Sultan Selim II’s Volga – Don Canal in Russian and Turkish Historiography

Abstract

In Russian and Turkish historiography, the themes of construction by Turkish troops of a canal between the Volga and Don tributaries, rivers Kamyshinka and Ilovlya, during the 1569 Astrakhan campaign became widespread. An archaeological monument known as “Selimov Val”, located in the territory of the Kamyshinsky Raion of the Volgograd Oblast, is regarded by some Russian and Turkish historians as remnants of this canal. The article analyzes the relevant historiography. It is shown that there were three viewpoints on this matter in the 17th – 20th century historiography: (1) Turkish (İbrahim Peçevi, Mustafa Âlî, Evliya Çelebi, and Ahmet Refik), Russian (A. I. Lyzlov, C. Cruys, G. S. Bayer, S. G. Gmelin, P. I. Rychkov, I. V. Rovinskii, and A. I. Rigelman), and European (P. Oderborn, M. Stryjkowski, and J. von Hammer) historians (16th to early 20th century) believed that the construction of the canal was the main goal, or one of the important goals, of the 1569 Astrakhan campaign and a significant part of the excavation works had been completed; these historians have not localized the canal construction site; (2) The representatives of the late 18th to early 20th century local-history historiography (N. Ya. Ozeretskovsky, A. N. Minkh, and K. G. Turovsky) believed that one of the canals between rivers Kamyshinka and Ilovlya was built by the Turks in 1569; (3) Russian (M. M. Shcherbatov, N. M. Karamzin, S. M. Solovyov, P. A. Sadikov, N. A. Smirnov, and A. L. Khoroshkevich) and Turkish (H. İnalcık and A. N. Kurat) historians (late 18th – early 21st century), drawing on the most reliable sources, argued that, in 1569, the works on the construction of the canal, if any, were carried out on a very small scale and 150 km to the south of Kamyshin rather than near it. Thus, the name of the archaeological heritage site, Selimov Val (“Selim’s earth bank”), is erroneous, as this site is what remains of a canal whose construction in 1697 was managed by J. Bröckell.