The ‘Ottoman Lake’

The history of the Black Sea was permanently influenced by the extraor­dinary rise of a small Turkic tribe that formed at the end of the thirteenth century in western Anatolia at a stone’s throw from Constantinople: the Osmanlis, better known as the Ottomans.

For the last shreds of the Eastern Roman Empire, the end drew near: the Ottomans already held the Straits north and south of Constantinople.^[695] A new factor completely changed the naval history of the Black Sea: the progress of artillery.^[696] Thanks to the range of their coastal cannons, the Ottomans were now able to forbid the pas­sage of enemy vessels between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, effectively severing the connection between the two. The crumbling walls of the isolated great city eventually fell to the siege cannons of the Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453, as did those ofTrebizond in 1461, and finally those of Kaffa in 1473. Georgia, fragmented and made an imperial vassal, disappeared as an independent state. Constantinople, by contrast, experienced a revival under its new mas­ters and a new economic system took root. The Black Sea commerce hitherto in the hands of Italians was reorganised into a coherent sys­tem whose centre was again Constantinople, and which provided tax revenue to the central administration. Seen from the south, it was as if the city ‘had monopolized the long-distance and the short-distance trade of the Black Sea, shielding this Mediterranean extremity from the rest of the sea’.^[697] On the left, European shore, the direct provin­cial administration of the Sultan stopped at the Danube not unlike in Roman times; beyond, the two Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia continued to exist as vassal states with their own insti­tutions and Christian religion. In Crimea the Ottomans oversaw the lasting establishment of a Tatar khanate affording it a large measure of autonomy.

It is thanks to the Turks that the term ‘Black Sea’ (Karadeniz in Turkish) entered into Western usage: the sea was located to the north of the Ottoman Empire, a direction represented by the black colour in Turkish culture. In the eighteenth century, Diderot’s Encyclopedic noted soberly: ‘The people who inhabit the shores of this sea are subjects or tributaries of the Ottoman Empire.’^[700] Thanks to the military capability of the Ottomans to control effectively every passage of the Straits, this period of the ‘Turkish’ lake was portrayed as one of enclosure as far as Europe was concerned;^[701] only the Poles retained a tenuous access to it thanks to the Bug and Dnieper rivers. That may be a partial view, however, since the peoples who inhabited its shores continued to trade with Istanbul, with the northern steppe and beyond the Caucasus with Persia;^[702] fur­thermore, the trade was still functioning with Central Europe along the Danube, as well as with the Mediterranean Sea through the Straits.^[703] The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries actually saw an expansion of the merchant marine.^[704] As was the case on other seas, Ottoman control of the water was however undermined by a nation of fearsome seafarers who practised piracy all the way across the Black Sea to Anatolia: the Cossacks.^[705] Ironically, history would better remember them for their exploits on land, in the service of the Russian cavalry.^[706]