From the Opening of the Straits to Steam Navigation
The war of the Holy League (1683-99), which united Austria, Poland and Venice in a coalition against the Turks, brought the Ottoman advance toward Central Europe to a final halt.
For the first time the Russian Empire participated in a European military coalition, in a war against the Turks. For all this, the Ottoman Empire remained a formidable power and tsar Peter the Great famously failed in his attempts to seize Crimea. Instead, he contented himself with the establishment of a small bridgehead in the Sea of Azov (where Russian ships remained bottled up), and even that he was unable to keep for very long.Yet the Ottomans’ days of dominance over the Black Sea were numbered. Following another war against the Russians, they were forced to sign the Treaty of Ku^uk Kaynarca in 1774, which at long last gave control of Crimea to the Russian Empire along with the estuaries of the Bug and Dnieper.[707] Russia finally had its access to the open sea and the sky seemed the limit. Most importantly, the Russians also obtained right of passage through the Straits and thus could conduct long-distance trade with the Mediterranean.[708] The Black Sea was open again to a foreign power.[709]
The empress Catherine the Great was now dreaming of Greek glory, which required nothing less than the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the reconstruction of an Eastern Roman Empire with Constantinople as its capital. It implied the building of Russian maritime power in the Black Sea.[710] This new expansion also signalled a race
to colonise the northern coast, which had been hitherto sparsely inhabited. Settlers from Russia as well as from the rest of Europe were invited, and incentivised by tax exemptions and grants of land. Many new cities were founded.[711] Significantly, most were given Greek-sounding names meant to evoke the first wave of Greek settlement in Antiquity: Kherson at the mouth of the Dnieper (1778), Sevastopol (1783) and Simferopol (1784) in Crimea (the suffix -pol meaning ‘city’ in Greek, as in ‘Constantinople’).[712]
For the northern shore, it was a period of accelerated Westernisation as a new form of urbanism, social organisation, architecture and dress; more generally, culture began to overlay and often to erase the Oriental substrates of earlier times.
The commercial port city of Odessa, overlooking the Dnieper estuary on the northwestern coast, was founded in 1794; its name was borrowed from the ancient Greek city of Odessos.[713] Located in healthier climes and better positioned than Kherson, Odessa - with gridded streets, stone buildings and French governors - was a city conceived as a testament to Enlightenment Europe.[714] Its status of a new port city, founded in modern history as a trading outlet for a newly settled hinterland makes it a particularly rich case study, almost a paradigm for maritime history, which presents some analogies with the development of American port cities and their imagery of a ‘new world’; at the same time it also has features similar to those of the ancient multicultural port cities that dot the Mediterranean Sea. The region of New Russia (Novorossiya) became the granary of Europe, thanks to its exceptionally fertile hinterland, with Odessa and Taganrog (on the Sea of Azov) being the two major ports.[715]Russia’s expansion continued: in 1812, following yet another war against the Ottomans, Russia annexed part of the Danubian principality of Moldavia north of the River Prut, renaming this land Bessarabia. The Congress of Vienna (1814-15) maintained the status quo in the Black Sea and the Ottoman Empire enjoyed a brief respite - though, by now, Western, Greek and Russian ships were plying its waters, taking a sizable share of the long-range traffic (Marseille and Trieste being two key outlets for exports to respectively France and Austria).[716] At that time, Odessa had a significant and prosperous Greek population, so much so that it would serve in 1822 as the base from which Hellenic patriots would launch their uprising against the Turks, much to the chagrin of tsar Alexander I.[717] Following the accession of his brother Nicholas I to the throne, the Westernised and liberal atmosphere that reigned in New Russia was progressively replaced by a policy of centralisation and Russification.
While Britain and France fought to support Greek independence, Russia extended its influence over the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (located in modern-day Romania). After the Treaty of Adrianople of 1829, and Greece gaining its independence the next year, the northern Black Sea region continued to grow economically. In that era, everything seemed possible in the rapidly expanding territories recently acquired by Russia and optimism reigned supreme. Indeed, in the novel Pere Goriot (1835) of the French author Honore de Balzac, the main character Goriot, who had made his fortune in Ukrainian grain, still dreamt on his deathbed of going to Odessa to start a pasta factory, a processed product that would evidently be loaded onto ships for the consumption of the French.[718]This renewed interest from the West in this pioneering time generated a flowering of literature from the angle of geography (including land and sea maps), trade and history as well as synthetic studies.[719] It shows that during that era, it was self-evident in Western Europe, Russia and the US that the Black Sea was a coherent geographical unit.[720] Steamships were already providing regular service from Odessa to Yalta in Crimea, allowing regular travel. The first known tourist guide for Crimea, written in French, published in Odessa in 1834, symbolises the opening of this region to travel and discovery.[721]
In contrast to this bold prosperity, the economically weakened Ottoman Empire was now labelled the ‘sick man of Europe’. Nevertheless, the Ottomans initiated a series of reforms beginning in the 1840s (known as Tanzimat in Turkish).[722] Gradually, equality between Ottoman citizens, regardless of their religion, was established and slavery abolished. Around the Black Sea, economic development accelerated further still with the development of the railroads. The Anatolian coast saw the development of coal mining activities in 1849 at Zonguldak, not far from Sinope (Sinop) exploited by French and Belgian companies, while the city of Trebizond (Trabzon) experienced a revival as an outlet for commerce with Persia.[723] Those products were not only destined to the markets of the Ottoman Empire; ships carried them beyond the Strait of Gibraltar to European ports, to meet the needs of the Western economies during the Industrial Revolution.[724]