The View through the Russian Prism, 1760–1805

Abstract

The increasing debility of the Ottoman Empire brought the Mediterranean to the attention of the Russian tsars. From the end of the seventeenth century Russian power spread southwards towards the Sea of Azov and the Caucasus. Peter the Great sliced away at the Persian empire, and the Ottomans, who ruled the Crimea, felt threatened. For the moment, the Russians were distracted by conflict with the Swedes for dominion over the Baltic, but Peter sought free access to the Black Sea as well. These schemes had the flavour of the old Russia Peter had sought to reform, just as much as they had the flavour of the new technocratic Russia he had sought to create. The idea that the tsar was the religious and even political heir to the Byzantine emperor – that Muscovy was the ‘Third Rome’ – had not been swept aside when Peter established his new capital on the Baltic, at St Petersburg. Equally, the Russians could now boast hundreds of vessels capable of challenging Turkish pretensions in the Black Sea, even if they were far from capable of mounting a full naval war, and the ships themselves were badly constructed, notwithstanding Peter the Great’s famous journey to inspect the shipyards of western Europe, under the alias Pyotr Mikhailovich. In sum, this was a fleet that was ‘poor in discipline, training, and morale, unskilful in manoeuvre, and badly administered and equipped’; a contemporary remarked that ‘nothing has been under worse management than the Russian navy’, for the imperial naval stores had run out of hemp, tar and nails. The Russians began to hire Scottish admirals in an attempt to create a modern command structure, and they turned to Britain for naval stores; this relationship was further bolstered by the intense trading relationship between Britain and Russia, which had continued to flourish throughout the eighteenth century while England’s Levant trade withered: in the last third of the eighteenth century a maximum of twenty-seven British ships sailed to the Levant in any one year, while as many as 700 headed for Russia.