Russia and the Ottoman Empire: The Geopolitical Dimension

Abstract

Russian academic science recently has demonstrated growing interest in the relations between the Russian and the Ottoman Empires. The reasons are numerous: sharpened attention to Russia’s imperial past because of the demise of the Soviet Union; recent general progress of Turkic studies in Russia; present-day Turkey’s active foreign policy, which in some ways reminds us of the days of the Ottoman Empire; and Turkey’s political and military weight in the once more turbulent region of the Middle East. For imperial Russia the Ottoman Empire was always by far the most important of all Oriental polities it had to deal with. The relations with it were vital both for shaping Russia’s especially vulnerable southern borders and for emphasizing its unique position as the only Christian Orthodox empire. Whereas the Republic of Turkey is just one of six pretenders to the “core state” status in the Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire, because of its might and the combination of the Padishah and the Caliph in its ruler, was indeed a “core state” (S. Huntington) and the strongest of the three Muslim “gunpowder empires” (M. Hodgson), the others being Safavid Iran and Mughal India. Contacts between the two countries go back to the fifteenth century when the Ottoman Empire (Sultanate) became one of Muscovy’s main trading partners. Later the two empires turned into geopolitical rivals. The