Місто Ізмаїл та його фортифікація (за джерелами XVI–XIX ст.)

Abstract

With these words, Philip Stanislavov, bishop of Nikopol, described the Ottoman city of Izmail and its people after a pastoral visit to his diocese in 1659. A place for gathering and sorting slaves for the Constantinople market,2 Izmail had grown extensively in the seventy years since its foundation, which an official decree of Sultan Murad III dates to November 1589. The birth of this fortified city and its development from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries are exhaustively reconstructed in a book coauthored by Andrew Krasnozhon, historian, and Mehmet Tütüncü, specialist in medieval Ottoman epigraphy.Located in what is now Ukraine, along the northernmost branch of the Danube Delta, Izmail is relatively famous for having been stormed and taken by Russian troops led by General Alexander Suvorov in 1790, during the Russo-Turkish war of 1787–1792.3 The rest of its history is practically unknown, however, even in Ukraine. Andrew Krasnozhon and Mehmet Tütüncü fill this gap based on documents mainly from Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian archives. Cartographical and iconographical sources also play an important role and include about ten Ottoman maps and plans and a series of watercolors by the Russian painter Mikhail Matveevich Ivanov (1748–1823) dating to the late eighteenth century.The book is arranged in twelve parts: I, “The Beginning of the City’s History”; II, “The First Construction Works”; III, “The City in the Possession of Mehmed-aga’s Charitable Foundation”; IV, “The Development of Izmail in the 1590s”; V, “Christian Izmail in the 17th Century”; VI, “Social and Economic Life in the Izmail District (1689–1693)”; VII, “The Epigraphy and Cartography of Izmail (1702–1770)”; VIII, “The City and Defensive Works in the 1770s”; IX, “The First Bastion Fortress of the 1780s”; X, “The Assault on Izmail in December 1790”; XI, “Modernization of the Fortifications in the 1790s”; and XII, “Izmail in the 19th Century and the Dismantlement of the Fortress (1856)”.Parts I–IV concern the city’s history, from its foundation to the end of the sixteenth century. Particular attention is given to its founder—the wealthy Habeshi Mehmed-aga, an intellectual of Ethiopian origin and patron of artists and architects, in close contact with Sultan Murad III—and to the main buildings erected at his initiative: a shipyard, a castle, a mosque, and a caravanserai, as well as baths, an elementary school, and several shops.Parts V–VI describe Izmail’s population in the seventeenth century, when Bishop Philip Stanislavov visited it. At that time, the city was prevalently Orthodox. Almost 85 percent of its population was composed of Moldavians, Greeks, and Armenians, and only 15 percent were Tatars and Turks. Jewish and Catholic minorities completed the picture. Among Catholics, the presence of merchants from Ragusa (Dubrovnik) was noteworthy, as Monsignor Stanislavov observed. As in other settlements in the region, such as Kilia,4 the Turks lived in their own quarter, separate from the rest of the population.Part VII presents a remarkable set of Ottoman epigraphs and maps concerning Izmail and its district. Among them is a minutely detailed map showing cities and fortresses on the Lower Danube, with a representation of the Danube Delta as it was in the second half of the eighteenth century (p. 270, figure 159).The rest of the book (Parts VIII–XII) reconstructs the history of Izmail’s defensive works: from the first castle, destroyed during the seventeenth century, to the bastion fortress built by the Ottoman government in the 1780s; from a rearrangement of fortifications after Suvorov’s assault in 1790 to the dismantlement of the fortress in 1856, when Izmail was annexed to the principality of Moldavia as a result of the Crimean War.5With its precise historical reconstruction and the presentation of many previously unpublished sources, this book by Krasnozhon and Tütüncü is an indispensable tool for all scholars interested in the history, epigraphy, and cartography of the Lower Danube during the Ottoman period.