Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  Strabo was himself a product of the Black Sea world, born just inland from the southern coast in the old Greek colony of Amaseia, today the city of Amasya, Turkey. Reared in a Greek-speaking environment, in the green valleys that lead down toward shimmering stone beaches, he was perhaps predisposed to see his own part of the world with more sympathy and nuance than were many outsiders. The poet Ovid, for example, was exiled to the sea’s western coast in 8 CE as punishment for offending the emperor Augustus. Accustomed to the comforts of his native Abruzzi or his villa on the Capitoline hill in Rome, he found the site of his enforced relegatio singularly unappealing. The Black Sea’s name in Greek and Latin—Pontus Euxinus—meant literally “the sea that welcomes strangers.” But Ovid’s view was clearly different. “They call it hospitable,” he wrote curtly in a letter from the Pontic coast. “They lie.”7

  Barbarians walked freely about the cities, their long beards covered in icicles during the harsh winters. Raiders from the interior descended with fury on the communities of Greek-speaking seamen, frontiersmen, and political exiles who inhabited the settlements. In the continual tug-of-war between hinterland and seacoast, the former came to dominate by the late Roman period. A region that Greek authors had once compared to Egypt—which they believed to be the most civilized society outside the Greek world—was again beyond the ken of most foreigners.

  A millennium later, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Italian city-states revived the ancient connections between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The great military and commercial powerhouses of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, cities such as Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, extended their reach beyond their own waters and established global empires of profit that leached into the Black Sea world and beyond. The sea provided an essential water link to the heartland of Central Asia and, farther still, the overland passage to China.

  Italian towns and cities, most built on top of older Greek foundations, flourished as nodal points in a vast commercial network. Just as Greek sailing ships had returned laden with grain and preserved fish, Italian trading companies crisscrossed the sea in their fat-hulled vessels carrying silk, furs, and slaves from among the Tatars, Circassians, Georgians, and other peoples—a substantial source of profit to European powers seeking servants as well as oarsmen on naval and commercial galleys. They overshadowed the dominant political power at the time—the Byzantine Empire, centered in Constantinople—and effectively bankrolled the Greek-speaking Byzantines as traders and creditors, a fact not lost on contemporary writers who decried their “arrogance” as “masters of the Black Sea.”8

  At this stage, the wider Black Sea region was a part of the world so intimately familiar to Genoese sailors, Venetian tax collectors, and Florentine financiers that adventurers such as Marco Polo could write about it with studied nonchalance. “We have not spoken to you of the Black Sea or the provinces that lie around it,” he wrote in the late thirteenth century, “for there are so many who explore these waters and sail upon them every day…that everybody knows what is to be found there. Therefore I say nothing on this topic.”9

  Polo was writing primarily about the southern and eastern coasts, which gave access to the riches of Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and China. If the northwestern corner of the sea had been one of the breadbaskets of antiquity, providing barley and millet to Athens and other Greek city-states at the height of their power, it was the eastern parts of the sea that benefited from the growth of global commerce during the Renaissance. Generations of businessmen made and lost fortunes in the Italian outposts at Caffa in Crimea and Tana on the Don River. A detailed Florentine business guide from the early fourteenth century, Pegolotti’s La pratica della mercatura—a combination of Rough Guide practicality and chamber-of-commerce boosterism—listed wax, iron, tin, copper, pepper, spices, cotton, cheese, oil, apples, silk, saffron, gold, pearls, caviar, and cattle hides as some of the many commodities shipped through the Black Sea ports.10

  Yet that commerce in turn rested on the same kinds of relationships between coast and hinterland—mutually beneficial yet also often fraught—that had allowed Greek colonies to flourish in antiquity. For Italian sailors and merchants, the inland partner was no longer the Scythians, who had disappeared centuries earlier into a fog of migrations, intermarriages, and invasions. It was now one of the many nomadic and settled peoples that had exerted control of the steppe in the millennium separating Herodotus from Marco Polo: the Tatars.

  The Tatars were the successors to the Golden Horde, the last remnant of the great movement of peoples out of Central Asia that had accompanied Genghis Khan in the early thirteenth century. After the breakup of Genghis’s empire, the Golden Horde laid claim to much of the western Eurasian steppe and governed a massive imperial landscape traversed by Turkic herdsmen, Italian merchants, emissaries from European heads of state, and intrepid Christian missionaries. European visitors invariably condemned the barbarity of the Mongol-Tatar nomads, whose customs and traditions seemed to represent the antithesis of learning and civilization. But Europeans’ own recorded experiences often flew in the face of their prejudices.

  In the 1240s, the rotund friar John of Plano Carpini was dispatched by Pope Innocent IV to establish relations with the Mongol-Tatar khan. Friar John was convinced of the nomads’ barbarous ways. “The slaughter of other people is accounted a matter of nothing with them,” he wrote. But his own eyewitness report reveals a cosmopolitan culture of erudition and exchange, albeit one that was often on the move, as the Mongol-Tatars followed their herds of sheep, cattle, and horses across the steppe and down to the shores of the Black and Caspian seas. As Friar John prepared for his long-awaited audience with the Mongol emperor, he was embarrassed to learn that the emperor’s secretaries were able to write in Arabic, Russian, and Tatar—whereas John himself knew no other written language but Latin. With considerable back-and-forth, the group managed to render the emperor’s multilingual thoughts into a Latin text that John could at last ferry back to the pope.11

  In time, the Golden Horde, like its larger Mongol predecessor, fell prey to internal dissension and dynastic rivalries. It eventually broke apart, forming a new patchwork of small khanates scattered across Eurasia. These, in turn, struggled for control over trade routes and resources with some of the emerging Christian powers of the region: Muscovy, which was prospering north of the steppe zone and managed to throw off Mongol-Tatar dominance in the late fourteenth century, and Lithuania, which had also begun to expand at the expense of the Golden Horde, claiming even the lower reaches of the Dnieper River in the 1360s. The eastern nomads who had once threatened Europe—sparking desperate long-distance diplomatic missions like that of Friar John—were no longer the conduit of commerce they had been in the late Middle Ages. Business with China slowed, and Italian trading centers around the Black Sea withered.

  Beneath these grand geopolitical changes, as tracts of territory shifted from one great power to another through decisive battles or royal successions, the lives of fishermen, merchants, farmers, and nomads continued from season to season. An army on the march ruined crops. Locusts ate what remained untouched. Cattle failed to calve, or spring lambs came earlier than expected. The arrival of ships flying unknown flags signaled some imponderable change beyond the sea. The sensible localness of Odessa was prefigured in the fate of its earliest and truest ancestor, a small windswept settlement lying at the meeting place of rival empires.

  BEFORE IT BECAME Odessa, Khadjibey was an out-of-the-way village situated on the heights overlooking the Black Sea. Its origins are obscure, but local lore maintained that it was founded by an eponymous Tatar chieftain, Hadji I Giray. Seeking support against internal rivals and nomadic incursions, Hadji allegedly ceded a portion of his western territories to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a military and political powerhouse whose lands stretched across much of modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, and western Ukraine. The village of Khadjibey entered nominally into the Lithuanian domain, but in practice life proba
bly went on as usual. Tatar villagers herded cattle, feuded with rivals over grazing lands, and traded livestock and grain with peoples farther inland, from the distant Poles and Lithuanians to the nearer Moldovans.12

  If the Lithuanians were the dominant force in the early fifteenth century, when a place called Khadjibey first appears in written sources, a century later a new set of influences came rushing in from the south. The Muslim Ottomans had created a voracious empire after the conquest of the Byzantine throne at Constantinople in 1453. Originally a set of allied Turkic-speaking tribes that long before had migrated out of Central Asia, the Ottomans gradually conquered or assimilated the panoply of Christian communities, Greek-speaking villagers, and migrant shepherds who lived on the margins of Byzantium. At their head was the sultan, a dynastic title carried by rulers who traced their lineage to Osman I in the 1290s—a chieftain from whose name the English term “Ottoman” is derived. Although Islamic at its core, the Ottoman state evolved as an empire in the truest sense of the term: a collection of peoples and territories loosely bound together by an overarching political leader and governed by an enormous machinery of taxation, tribute, and war-making.

  By the time the Ottomans marched into Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire had nearly melted away on its own. Over the centuries, it had become a ghostly shell of the glorious eastern Rome of centuries past. Ottoman armies had already spent many summers on the march across southeastern Europe, bypassing the imperial capital and placing pressure on the Christian kings and princes of the Balkans, from Serbia to Moldova. But by the 1520s, with Constantinople subdued, the Ottoman sultan was able to secure the full acquiescence of the major powers in the region, who promised fealty in exchange for his recognizing their authority in their own lands. The coasts of the Black Sea were now under Ottoman suzerainty, even if the sultan often had to rule indirectly through local notables. The sea itself, with Ottoman warships commanding access to the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, was the watery domain of the world’s greatest Islamic empire.

  The port of Odessa, from an early-twentieth-century postcard. Author’s collection.

  Villagers in places like Khadjibey, whether they knew it or not, were now Ottoman subjects. That news did not always convince the locals, however. Pirates from north of the Black Sea frequently targeted Ottoman ships, even hitting the Ottoman heartland in Anatolia and occasionally menacing Constantinople. These raiders grew up out of the frontier society that defined the coastal borderlands of the empire—a mixture of former Polish-Lithuanian or Muscovite peasants, local Muslims, and nomadic herders, some of whom coalesced into distinct communities given the catchall label “Cossacks.” Cossack groups emerged in the mid-sixteenth century as a key power at the intersection of Polish-Lithuanian and Ottoman authority, offering their services as freebooters—the word “Cossack” probably derives from kazak, a Turkic word for “free man”—to whichever sovereign could pay the highest fee. Although a substantial livelihood came from raiding and piracy, Cossacks were a true multipurpose frontier people, farming, herding, and fishing in the grassy lowlands and estuaries of the Dnieper and other rivers.

  The French artillery engineer Guillaume de Beauplan, who witnessed Cossack raids in the seventeenth century, left a graphic description of the Cossacks and their waterborne lives, painting them not as the legendary cavalrymen they would eventually become, but rather as able and daring seamen, commanding small river craft that could be reoutfitted for voyages across the sea. As he wrote in his Description of Ukraine:

  Their number now approaches some 120,000 men, all trained for war, and ready to answer in less than a week the slightest command to serve the [Polish] king. It is these people who often, [indeed] almost every year, go raiding on the Black Sea, to the great detriment of the Turks. Many times they have plundered Crimea, which belongs to Tatary, ravaged Anatolia, sacked Trebizond, and even ventured as far as the mouth of the Black Sea [Bosphorus], three leagues from Constantinople, where they have laid waste to everything with fire and sword, returning home with much booty and a number of slaves, usually young children, whom they keep for their own service or give as gifts to the lords of their homeland.13

  As the Cossack raids illustrated, in the seventeenth century at least, the Ottomans exercised little direct control north of the Black Sea, except during seasons of war when troops might descend on local villages to burn crops or requisition livestock. Even then, the Ottomans depended on a web of relationships of treaty, tribute, and vassalage with Christian sovereigns as well as the Muslim Tatars of Crimea. Agreements were as often breached as honored. Constantinople’s inconstant hold on the northern coast lasted until yet another imperial power, Russia, moved southward to challenge the sultan’s notional hegemony. The riches of the sea and its hinterlands—including grain, sheep, cattle, and timber—had been an inducement to imperial rivals for centuries. But the sea also offered two things that the Russians in particular desired: ports that were ice-free for most of the winter and potential access to the Mediterranean.

  Under Peter the Great, Russia launched a series of military forays against the Ottomans and their clients. Most of Peter’s southern expeditions, in the 1690s and 1710s, came to little. But one of his successors, Catherine the Great, was able to combine strategic daring, technological innovation, and careful diplomacy to present a sustained challenge to the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars, a remnant of the old Golden Horde based on the Crimean Peninsula and exercising some sway along the northern coast of the Black Sea.

  In a series of military campaigns from 1768 to 1774, Catherine pushed back Ottoman armies and secured territorial gains that made the Russian Empire an emerging Black Sea power. The empress took control of old Ottoman fortresses at Kinburn, Yenikale, and Kerch, vital choke points that commanded access to the Dnieper and Bug rivers, as well as to the shallow, fish-rich Sea of Azov. Under the terms of the Russian peace treaty with Constantinople, the Crimean Tatars were proclaimed independent of Ottoman authority, although they were permitted to recognize the sultan as caliph, or earthly spiritual leader of all Muslims. Russian-flagged ships were allowed to enter the Black Sea from the Mediterranean, an essential boon to commerce in the Russian lands north of the sea.

  The empress ordered a massive shipbuilding campaign to outfit a new commercial and naval fleet. New towns grew up in the areas now under Russia’s control, small but promising hamlets that were soon attracting merchants and immigrants from across the empire’s uncertain borders and even from across the sea. As one observer noted at the time, “These towns…as well as numerous villages which have suddenly reared their heads in a country formerly inhabited only by lawless banditti, or traversed by roving hordes, are filled with Russians, with Tartars reclaimed from their wandering life, and with numerous colonists, particularly Greeks and Armenians, who migrated from the adjacent provinces of the Turkish empire.”14

  Settlements were rising farther inland, along the southern reaches of the Dnieper and Bug rivers, but in backward places such as Khadjibey—coastal villages, Cossack settlements, and Tatar camps—the martial designs of kings and sultans were probably less important than the advent of rain, the seasonal migration of fish, or the availability of freshwater and salt licks during the winter trek from steppe to coastal meadow. An early frost or the lavish wedding of an elder’s daughter might leave more of a mark than the faraway coronation of a new ruler or the fall of an imperial capital to invaders. All this began to change in the late 1780s, when a new war between Russians and Ottomans focused attention on the part of the sea that travelers and traders had often bypassed—the shallow inlets and grasslands of the northwest, including the dusty cliff-top village of Khadjibey.

  CHAPTER 2

  Potemkin and the Mercenaries

  Founding father: Portrait of Admiral Osip de Ribas [José de Ribas] (1796) by Johann-Baptist I. Lampi, © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

  “Rather than sign the secession of thirteen provinces as…Geor
ge has done,” Catherine is reported to have said of her contemporary, Britain’s George III, “I should have shot myself.”1 Russia had expanded toward the Black Sea, but Catherine saw her empire’s natural frontier as lying even farther to the south, well into Ottoman lands, perhaps even to the Mediterranean. George III, along with other eighteenth-century monarchs such as Joseph II of Austria and Louis XVI of France, ruled domains that stretched across Europe and around the world. Catherine was not to be out-done by their imperial acquisitiveness. From the coast of the Black Sea, she reckoned, Russia could realize its longer-term aims of removing the sultan from his throne in Constantinople and replacing him with a Christian (and Russian) prince. The rise of a new Byzantium under Russian protection would then mark the end of Islam’s reign on the borderlands of Europe.

  In 1783 Catherine had taken a further step southward by formally annexing Crimea, backtracking on the independence that the region had been guaranteed less than a decade earlier. The immediate results were disastrous. Tens of thousands of Crimean Tatars fled to the Ottoman Empire. Their fellow Muslims soon called for the sultan to intervene on behalf of the embattled refugees now overwhelming the Turkish ports. But the plight of starving, typhus-ridden Tatars, however galling to the sultan, paled before an ostentatious display of Russian power stage-managed by Catherine’s personal and political partner—Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin.