy of the nobles, but transferred to private landowners 530,000 serfs who had previously enjoyed easier conditions as serfs of the state. He sanctioned the severe punishment of rebellious serfs—”as much as their owner will desire.”12 His troops, once devoted to him, resented his unrelenting surveillance and imperious discipline.
His foreign policy was incalculably versatile. He canceled the plans of Catherine to send forty thousand soldiers against Revolutionary France. He resented Napoleon’s appropriation of Malta and Egypt, and allied Russia with Turkey and England against him; he persuaded the Sultan to allow Russian warships to pass through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles; his Navy took the Ionian Islands, and landed troops in the kingdom of Naples to help eject the French. But when Great Britain refused to surrender Malta to him as elected grandmaster of the Knights of Malta, Paul withdrew from the coalition against France, and fell in love with Napoleon. When Napoleon responded with gestures of goodwill Paul forbade all trade with England, and seized all British goods in Russian stores. He discussed with Napoleon a Franco-Russian expedition to expel England from India. His fits of anger multiplied as foreign affairs ignored his wishes, and as domestic compliance waned before the profusion of his demands. He punished severely the slightest offenses, banishing from Moscow nobles who had questioned his policies, and sending to Siberia army officers tardy in obedience. His son Alexander had often been the object of Paul’s special wrath and insults.13