The Russian Empire
Question & Answer

What Was the Russian Empire’s Policy Toward the Ottoman Empire?

In 1711 Tsar Peter I, leading his army in person, found himself trapped by an Ottoman force near the Prut River and had to buy his way out by returning Azov and accepting humiliating terms. Almost exactly two centuries later, in 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany, and the Straits became one of the central objectives of Russian strategy. Between those two moments, Russia and the Sublime Porte fought eleven separate wars, signed dozens of treaties, and developed a rivalry that defined the political geography of the Black Sea, the Balkans, and the Caucasus for over three hundred years (see Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 5th ed., 1993).

The origins of the rivalry

The first contact was hostile. From the 1470s onward the Crimean Khanate — a Turkic Muslim state descended from the Mongol Golden Horde and a vassal of the Ottomans — launched regular slave-raids into Muscovite territory, periodically reaching Moscow itself. The fall of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556) brought Muscovy to the Volga, but it also brought the new southern frontier into direct contact with Ottoman-controlled steppe and sea.

The first formal Russo-Turkish war came in 1568, when the Ottomans tried to recover Astrakhan and the Volga route. The campaign was inconclusive, but it set the pattern: Russia pushing south, the Porte pushing north, and the Crimean Tatars caught in between.

The long wars, 1676-1914

Eleven Russo-Turkish wars were fought between 1568 and 1914. The most important were:

  • The war of 1676-1681, ending in the Treaty of Bakhchisarai and confirming Russian control of Left-Bank Ukraine and Kiev.
  • The Azov campaigns of 1695-1700, in which Peter I took the fortress of Azov and gained Russia’s first foothold on the Black Sea.
  • The war of 1768-1774, which ended with the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, secured Russian access to the Black Sea, and made the Crimean Khanate independent of the Porte.
  • The war of 1787-1792, ending with the Treaty of Jassy and the Russian annexation of the northern Black Sea littoral up to the Dniester.
  • The war of 1806-1812, ending with the Treaty of Bucharest and the Russian annexation of Bessarabia.
  • The war of 1828-1829, ending with the Treaty of Adrianople and the Russian acquisition of the eastern Black Sea coast.
  • The war of 1877-1878, ending with the preliminary Treaty of San Stefano and the revised Treaty of Berlin (see Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon, 2009).

The Eastern Question

By the nineteenth century, the Russian-Ottoman confrontation had become the largest single item on the agenda of European diplomacy, what diplomats called the Eastern Question. Three interests shaped the Russian position. First, the Russian claim to be the protector of the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire, especially in the Balkans — a claim made official in Article 7 of Küçük Kaynarca and repeatedly invoked thereafter. Second, the desire for territorial access to the Mediterranean via the Straits. Third, the strategic need to keep a declining Ottoman Empire from collapsing in a way that handed the region to Britain or Austria-Hungary.

Britain was the main counter-weight, alarmed by any Russian advance toward the Mediterranean or the route to India. Austria-Hungary, with its own restless Slavic populations, opposed Russian influence in the Balkans. France, allied to Russia after 1894, generally backed the Russian position in the Straits.

The Balkan crisis and the road to 1914

The climax came in 1877-1878. Alexander II’s war, in which Russian troops crossed the Danube and fought their way to the outskirts of Constantinople, was won with terrible losses but produced a punitive settlement at San Stefano. The other powers, led by Disraeli and Bismarck, rewrote the treaty at the Congress of Berlin, shrinking the “Big Bulgaria” San Stefano had created. The Russian government, which had fought the war partly in the name of Slavic solidarity, was deeply embittered by what it saw as ingratitude, and the experience fed directly into the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894 and the suspicions that the great Slavophile publicist Ivan Aksakov expressed when he wrote that Russia had bled itself “for the liberation of the Slavs, but also for the benefit of the European stock exchange.”

The unresolved question of the Straits, the unresolved status of the Balkans, and the unresolved question of Armenian reform in the Ottoman Empire — all of them legacies of the long Russian-Ottoman rivalry — fed directly into the diplomacy of July 1914.