Download PDF | Brian L. Davies - The Russo-Turkish War, 1768-1774_ Catherine II and the Ottoman Empire-Bloomsbury Academic (2016).
340 Pages
PREFACE
Many years ago when I was still a graduate student my imagination was captivated by William S. McNeill’s magisterial Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (University of Chicago Press, 1964), which surveyed the development of Pontic Europe—the steppe frontier zone of southeastern Europe—over the early modern period and its gradual incorporation into three great competing agricultural Empires, Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg. In addition to the breadth of knowledge McNeill’s book displayed, I was impressed at how skillfully it interwove the geopolitical and military narrative with the history of colonization, economic development, social policy, and statecraft within the three expanding empires and the frontier polities they absorbed. I was inspired to devote my own research to examining the imperial competition for Pontic Europe in closer detail, making use of Russian-language sources.
So far this project has resulted in four studies. My State Power and Community in Early Modern Russia: The Case of Kozlov, 1635–1648 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2004) relied on archival sources to reconstruct Muscovite frontier colonization policy and the ways in which it structured state–society relations in the southern Russian forest-steppe zone in the early seventeenth century. My next book, Warfare, State, and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500–1700 (Routledge, 2007), was intended for a broader audience and dealt with Russian steppe colonization and military development in the larger context of Russia’s intensifying competition with Poland-Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate for mastery of Pontic Europe.
A third book, Empire and Military Revolution in Eastern Europe: Russia’s Turkish Wars in the Eighteenth Century (Continuum, 2011), continued the narrative of this competition over the course of the eighteenth century as it became more focused on Russian struggle with the Ottoman Empire. Now, in The Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774): Catherine the Great and the Ottoman Empire, I offer a more detailed study of the most decisive and transformative of the eighteenth-century RussianOttoman wars. The Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 had enormous repercussions for Eastern Europe. It resulted in the defeat and ultimately the annexation to Russia of the Crimean Khanate. It led to the partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It completed the incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian Empire and the dissolution of the Zaporozhian and Don Cossack Hosts. It reduced Ottoman power in the Black Sea, along the Danube, and even in the eastern Mediterranean and emboldened Europeans to begin treating the Ottoman Empire as the “Sick Man of Europe.” The war also stabilized the political fortunes of Empress Catherine II and enabled her to promulgate reforms further centralizing provincial government, accelerating the colonization of the southern steppe, and establishing broader foundations for state finances.
The military and diplomatic narrative of Catherine the Great’s first Turkish War will be largely unfamiliar to most English-language readers, but those especially interested in military history should find useful its comparison of Russian and Ottoman military organization and its identification of certain Russian technical and tactical innovations that could be argued represented a European “Military Revolution.” In explaining the circumstances by which Ukraine and Crimea joined New Russia in the Russian Empire, the book illuminates some issues that have recently become flashpoints in Russian relations with Europe and the United States. We do not, however, take any position on what territories rightly “belong” to what modern states, for we see speculations about organic national “identity” and “historical right” as useless and even counterproductive to writing serious and objective history. The military narrative here relies by default largely on Russian-language sources. I would have liked to compare them with Ottoman accounts of the war but as I do not read Turkish some important Ottoman primary sources, such as the court histories compiled by Sadullah Enveri and Ahmed Vasif Efendi, were not available to me.
The one notable exception was Ahmed Resmi Efendi’s Hülasat al-itibar (1781), which was recently translated into English. I have tried to balance my account of the war with a sympathetic understanding of Ottoman capabilities and security interests, and I hope to learn from whatever dialog with Ottomanists my book might engender. With the exception of places most familiar to readers in traditional English transliteration (Moscow, Warsaw, Istanbul, Kiev, Bucharest, Zaporozhia, etc.) I have tried to render toponyms according to modern atlas usage (thus: Dnepr, Dnestr, Chernihiv, Iaşi, Foçsani). The names of towns and fortresses under Ottoman control are presented in the fashion most likely to be recognized by Ottomanists (Akkirman, Bender, Ibrail, Rusçuk, etc.).
In a few instances I have chosen to transliterate from Russian because during the period under examination these places figured largest in Russian discourse (thus Khotin rather than Chocym or Hotyn). Unless otherwise indicated all dates are given in the Old Style, that is, in accordance with the use in Russia (until 1918) of the Julian Calendar. In the eighteenth century Julian dates were eleven days “behind” Gregorian dates. I wish to thank the following people for their patience and encouragement: Jeremy Black, Carol Belkin Stevens, Gregg Michel, Kolleen Guy and her children, my wife Paula, and my editor at Bloomsbury, Claire Lipscomb.
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