Maritime Circulations in the Twilight of Empires

Clouds gathered once more as renewed Russian expansion towards Constantinople, coupled with a policy of intervention in the eastern Mediterranean, threatened the very survival of the Ottoman Empire.

A situation that might have remained diplomatically manageable under diplomats of the generation of the Congress of Vienna descended into war in 1853. Britain and France came to the rescue of the Turks, forc­ing the Russian army to retreat back into its own territory. Things might have remained at that, but for obscure reasons that are still debated, the Western Allies decided to make a landing in Crimea, effectively starting the Crimean War (1853-56).^[727] This anomalous and cruel siege of the naval base of Sevastopol ended with an orderly retreat of the defend­ers through Crimea (the land road having never been cut) - and their prompt return after the expeditionary force had re-embarked on its transport ships.

On the level of the imaginaire, the Crimean War popularised the Black Sea and its region in Western European culture.

The Treaty of Paris of 1856, which concluded the conflict, prohibited the navigation of warships on the Black Sea and the construction of for­tresses around its shores. As a reaction, the policies of the Russian Empire started turning inwards, toward a tighter integration of the region, par­ticularly the northeast shore of Black Sea. The Russians had already established nominal control of the mountainous east coast, bounded by the Kuban River (then called Circassia). Unlike the Georgians, who were annexed in 1801, the Circassians were Muslims and without a proper state. Between 1864 and 1867, the Russian army unceremoniously occupied their territory and practised a determined policy of expul­sion. Nearly half a million people were deported to the Ottoman Empire under appalling conditions.^[732] Tens of thousands of Crimean Tatars also took the same path of exile.

The Black Sea also became a secondary theatre in the ‘Great Game’ between Great Britain and Russia for control of the trade routes to Central Asia, and to Persia in particular. This competition is key to understanding the development of transport infrastructures in the east­ern part of the Black Sea: in addition to Odessa, the Russians developed the port of Novorossiysk on the shore across the Kerch Strait (reachable by train from the north) and controlled the Transcaucasian corridor that leads to the Caspian Sea through the Caucasus.^[733] The British exploited for their part - with Ottoman permission - the route through the south Caucasus: ships crossing the Bosphorus unloaded in Trebizond, bridgehead of the caravans to Persia.

In 1877-78 Russia tried once again to end the Ottoman Empire, which was saved in extremis by the arrival of the British navy in the Straits. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin led to a new configuration of the Black Sea’s west­ern coast with the recognition of Romanian sovereignty and the creation of modern Bulgaria. The withdrawal of the Turks saw massacres commit­ted against the civilian population by each side and the Balkans became the scene of deportations and population transfers. With the accession of tsar Alexander III in 1881, a highly conservative monarch, the russifica­tion policies in the Empire took on an entirely new scale: a wave of repres­sion befell non-Orthodox Christians and Muslims. In the case of Jews, segregation and violence became institutionalised, leading to pogroms committed by the locals, on which the authorities turned a blind eye. The situation on the western shore of the Black Sea remained tense: the two Balkan Wars of 1912-13, which took place largely in Bulgaria and Thrace, were only the prelude to the coming storm.