The Role of the Environment

As for the present, how could one envision the current political and social vicissitudes of this sea and its hinterland without also compre­hending its geography and its history? The Black Sea belongs to the cat­egory of enclosed seas of moderate size, a feature that implies that the sea routes crossing it and the land routes circling it complement and extend each other.

Unlike in the case of oceans, there is thus an overlap and entangle­ment between maritime and land histories of the Black Sea that cannot be avoided. A central question is how well such a body of water has been connected to other seas and lands, in various periods of time, not­ably through its straits (its relative enclosure versus openness}. Indeed, the repeated clashes of empires over inlets to the Black Sea played a central role in its vicissitudes. The inextricable interplay between geopolitical and maritime factors is what, in fact, gives distinctive flavour and rich­ness to the history of that inland sea.

Nevertheless, the statement by Fernand Braudel about the Mediterranean Sea, that the environment imposed persistent constraints

Torre, ‘Deepwater archaeology of the Black Sea: The 2000 season at Sinop, Turkey’, American Journal of Archaeology, 105 (2001): 607-23; C. Ward and R. Horlings, ‘The remote exploration and archaeological survey of four byzantine ships in the Black Sea’, in Robert D. Ballard, ed., Archaeological oceanography (Princeton, NJ, 2008), pp. 148-75. For an overview of the recent literature on the Black Sea archaeology, see Jan Bouzek, Viktoria Cist’akova, Petra Tuslova and Barbora Weissova, ‘New studies in Black Sea and Balkan archaeology’, Eirene: Studia Graeca et Latina, 50 (2014): 298-316. An example of recent discovery of marine archaeology in the Black Sea is William S. Broad, ‘“We couldn’t believe our eyes”: A lost world of shipwrecks is found in the Black Sea’, NewYork Times, 11 November 2016: www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/science/shipwrecks-black-sea- archaeology.html (accessed 31 March 2017).

⁴ Jules Verne, Keraban-le-Tetu (Paris, 1883). on the history of humankind, is definitely valid in this context.^[655] By con­trast, the more recent model elaborated by Horden and Purcell for the Mediterranean - as a constellation of distinct and separate micro-envir­onments, where the hazards of subsistence constituted the root cause of sea connections^[656] - is less applicable to the Black Sea, which is more of a coherent geographical unit. In the first place, it has a smooth shoreline that is almost devoid of islands, where every point is therefore poten­tially in contact with all others. Furthermore, each shore could have been largely self-sufficient since the Black Sea’s climate allows very productive crops with little risk of failure - the continental north is favourable to grain, while the eastern and southern subtropical climates support the produce typical of the Mediterranean.^[657]

The reason why the Black Sea has been so favourable to human cir­culation is that its basin connects the settled and warm Mediterranean world of the south to the frigid plains of the north, which have been con­tinuously crossed by waves of nomads.

Since the Black Sea is entirely contained inland and captures all rivers around it without allowing any outflow into an ocean, it is known as an endorheic basin.^[660] While its size is respectable (435,000 square kilometres, approximately three times the size of Great Britain), its true dimension stems from its huge hinterland: it drains a substantial part of the riv­ers of Europe - up to a watershed stretching east from the Swiss Alps, southern Germany and part of Poland, across to the heart of European Russia. Among these rivers is the mighty Danube, the great waterway of Mitteleuropa¹ Not far up from its delta are the mouths of the Dniester and the Dnieper, large rivers that originate in the north, far away beyond the steppes. One should also mention a secondary basin: the Sea of Azov, in the northeast. From the northern steppes, it is easily reachable by descending the River Don. From the Black Sea, it is accessible through the Kerch Strait that separates Crimea from the mountainous mainland to the east (Kuban).

Human settlements on the Black Sea thus differ markedly from those on the Mediterranean Sea, which had seen agricultural civilisations slowly emerge over the centuries and then take to the sea. The Black Sea is a basin that has regularly drawn human immigration from its periphery, just as it has drawn the water of surrounding rivers and the Mediterranean.^{[661] [662] In every era, nomad invaders arriving by land or river from the northern steppe encountered the same major obstacle: to go farther it would then be necessary for them to cross the sea in ships (something ordinarily alien to horse-mounted tribes), or else head south by land along the western shore to the Danube Delta - only to con­front coastal seafarers solidly entrenched in their fortress towns built on cliffs, with their backs against the surrounding mountains. Conversely, southern invaders could easily cross the waters to land on the northern shores and settle there - providing of course they did not find the place already occupied.}

As could be expected, all movement across the Black Sea oscillates around the grip of the bow: the famous Crimean Peninsula, whose southern ports are cut off from the northern plain by a mountain range, had a destiny of its own. As a rule, whoever held this strategic area - the fulcrum of the Black Sea - became master of the waters. Indeed, any northern power wishing to extend its control on the Sea of Azov without also holding eastern Crimea (and thus the Kerch Strait) did not draw much benefit, because it remained hopelessly bottled up.

In fact, the Black Sea is also accessible from the west and the east, from both tips of the bow. The Danube is well suited for commerce, although invaders repeatedly followed along its banks from west to east or from east to west, fighting many battles on their way.^[663] On the other side, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, lies the steep valley of the River Rioni (called Phasis by the Greeks). Not a significant waterway by a long stretch, its main merit is that it long ago dug a gash across the otherwise impassable massif of the Caucasus Mountains, neatly dividing it in two parts. The Rioni Valley has been a significant land route for the trade connecting the Black Sea region to the Caspian Sea and then to Central Asia, the only alternative being the caravan route that starts from the eastern Anatolian shore at Trebizond, skirting south of the Caucasus to reach Iran.

No account of the Black Sea can be complete without mention­ing the city that guards its southwest passage into the Mediterranean Sea: Istanbul, formerly known as Constantinople (and still earlier, Byzantium).^[664] Its colossal walls, its grand monuments, its wealth and population earned it such titles as Miklagaard (the ‘Great City’) by the Vikings, Tsarigrad (the ‘Imperial City’) by the Slavs, or simply Polis, the ‘City’.

The two Black Sea straits of the Bosphorus (to the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean) and Kerch (to the Sea of Azov), along with half a dozen large and medium-sized rivers are the access routes in and out of the sea and a strong geographical constraint; without them, there is no connection with the outside world. Any empire (such as the Persian and Roman empires of Antiquity, the Ottoman empire, or the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union), that managed to control all of these, either directly or through vassal states, was able to turn this inland sea into its own ‘lake’. Thus the Black Sea has experienced alternating peri­ods of openness and enclosure, according to the evolving configurations of the states that bordered its shores. Whenever an empire did manage to establish hegemony over these key points, the Black Sea seemed to close up like a clamshell - at least for outsiders. When its grip was loosened, the sea became once more open to general free movement.

These successive periods of relative openness and enclosure, which affected the circulation of people, goods and ideas, also influenced the narratives of the Black Sea: during periods of openness, such as the hey­day of the Greek commercial network of Antiquity, the Italian period of the Middle Ages, or the nineteenth century, it attracted more atten­tion from navigators and travellers from outside, who naturally saw it as a maritime unit; while those periods of enclosure generated a different type of narrative, one more focused on the land. The rise, during the second part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, of new nation-states (Romania, Bulgaria, followed by Georgia and Ukraine, as well as Turkey) on the Black Sea’s shores confirmed this enclosure and led to a dearth of works that considered the Black Sea either as a mari­time or regional unit in the modern period (since land and sea can hardly be disentangled).^[666] All littoral states endeavoured to ‘reinvent’ their iden­tities and give them legitimacy by using a recipe universally applied at the time: nation-centric narratives that extolled a heroic past.

On top of this national fragmentation, a second political rift occurred along a north-south line in the first half of the twentieth century: first the establishment of Soviet regimes in Ukraine, Russia and Georgia, as early as 1920, and then the incorporation of Romania and Bulgaria in the Soviet bloc from after World War II turned the Black Sea into a political and ideological line of demarcation during the Cold War. We will return to the consequences of this enclosure at the end of this chapter, but to understand the larger significance of openness and closure in the history of the Black Sea, it is necessary to return to its early history.