The Black Sea

by Charles King

  Even before Mehmet II entered Constantinople, the Ottomans had extended their reach through much of the Balkans, destroying the Serbian empire and annexing Thrace. Much of the Black Sea coast, however, remained as it had been before, a congeries of small states that bordered on larger regional powers beyond—Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, the various principalities of Russia, and Persia. In this complicated milieu, the Ottomans chose a relatively low-cost strategy: to conquer outright the strategic fortresses and ports that would allow them unfettered control of the sea and then to forge agreements with the most powerful political entities inland. These agreements provided for some degree of autonomy over local affairs in exchange for tribute and professed loyalty to the sultan. That strategy entailed a certain amount of risk, however. The pinpoints of direct Ottoman power—fortified garrisons on river- and seaports—were targets of assault when the vassals decided to revolt, and patron–client relationships with powerful native rulers were stable only so long as the client did not receive a better offer from another potential patron. The advantages and hazards of empire by condominium were clear in the Ottomans’ relations with three groups around the sea from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries: the princes of Wallachia and Moldova, the khans of Crimea, and the kings of Georgia.

  Wallachia and Moldova, the so-called Danubian principalities, emerged in the region between the Carpathian mountains and the Danube and Dnestr rivers, an area that forms much of modern Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The area was populated by a mixture of cultural groups—Slavs, Romance- and Turkic-speaking peoples, and others—since it lay squarely on the path of the various cycles of westward migration from the Eurasian steppe. In the 1300s, local rulers consolidated their power, creating two distinct principalities that were originally subordinate to the kingdom of Hungary—Wallachia south of the Carpathians and Moldova to the east. The power of the Wallachian and Moldovan princes rested on two factors: the natural endowments of the territories they controlled, including wood products from the dense forests and animal skins from cattle herds on the river plains, and their geographical position astride important trade routes from the old Genoese ports at the mouth of the Dnestr (Maurocastro, later Akkerman) and on the northern arm of the Danube delta (Licostomo, later Kilia).24

  By the fifteenth century, both principalities had established durable dynasties. Each experienced periods of greatness, as military powers and as centers of art and culture, under the princes Vlad the Impaler of Wallachia (reigned 1443–76, with interruptions)—the historical “Dracula”—and Ştefan the Great of Moldova (reigned 1457–1504). The Danubian princes, like many of their neighbors in the Balkans, were Orthodox Christians and looked to Constantinople as their spiritual center. Other than that, however, the Byzantines, by now only a weak regional power, played little role in Wallachian and Moldovan affairs. The real influence came from kingdoms farther to the north, Hungary and Poland, which saw in the two principalities a strategic highway to the Danube and the Black Sea as well as a useful shield between themselves and the Ottoman armies that had begun to make inroads into the Balkans. For much of the 1400s, the two principalities played off one potential patron against another—when they were not battling each other.

  Modern Romanian historians speak of the period of Ottoman “conquest” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but that term would probably have made little sense at the time. The Danubian princes often sought accommodation with the Ottomans, even if that accommodation meant crossing over the line between Christian and Muslim. Wallachia paid tribute to the sultan already from the 1390s, Moldova from the 1450s. Rebellions were frequent thereafter, but there was rarely any concerted effort by the Danubian princes to present a united front against the Ottomans. So long as the sultan was able to provide a show of force against the client princes and to deliver protection in the event of invasion by another regional power, they were usually content with the autonomy that they were allowed in their own affairs. Unlike in the Ottoman lands south of the Danube, Muslim landlords were not settled in the Danubian principalities, and local princes (domni or domnitori), elected by noble assemblies or ruling as dynasts, continued on their thrones (an arrangement that would last until the early eighteenth century). The Orthodox church retained its place at the center of the Wallachian and Moldovan states, and there was no significant conversion to Islam, either voluntary or otherwise. Except for an agreement to provide troops against the enemies of the sultan and to pay an annual tribute and periodic fines for rebellious activity, the costs of recognizing Ottoman suzerainty were not particularly onerous. And since the Ottomans represented a friend in times of need, when the ambitions of the Poles or Hungarians fell on the principalities there were certain benefits to subjugation.

  The relationship with Crimea was rather different. In the first place, the Crimean Tatars were speakers of a Turkic language and, as Muslims, part of the same cultural universe as the Ottomans. Even more important, they represented an unbroken link between the great empire of Chingis Khan and the newer empire of the Ottoman sultan. The dynasty of the Tatar khan, the Giray family, traced its lineage back through the Golden Horde to Chingis. Crimea thus represented not only a strategic asset to the sultan but an ideological one as well. The Ottomans’ claim to the northern shore and to other parts of Eurasia rested in part on their connection to the Chingisid dynasty represented by the Tatar khans.

  The relationship between Istanbul and the khan’s palace at Bakhchisarai was therefore even looser than that with the capitals of Wallachia and Moldova. The khan controlled his own affairs and conducted a foreign policy that was at times wholly independent of that of the Ottoman court. Tatar raids on Polish, Russian, and even Wallachian and Moldovan cities and caravans provided a useful instrument for the Ottomans north of the sea, a way of fending off potential aggressors and of correcting rebellious Christian clients. The chief booty carried away from these raids—slaves—kept a supply of humans flowing from the Crimean ports to Istanbul. However, the independence of the Giray khans also meant that they could, at times, pursue policies that were contrary to the strategic interests of the Ottomans. Tatar incursions often threatened to provoke full-scale wars with Poland and Muscovy. In fact, from the late seventeenth century forward, Ottoman policy toward the Tatars more often involved attempts to control their reckless raiding than to use them as a lever against northern powers.

  The situation in the Caucasus was even more intricate. Of all the areas around the sea, the Caucasus was the most difficult to control. The Circassian highlanders, the Abkhaz along the coast, and the various Georgian kings and princes in the south were so divided that there was no single political figure who could claim to speak on behalf of any sizeable part of the region. The inhospitable interior also meant that projecting military force beyond the thin coastline was often impossible. As under the Romans, the Ottomans therefore settled on generally leaving the highland tribes to their own devices, placing directly appointed administrators in the fortified ports, and striking political bargains with the lowland kings farther inland.

  There was an important strategic reason to rely on pacts rather than outright conquest, especially in the Georgian lands. As a borderland between the Ottoman empire and Persia, the south Caucasus would have demanded significant resources to police, and successive sultans settled for relying on local feudal powers to raise their own armies and secure Ottoman interests against the Persians and their allies. (The same point could be made about Wallachia and Moldova, which were also buffer states between the Ottomans and Hungary, Poland, and Russia.) That often meant, of course, that Georgian armies found themselves on opposite sides of the battle lines—the Ottoman influenced kings of western Georgia, or Imereti, against the Persian-influenced kings of eastern Georgia, or Kartli–Kakheti, plus dozens of lesser rulers on either side. But as in many other parts of the Ottoman imperial system, it was strategic good sense, not religion or language, that usually determined the lines of allegiance.

 
The combination of centralized control of trade, complex systems of tribute and taxation, and loose political–military bargains with local leaders worked well for the first two centuries after the closing of the sea. The Ottomans were able to benefit from the resources of the littoral—both directly and in the form of taxes on trade—while the client states used their connections with the region’s major imperial power for their own ends. However, by the seventeenth century, the system began to undergo two changes that would have a serious impact on the political and economic relationships around the sea.

  First, within the lands directly controlled by the empire, the highly centralized administrative system created during the reign of Mehmet II (1451–81) gave way to a far looser one. Rather than relying on governors directly appointed by Istanbul and dispatched to the provinces, the state came to rely on local landowning notables. The power of these local elites was recognized by the sultan, and in turn they provided for the collection of taxes and the raising of military forces during the campaign season. In some areas, these landlords developed quasi-dynastic, even partially feudal, systems within the lands that they administered. At the time when parts of western Europe were undergoing the transition from feudalism to centralized monarchies, the Ottomans were moving in the opposite direction, from central administration to tax-farming to the virtual devolution of power out to regionally based noble families.

  The impetus for decentralization was the need to divest an overburdened central apparatus from the demands of directly administering a vast empire. However, the result, over time, was the weakening of the center against the power and interests of the periphery. This shift of power was especially evident across Anatolia, including along the Black Sea coast. There, the leaders of powerful regional families came to be known as derebeys, literally “lords of the valleys.” Important owners of large estates, some of them associated with the old Turkoman families that had commanded parts of the coast even before the Ottoman conquest, came to dominate the regional economy and, therefore, politics. Major ports such as Sinop and Trabzon were run as the fiefdoms of leading families, with the center generally unable to change the status quo. The apogee of derebey power came in the reign of Sultan Selim III (1789–1807), who officially recognized their position and codified their privileges.

  A second major change was the rise of stronger powers north of the sea, powers that began to have an influence on the client states around the coasts. When the Ottomans conquered the major port cities at the end of the fifteenth century, potential rivals in the region were few. The chief candidates—the kingdom of Poland, the kingdom of Hungary, and the grand principality of Muscovy—were geographically far enough away to cause little concern. In the sixteenth century, however, Poland and Muscovy began to grow in strength. Poland, united with Lithuania in 1569 to form the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, extended its reach all the way from the Baltic Sea south into the Black Sea steppe. A persistent worry of the Ottomans was to prevent further encroachments by the Poles toward the south. The armies of the Tatar khan and the raiding parties of the Nogays were employed to harass Polish troops and prevent Slavic settlement in the steppelands.

  Muscovy had likewise become an important regional power by the late 1500s. At the time of the Tatar–Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century, Muscovy had been only one of a number of Russian city-states forced to pay tribute; but the “Tatar yoke,” mourned by generations of later Russian historians, was in many ways the engine of Muscovite ascendancy. The Muscovite princes served as facilitators in the Tatar–Mongol system of tribute collection, promising to deliver wealth from the several other Russian principalities in exchange for a cut of the take. In time, this system paved the way for political centralization. Under Ivan IV (the Terrible), in the sixteenth century, the grand prince took the title “tsar of all Russia,” marking a change in both the geographical extent of Muscovite, now “Russian,” power as well as the ideology that justified Muscovy’s ascendancy. The Russians came to see themselves as inheritors of the traditions of the Byzantine empire and, thus, of the Roman empire as well (tsar, of course, derives from the Latin caesar). But they also looked back to the Tatar–Mongol period to justify their dominant role in Eurasia, a role sealed by Ivan’s conquest of Tatar khanates along the Volga and in Siberia. These two sources, Roman/Byzantine and Chingisid, gave the tsar his chief claim to power across the Eurasian lands—and logically placed him at odds with the other claimant to these twin legacies, the Ottoman sultan.

  The weakening of central power within the Ottoman lands and the rise of rival regional powers altered the strategic relationships around the sea. Client states now had new potential protectors—Poland and Russia—against whom they could play off the Ottomans or, in the case of the Crimean khans, against whom they could make war. The derebeys along the southern coast looked to their own affairs with little regard for what happened in the capital. In the end, however, these changes were only the background to the most pressing challenge that faced the Ottomans in the late 1500s and early 1600s. That challenge came from the sea.

  Sailors’ Graffiti

  For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the grand sea battles and smaller naval engagements that the Ottomans faced in the Mediterranean were unknown on the Black Sea. At the famous set-piece battle at Lepanto in 1571, the Ottoman fleet was largely destroyed by the combined forces of Catholic Europe; but there was to be no equivalent on the Black Sea until some two centuries later.

  Ottoman naval supremacy rested on three pillars. The first, and clearly the most significant, was control of the Straits and the mouth of the Danube, the only two routes via which European ships could enter the sea. Even after Lepanto, the fortresses along the Dardanelles and Bosphorus and at the mouth of the Danube, as well as the strategic location of the imperial capital, helped maintain a choke-hold on travel to and from the Black Sea. Second, none of the states in the region could muster a naval force that might threaten the Ottomans. The absence of a Moldovan, Crimean or Georgian navy was, in part, the result of the political traditions of these entities themselves; after all, they had grown up in the plains and mountains of the hinterlands with little affinity for the sea. Even more important was the Ottomans’ hold on the seacoast itself, which effectively kept the client states away from the water. It is only in these two strategic respects—control of the Straits and the effective isolation of the client states from the littoral—that the sea might be said to have been a “Turkish lake.”

  The third pillar, in some ways derivative of the first two, was the virtual absence of piracy on Black Sea for at least the first two centuries of Ottoman dominance. The sea “became fully controlled and … evil people of sedition no longer inhabited these parts,” wrote the fifteenth-century chronicler Ibn Kemal.25 That is a remarkable fact. Piracy was endemic in the Mediterranean in the early modern age, and much of the naval history of that period is the story of the effort by various regional powers either to combat or to encourage it. Pirates were both burdens and blessings, of course: the former when they attacked one’s own ships, the latter when they could be induced to attack an enemy’s. The growth of Ottoman naval power in the Mediterranean in the 1400s and early 1500s can to a certain degree be traced to the empire’s desire to secure its shipping lanes against attacks by Italian and Levantine corsairs. Most of the armed ships in the eastern Mediterranean were freebooters of one type or another, with only Venice, the Ottomans, and the Knights of Rhodes able to claim anything resembling a regulated, professional navy.26

  Pirates, like any businessmen, need both bases and markets: a secure harbor from which to direct their operations and a place where they can offload their acquisitions. The great achievement of the Ottomans on the Black Sea was to deny them both. Major fortified ports were located on each of the coasts: Sinop and Trabzon in the south, Azov (the old Venetian Tana) on the Don river, Caffa in Crimea, Akkerman (the old Maurocastro) on the Dnestr, and Kilia (the former Licostomo) on the Danube. The sea
’s small size made patrol operations from these centers relatively easy. Since these ports were also the major commercial hubs, any potential pirates would have had a difficult time fencing their goods—which is why piracy, when it did surface, tended to be associated with the parts of the sea least easily controlled, the rugged southern and eastern coastline from Trabzon to the Caucasus. These were not only significant differences between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean; they also marked a change from the situation under the Romans and Byzantines. Seaborne brigandage had been a problem for the previous thousand years or more. Roman and Byzantine sources are replete with complaints about the ravages of pirates, from the Goths of the fourth century to the “Laz” (a general term for inhabitants of the southeast coast, people who today might be called Georgians or, in Turkey, still Laz) mentioned in later periods. After the late Middle Ages, however, references to corsairs virtually disappear from the sources.

  It was in this relatively secure environment that business was able to flourish, and by all accounts the sea in the early Ottoman centuries was a hive of activity, for both local and international commerce. Cabotage—short-run coastal shipping—continued much as it had done since antiquity. Other forms of shipping included a combination of sea and river routes, with Ottoman vessels offloading goods at ports on the Danube, Dnestr, and Don and transferring them to foreign vessels or caravans; and sea-to-sea routes, with Ottoman subjects piloting ships to the Mediterranean and then offloading to foreign vessels in the Aegean archipelago or the Levant. A small number of foreign ships was permitted to enter the Black Sea in various periods. In the late sixteenth century, Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia) maintained a lively commerce with ports along the western Black Sea coast, a result of the citystate’s maintaining diplomatic ties with the Ottomans at a time when most other European powers were united against them.27 The Ragusan trade probably declined in the seventeenth century, as Orthodox merchants from the Aegean archipelago came to dominate the business of transshipment from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.