by Charles King
The future of Trabzon was thus of considerable concern to Britain. Having a say in the city’s affairs and keeping open a regular and safe sailing route to Istanbul became the goal of British policy along the southeast coast. The British Foreign Office soon decided to open a permanent consulate in Trabzon to monitor local developments and shipping activity. In 1830 the British ambassador in Istanbul appointed a young diplomat, James Brant, as the first consul in the port. The ambassador’s instructions to his new representative revealed the keen interest that Britain had begun to take in Russian actions around the sea. “The recent success of Russia and the extension of her domain in the quarter to which you are going,” wrote the ambassador, Sir Robert Gordon, referring to the outcome of the 1826—9 wars with Persia and the Ottoman empire, “cannot have failed to produce a sensible effect upon the minds of the inhabitants, whether Christian or Mahomedan; and it is my wish that you should endeavour to ascertain the nature of that effect, and to acquaint me in how far it may be prejudiced to the interests of the Sultan.”80 In particular, the ambassador asked that Brant report on the various ethnic groups of the region (whether, for example, the local Armenian and Laz populations had any particular sympathy for Russia), as well as the political influence that Russian authorities might exercise in Trabzon and the extent of their commercial interests.
Brant reported regularly to the ambassador in Istanbul and compiled a series of annual reports that chronicled the changes taking place in the city. Already by the time Brant arrived, the sultan had begun to exercise more control over the city and the region around it; the old derebeys had been ousted in the centralizing reforms of Sultan Mahmut II (reigned 1808—39), and a provincial governor had been dispatched from Istanbul. As Brant discovered, that change meant that the sultan now had a direct hand in the affairs of the port and could command the tax revenue from the import and export businesses being carried on via foreign shipping companies. Given the influence that Britain enjoyed in both Istanbul and Tehran, British firms were well placed to profit from the full opening of the port to foreigners.
Brant found the roadsteads in inadequate condition and the local authorities not always cooperative. British shipping was miniscule compared to that of other countries; only two British ships entered Trabzon in 1831 as against fourteen Austrian and ten Russian.81 Over the course of his tenure, things changed dramatically. The extension of Ottoman central control across Anatolia undercut the power of local notables and brought the empire back into a single administrative order. Better quarantine systems reduced the incidence of infectious diseases, which had at times brought the Persian transit trade to a complete halt. Regular steamship connections to the Anatolian ports cut down travel time to Istanbul and the Danube and ensured that goods could be delivered even in unfavorable weather. The first steamer to visit Trabzon was the British Essex, which called on the port in the summer of 1836, and later in the same year another British steamer opened a regular route to Istanbul. The Austrians, who exercised a virtual monopoly on steam transport on the Danube, soon launched their own route connecting Trabzon with Vienna.82 In the mid-1840s the British P. & O. Company inaugurated a direct steam line running all the way from Trabzon to Southampton.83 By 1835 Britain was in first place in the number of cargo ships visiting Trabzon annually.84
Brant left office in 1836, when he was transferred to the consulate in Erzurum. But the reports of his successors chronicled the steady growth of the Trabzon route and its vital importance in the British trade with Persia. Manufactured goods, especially cotton cloth from the mills of Manchester, as well as products from British colonial possessions, such as tea and sugar, were carried on British ships and then offloaded onto horse and camel caravans for the trip overland to Tabriz. On the return trip, ships carried Persian silks and other textiles, tobacco (mainly for sale in Istanbul), carpets, and dried fruits. Not insignificantly, the Trabzon road also became the central resupply route for British diplomats in Tabriz and Tehran. As some diplomats complained, when it was closed because of the plague, weather, or rebellious pashas, there was no sherry aperitif or postprandial port.85
For the first few decades after the opening of British trade with Trabzon, the port remained one of the key inlets for European commerce with the sizeable Persian market. Later in the century, it would ultimately fall victim to the opening of the Suez canal and the inauguration of Russian railway links with the Caucasus ports. In the 1830s and 1840s, though, it was still a key point of contention between Russia and Britain. The Russians, less favored by the sultan than the British, continually sought to redevelop the route to Persia via the Caucasus. That, however, depended on subduing the upland peoples of the Caucasus mountains, a persistent security problem for Russian towns along the coast as well as for persons traveling the overland “military highway” across the mountains to Tiflis. Russia’s long-running frontier wars in the region sapped energy away from plans to create an alternative to the Trabzon route, and the Russian blockade of the Caucasus coastline—particularly the attempt to interdict the flow of weapons and, crucially, salt from the Ottomans to the Muslim highlanders—continually threatened to spark a major international incident. (In 1836 the Russian seizure of a British blockade runner, the Vixen, caused a diplomatic rift and provided fuel for political intrigues in London.) In the end, the fate of Trabzon, the Caucasus coast, and indeed the entire sea was wrapped up in a far larger contest between the British and Russian empires, the “Great Game” for mastery of central Asia; but it was a game that would reach its climax around the sea.
Crimea
The Crimean war was the only modern conflict fought largely on, and to a certain extent for, the Black Sea. Its origins lay in the growing rivalry between Britain and Russia across the Near East and central Asia, fueled by a mix of imperial ambition, commercial interests, and frontier politics, similar in some ways to that which had long complicated the relationship between Russia and the Ottoman empire. The issue that stood at the center of that rivalry, however, was the future of the Ottoman state itself and, by extension, control of the Straits. Britain and Russia were united in their belief that the sultan’s hold on his domains was tenuous and that some international agreement was necessary to delay the empire’s collapse for as long as possible, to forestall a violent rush among European powers to gather up the pieces, and to make contingency plans for where the various bits should go once the empire disappeared. One part of that arrangement was the continued closure of the Black Sea to foreign warships in times of peace, an agreement that was affirmed in the Straits Convention of July 1841, signed by all the European great powers.
The irony is that a common understanding about the future of the Ottoman empire, backed up by an international treaty, should have led in just over a decade to a major war. But Britain’s residual suspicions about Russia’s aims in the east meant that, regardless of formal consultations and understandings, the tsar was never considered a fully reliable negotiating partner in London. Tsar Nicholas I had come to the throne in 1825 in the middle of an attempted military coup, the Decembrist rebellion, and the experience of it colored much of his long reign. Conservative, even reactionary in his politics and committed to preserving the territorial gains of his predecessors against threats real or perceived, Nicholas was particularly concerned that outsiders’ efforts to profit from the demise of the Ottomans not lead to their profiting at Russia’s expense as well.
That natural conservatism also showed itself in religious matters, in many ways the spark that produced the conflagration at mid-century. The trinity of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality—the three components of the official state ideology developed during Nicholas’s reign—affirmed the central place of the church in Russia’s social life, the absolute power of the tsar as sovereign, and the romantic attachment to the Russian nation, even to a pan-Slavic brotherhood, as the embodiment of the ideals of the state. Those ideals soon found expression in Russian foreign policy. In 1850, when a local dispute erupted between
Catholic and Orthodox hierarchs over the control of sacred sites in Jerusalem, Nicholas intervened. He pressured Ottoman authorities to recognize Orthodox demands against those of the Catholics, backed by France. When the sultan complained that Russia had no standing in the matter (the Orthodox communities, regardless of their connection to Russia, were still Ottoman subjects, after all), Nicholas occupied Moldova and Wallachia and made preparations for war.
Fighting broke out between Russia and the Ottomans along the Danube in October 1853, but there was little immediate naval action to accompany the land battles. The severity of the brewing winter weather, as well as the lack of intelligence about the disposition of forces, meant that ships often met only by chance and, even then, were often reluctant to engage. However, the decisive action in the war’s first phase came only a month later. The Ottoman sailing fleet, commanded by Osman Pasa, was wintering in the harbor at Sinop, still training the crews that had been hastily assembled since the summer. The Russian fleet had quietly moved out of its base at Sevastopol and made the quick sail across the sea. On November 30, it appeared just outside Sinop harbor. In the dim light of early morning, with a cold winter rain falling, Admiral Pavel Nakhimov ordered his six ships-of-the-line to open fire.
As with the Dnepr estuary campaign almost seventy years earlier, there was little in the way of a real battle. The Russian ships were equipped with exploding shells, and they used them to devastating effect. In only about an hour, Osman Pasa’s entire fleet was sunk. The batteries along the coast were destroyed and the town set on fire. More than 3,000 Ottoman seamen were killed, and Osman himself was taken captive. Only thirty-seven sailors were lost on the Russian ships.86
The attack on Sinop was stunning. It devastated the Ottoman fleet and illustrated the ability of Russian forces to rush across the sea to the south shore. As one British writer put it, Sinop was in fact a “second Gibraltar.” If Russia were to seize it—as Nakhimov’s fleet demonstrated it could do—the tsar would be able to squeeze the sea in half by commanding the finest natural harbors on the northern and southern coast, Sevastopol and Sinop. That would be the first step to taking the Bosphorus and then Istanbul itself.87
The attack convinced any doubters in London and Paris that the Russian empire intended not only to challenge the Ottomans, but to bury them. In the months that followed, European governments made plans to send their own ships to aid the demolished Ottoman fleet. In March 1854, the Allied powers—Britain, France, Austria, and, a short time later, Sardinia (which also had substantial interests in the Black Sea ports)—joined the fray on the side of the sultan.
The battle at Sinop had illustrated Russian superiority over the Ottomans, but it had also demonstrated the continued dependence of the Black Sea fleet on wooden sailing vessels, which were no match for the armored steamers that were increasingly dominant in west European navies. Over the course of the autumn, British and French ships patrolled the Anatolian coastline, protecting the southern harbors against a repeat attack from the north. Russian and Ottoman armies engaged on both sides of the sea, along the Danube and in the south Caucasus and eastern Anatolia, where the Russians delivered a dramatic blow by taking the fortress at Kars.
The real focus of fighting, especially once the Allied forces arrived in the autumn of 1854, was Crimea. Troop transports sailed through the Bosphorus and made straight for the peninsula. Allied ships blockaded the narrow entrance to Sevastopol harbor, and with little ability to break the blockade, Russian admirals ordered much of the sailing fleet to be sunk to prevent the enemy from entering the inner harbor. In the meantime, Allied forces were landed at Balaklava and slowly made their way north to attack Sevastopol by land. The siege of the port wound on for eleven months, with constant shelling by Allied forces and terrible losses among Russian sailors, now a de facto land army engaged in a drawn-out, dug-in defense. (The hero of Sinop, Nakhimov, was among the victims.) Leo Tolstoy, then a young artillery officer in the city, described the scene on the Russian bastions in the last months of the siege:
[E]verything all around was falling in with a din. On the earth, torn up by a recent explosion, were lying, here and there, broken beams, crushed bodies of Russians and French, heavy cast-iron cannon overturned into the ditch by a terrible force, half buried in the ground and forever dumb, bomb-shells, balls, splinters of beams, ditches, bomb-proofs, and more corpses, in blue or in gray overcoats, which seemed to have been shaken by supreme convulsions, and which were lighted up now every instant by the red fire of the explosions which resounded in the air.88
In the end, a combination of superior Allied firepower, inadequate Russian supplies and communication, and most importantly rampant epidemics—typhus killed more men than did bombs and bullets—led to a Russian defeat. In September 1855, the Russians evacuated Sevastopol and scuttled all the remnants of the Black Sea fleet. Although the fighting was all but over, hostilities continued officially until the following spring. Alexander II, who had succeeded Tsar Nicholas during the course of the war, was forced to accept, in principle, the situation that the Allies had already created in fact: the elimination of his fleet and the dismantling of coastal fortifications and naval arsenals. Henceforth, all warships, even those of coastal powers, were prohibited from sailing on the sea.
The war and the treaty of Paris which ended it marked the close of an epoch on the Black Sea. In strategic terms, the war had demonstrated the willingness of western European powers to intervene on behalf of the Ottomans and to ensure that no single power, least of all the Russians, could take undue advantage of the empire’s weakness. The status of the Danube and the Straits now became, more than ever before, a matter of international law, not simply a by-product of the balance of power between the two empires that faced each other from the northern and southern coasts. Control of the mouth of the Danube was returned formally to the Ottomans, but an international commission was created to secure freedom of navigation. The sea and the Straits were declared off limits to warships flying any flag, even the Russian and Ottoman ensigns, a provision that was to be guaranteed by the Allied powers. The war also featured the last major engagement between sailing ships in the region, the end-bracket to the period whose beginning John Paul Jones had witnessed in the 1780s. Sinop, however one-sided a battle, was the final encounter between ships-of-the-line, and both the Russians and the Ottomans left the war with a virtual blank slate in naval terms—a slate on which both would begin to draw the plans for an armored navy of steam-powered, propeller-driven ships by the 1870s.
The war guaranteed the freedom of foreign commerce—by securing unimpeded transport down the Danube and through the Straits—but it also literally opened up the Black Sea world to west Europeans. The exploits of Allied troops in Crimea were chronicled in a wave of popular writing. There were wide-eyed accounts for schoolboys and tales of selfless civilians such as Florence Nightingale. There was the gushing romance of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” and other paeans to military valor (and foolhardiness). There were sober analyses of fortifications and troop movements recounted in the memoirs of former British and French officers. (Those analyses would be tested in less than a decade during the American Civil War.) A new breed of newspaper writer, the war correspondent, brought home the horror and heroism of the war in words, while sketch artists and photographers (another new profession) supplied the images.
All this sparked sufficient interest that the region experienced a virtual tourist boom in the decades that followed. It now became a legitimate destination for the foreign traveler, a point of interest to be taken in during trips to the Near East, a place still exotic enough to intrigue but sufficiently civilized to supply many of the accoutrements of home. Soon, Crimea in particular would be hit by yet another invasion, this time of writers, artists, and tourists who flocked to its congenial shores to stroll through the garden of the Russian empire.
NOTES
1. Denis Diderot, Encyclopédic, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts
et des metiers (1751—80; Stuttgart: Friedrich Fromman Verlag, 1966), “Pont-Euxin.”
2. Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, l500–l800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 8.
3. Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, p. 17.
4. Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, p. 22.
5. Khodarkosvky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, p. 223.
6. R. C. Anderson, Naval Wars in the Levant, 1339–1833 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1952), pp. 238—9.
7. Anderson, Naval Wars, pp. 240—2.
8. The standard account of the Volga—Don canal plan is John Perry, The State of Russia Under the Present Czar (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1716; reprint New York: Da Capo Press, 1968). Perry, a British Royal Navy captain, was the chief consultant on the project.
9. Louis-Philippe, comte de Segur, Memoirs and Recollections of Count Segur, Ambassador from France to the Courts of Russia and Prussia, 3 vols. (London: H. Colburn, 1825—7).
10. Segur, Memoirs and Recollections, Vol. 3, pp. 2—3.
11. Segur, Memoirs and Recollections, Vol. 3, pp. 18—19.
12. Segur, Memoirs and Recollections, Vol. 3, pp. 91—2.
13. Segur, Memoirs and Recollections, Vol. 3, p. 45.
14. Segur, Memoirs and Recollections, Vol. 3, p. 104.