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.1 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.2 For the economy of the North Sea, Baltic and Atlantic had continued to grow, while the Mediterranean was becoming, relatively speaking, a backwater.
It is therefore no surprise that it was not events in the Mediterranean, nor even in the Black Sea, that brought Russian navies into Mediterranean waters. Far away in north-eastern Europe, the Russian empress Catherine the Great intruded her own candidate on to the contested throne of Poland; raids on the opponents of the new king spilled over into Ottoman territory, and in 1768 they set off a Turkish-Russian war.3 The British had entered into a commercial treaty with Catherine in 1766, and were convinced that, handled with care, Empress Catherine could bring them many a bonus. The British government assumed that Russian maritime expansion would actually increase dependence on Britain, because expansion could be achieved only with British aid. The government also believed that French merchants would eventually break into the Black Sea if they were not checked by a successful Russian campaign against the Turks. The idea of a proxy war began to develop in the British political imagination, in which Russian fleets would clear the Mediterranean of threats to British interests. Louis XV’s minister de Broglie viewed the problem in much the same way: he argued that a Russian naval victory over the Turks would endanger French trade in the Levant.4
Still, the chances of the Russians achieving anything in the Mediterranean appeared slim. The Black Sea fleet would not be able to brave the passage of the Bosphorus past the Ottoman capital, so the Russians decided to send five squadrons from the Baltic into the Mediterranean, through the Straits of Gibraltar. It was thus imperative, both within the North Sea and the Mediterranean, that the Russians could make use of the naval facilities of a friendly power – some of their ships were, frankly, not in a fit state to spend many months at sea (as soon as they arrived at the English port of Hull, two large vessels had to undergo major repairs, and one of them then ran aground off the southern English coast). The British were anxious to protect their supposed neutrality, but the Admiralty issued orders that Russian ships could buy what they needed in Gibraltar and Minorca. In January 1770 four Russian battleships were being made ready at Mahón, and the Russians appointed a Greek businessman as their consul there.5
While the Turks grumbled at British aid to the Russian fleet, the Russians advanced eastwards, engaging the Turkish navy on 6 July 1770 off Çesme, tucked behind Chios. At the start of the battle the Russians found themselves in difficulty: one of their ships exploded when the blazing mast of a Turkish vessel fell on to its deck. In the end, the Russians were simply lucky: a strong west wind favoured their use of fireships within the straits between Chios and the Turkish mainland, and many Turkish ships were burned in the water. The Austrian emperor was impressed and worried: ‘all Europe will be needed to contain those people, the Turks are nothing compared to them’.6 Although they had scored a victory, and in a sense had won command of the sea, the Russians had no idea what to do next; however, they established some supply-stations, and for several years skirmishes and raids took place within the Aegean and as far south as Damietta, where they captured the governor of Damascus. But, as the British had discovered with Minorca, what was really valuable was the possession of a substantial, strategically placed, harbour, and this the Russians lacked.
Even so, there was a sense that the balance of power in the Mediterranean had shifted in unpredictable ways. The decline of Ottoman power, along with the increasing debility of Venice, had left a vacuum, and, as will be seen, not just the Russians but the Danes, the Swedes and eventually the Americans intruded themselves into the Mediterranean, even if their primary interests lay elsewhere. That, indeed, was part of the problem: everyone, except the Venetians and the Ragusans, who were old-timers, saw the Mediterranean as one among many political and commercial spheres in which they had to operate – even the Barbary pirates raided Atlantic waters with impunity. French inactivity in the face of British counter-threats gave the Russians a free hand in the eastern Mediterranean.7 Indeed, by 1774 there was little fighting, because the Russians had, against the odds, gained effective control of Levantine waters. They had, though, failed to capture the major islands of the Aegean, such as Lemnos and Imbros, which controlled access to the Dardanelles, and it was hard to see how they could maintain a permanent presence in the Mediterranean if they could enter only by way of Gibraltar.8 The Russians still had to work out what advantages they could draw from their presence in the Mediterranean: control of the eastern Mediterranean was not an end in itself, as was shown when the Russians made peace with the Turks in 1774. Under the terms of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca the Turks recognized for the first time Russian control of part of the Black Sea coast; Russia also secured the right to send merchant ships through the Bosphorus into the Mediterranean, and this raised the prospect of a revival of the ancient trade routes linking the northern shores of the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Catherine II now began to consider the duty of Orthodox Russia to the Christian peoples of eastern Europe, especially the Greeks. The Russians fomented a serious but futile Greek rebellion in the Morea during 1770. The ideal of helping the oppressed Orthodox of Ottoman-ruled Greece formed part of a grander ideal: the recovery of Constantinople for Orthodox Christendom, the ‘Great Idea’ which the Russian tsars would ponder for a long while.9
A few years of success in the Aegean whetted the appetite of the Russian court for further Mediterranean adventures. A consistent feature of these projects was the way they originated beyond the Mediterranean. In 1780 the British government was embroiled in its war with the rebellious American colonies, rendered more dangerous by the support the French and Spanish gave the United States. From 1779 to 1783, Gibraltar once again faced Spanish blockades, and, finally, relentless bombardment, through all of which it was stoutly defended by Governor Eliott.10 With Britain under such pressure, it was important to find allies, preferably allies with ships, and Russia emerged as the obvious friend. Still, friendship would have to be bought. The British minister Stormont tried to lure Catherine into a joint attack on Majorca, arguing that ‘the advantage to Russia of such a port so situated is too obvious to be dwelt upon’. He insisted that ‘Peter the Great would at once have caught at the idea’ and that the British government would feel nothing but joy at the Russian acquisition of Majorca. Stormont was worried by rumours that Britain’s enemies had been trying to tempt Russia into their camp with offers of Puerto Rico or Trinidad. The British understood that the Mediterranean was the sea that mysteriously attracted Russia. The Russians were scathing about offers of islands in the Caribbean, whether they were made by Spain or Britain. Catherine II’s minister Potyomkin looked down from his great height and told Sir James Harris, the British envoy to St Petersburg: ‘You would ruin us if you give us distant colonies. You see our ships can scarce get out of the Baltick, how would you then have them cross the Atlantick?’ Sir James was left with the clear impression ‘that the only cession which would induce the Empress to become our ally, was that of Minorca’; it would become ‘a column of the empress’s glory’. Potyomkin’s vision was not calculated to win the support of the Minorcans: they were all to be expelled, and the island was to be settled with Greeks. Minorca would become a bastion of Orthodoxy in the western Mediterranean, an advance post in the Russian struggle against the Ottomans.
Harris’s problem was that this was simply a proposal in which Potyomkin and his own government had expressed interest; the British government had not actually authorized an explicit offer, and the Russians were greatly enjoying the opportunity to act as power brokers in a divided Europe. On the one hand Catherine genuinely coveted Minorca, but on the other she realized that Britain expected something very substantial in return, Russian naval support. She knew, too, that Minorca would be hard to defend from Spanish and French incursions. For once she commented, ‘I will not be led into temptation.’ She decided that her mission was to make peace between the warring parties, rather than to exacerbate the conflict in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Her practical common sense had triumphed, and her judgement was vindicated within a year, since the Spaniards were now turning their attention to Minorca, and wrenched the island from British control in February 1782.11 A terse commentary on these approaches to the tsarina was provided by an anonymous writer, possibly Edmund Burke:
England had had full leisure to ruminate upon, and sufficient cause to reprobate, that absurd and blind policy, under the influence of which she had drawn an uncertain ally, and an ever-to-be-suspected friend, from the bottom of the Bothnic Gulf to establish a new naval empire in the Mediterranean and the Archipelago.12
This was written a few years later, when the British government was beginning to rue its past support for Russia. Now, in 1788, the British government was wondering whether Louis XVI would be interested in a joint blockade of the English Channel, to prevent the Russians from reaching the Mediterranean.13
Despite Catherine’s rejection of the offer of Minorca, these negotiations, and the eventual cooling of British affection for the Russians, demonstrate that Russia had won for itself a significant role in Mediterranean war and diplomacy, which it would try to retain ever after. The annexation of Crimea in 1783 and the further extension of Russian authority along the Black Sea coast (leading to the foundation of Odessa) furthered Russian ambitions in the Mediterranean, since the tsarina now possessed a base for commercial and naval ventures towards the Dardanelles. Much would depend on relations with the Turks; in 1789, while Catherine was at war with the Sublime Porte, Greek corsairs licensed by the Russians harried Turkish shipping in the Adriatic and Aegean. They had the willing support of Venice, engaged in its final acts of defiance as an independent republic: a Greek captain, Katzones, was permitted to use Venetian Corfu as his base, prompting the Russians to think of the island as a possible vantage point in the Mediterranean. Katzones made life difficult for the Turks: he captured the castle at Herceg Novi in the Bay of Kotor and raided as far away as Cyprus. By 1789 three ‘undisciplined, largely unorganised, and semi-piratical squadrons’ under the Russian flag were proving a real irritant to the Ottomans.14 Their predations made plain the instability of the Mediterranean.
The way to bring stability was obvious: at least in the short term, peace treaties resolved grievances over territories and gave merchant shipping safe passage. So, once peace was signed with the Turks in 1792, Russian trade in the Mediterranean began to expand, partly because Odessa was so well situated – it was largely free from ice and had good access to the open spaces of the Ukraine and southern Poland. In the year of its official foundation, 1796, Odessa already acted as host to forty-nine Turkish ships, thirty-four Russian ships and three Austrian ones, and it attracted settlers from Greece, Albania and the southern Slav lands. Merchants arrived from Corfu, Naples, Genoa and Tripoli. Looking to the future, by 1802–3 Odessa was importing massive amounts of olive oil, wine, dried fruit and wool from Greece, Italy and Spain, mainly on Greek and Italian vessels flying Turkish, Russian and Austrian flags of convenience; meanwhile, the Russian Black Sea ports exported grain worth nearly twice as much as the imports (indeed, in 1805 grain exports were worth a staggering 5,700,000 roubles).15 All this commercial success was impossible without free passage through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, which could be guaranteed only by a Turkish treaty with Russia, or, more ominously, by a Russian victory over the Ottomans that would wrest Constantinople from the Turks and return it to Orthodox masters.
In the year of the foundation of Odessa, Catherine was succeeded by her son Paul, whose ambitions easily outstripped those of his mother, for she had been clever enough to know the limits of Russian power. He had already travelled to the Mediterranean in 1782, notionally incognito as ‘the count of the North’, on a grand tour that encompassed Naples, Venice and Genoa, and his experiences aroused his interest in establishing a Russian foothold in the region.16 In his short five-year reign he once more propelled Russia into the heart of the Mediterranean. The Russians still sought an island base in the Mediterranean; but Tsar Paul’s attention wandered eastwards from Minorca, and focused instead on Malta. Yet, as before, it was circumstances far from the Mediterranean that prompted Russian intervention, and Paul’s initial interest lay not in the island but in its Knights. Links between the Knights of Malta and Russia went back many years. Peter the Great had sent his general Boris Cheremetov to the island in 1697, to propose a joint campaign against the Ottomans. Russian ships would engage the Turkish navy in the Black Sea, while the small but potent Maltese fleet would attack the Turks in the Aegean. The Grand Master was not willing to throw in his lot with the still little-known Russian empire, which remained, after all, the bastion of Orthodox Christianity. Still, Cheremetov greatly impressed the Knights by his tearful devotion to the relic of the arm of St John the Baptist, brought into the magnificent Conventual Church in Valletta during the service for Pentecost, which was attended, to the great fascination of the Knights, by this visitor from another Christian world.17
Under Catherine, too, there were matters arising between the Knights and the Russian court. These turned on a complex legacy by a Polish nobleman which resulted in the establishment of a Hospitaller priory in Russian-controlled areas of Poland.18 Catherine imagined that she could use the Knights against her opponents in Poland, and welcomed an old acquaintance, Michele Sagromoso, an Italian Knight of Malta, to her court in 1769, aware that he brought messages from the Grand Master and from the pope, who, naturally, was keen to set up Catholic institutions in the Russian empire. Religious questions intruded, however, when Catherine sent a dubious Italian protégé, the burlesque marquis of Cavalcabó, to Malta as her agent. Things did not start well: the Knights objected to the presence of a chargé d’affaires appointed by a non-Catholic power, and Cavalcabó was an untrustworthy figure who was suspected of conspiring with the strong pro-French party among the Knights. For many of the Knights were French, and the Order of Malta held vast estates in France.19 Cavalcabó’s aim was to gain access to Malta for the Russian fleet, which at this stage was still wandering the eastern Mediterranean. By 1775 the frustrated imperial agent was scheming with the ancient Maltese nobility, who had long been pushed to the margins by the Knights, in the vain hope that they would lead an uprising against their tyrannical masters and confer their island on Empress Catherine. The Knights became increasingly irritated at the bizarre behaviour of Catherine’s agent. They raided his house in Floriana, the suburb of Valletta, only to find it full of arms. Cavalcabó was kicked out, and he spent his last days in disgrace, living in France in fear of arrest for fraud.20
Tsar Paul’s approaches to the Knights of Malta were not, then, a total surprise.21 Paul had studied the history of the Knights as a young man, and he romantically saw the Order as a potential bulwark against revolution: here were noblemen of pure blood, united by common Christian zeal, transcending the petty differences between the European states of his day. He was unworried by its Catholic identity, and never had any doubt that he, as the greatest Orthodox prince, could work closely with the Order.22 He imagined that the Knights of Malta would be able to support him on two fronts: a Polish-Russian priory would contribute money and manpower to the fight against the Turks in mainland eastern Europe, while the Knights based in Malta, working together with Russian squadrons, would squeeze the Turks in the Mediterranean. Before long, Orthodox rule would be restored in the old Byzantine lands. There was one insuperable obstacle to this grand dream. The name of this obstacle was Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Revolutionary War, and the Napoleonic Wars that followed, affected the entire Mediterranean. In 1793, not long after the revolutionary government declared war on Britain, it seemed for a moment that the British fleet would be able to prevent the French navy from making any use of Mediterranean waters. As the war between France and its neighbours intensified, to the accompaniment of the ruthless suppression of those who opposed the Jacobin radicals, rebellions broke out in the French provinces. The citizens of Toulon ejected the Jacobins from office, and appealed to the British to save their city from the revolutionary armies that were advancing southwards. Refugees flooded in and supplies were short. Fortunately, British ships, commanded by Lord Hood, had already placed Toulon under a blockade; this had only accentuated the shortages within Toulon. On 23 August Hood agreed to take charge of Toulon if the inhabitants recognized the heir to the throne as King Louis XVII. The citizens swallowed hard and agreed to this, for their fear of the Jacobins compensated for their lack of enthusiasm for the monarchy. The occupation brought about half the French fleet under British control. But Hood was poorly supplied with ground troops, and once the revolutionary army, commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte, captured the fort at the mouth of the harbour entrance known as ‘Petit Gibraltar’ (17 December 1793), Hood realized that the British position was untenable. As they withdrew, the British destroyed nine French ships of the line as well as three frigates, and blew up stocks of timber on which the future of the French fleet depended. They also towed away twelve more ships, which were taken into the British and Spanish navies.23
This was one of the severest blows against the French navy during the entire war with France, at least as serious as the destruction unleashed at Trafalgar. And yet the loss of Toulon created a mountain of problems for the British. Every British commander in the Mediterranean obsessively watched Toulon as long as Napoleon was active.24 British commanders had to devise new ways of confronting the French fleet there. One solution was the recovery of Minorca, which was reoccupied in 1798 as a forward position close to southern France. Before that, though, another tempting possibility offered itself. In 1768 the French Crown had taken Corsica off the hands of the Genoese, who had in any case lost control of the island to the nationalist forces led by the eloquent and inspiring Pasquale Paoli. And then, before France declared war on Britain, reports circulated in Livorno that the revolutionary government had no interest in Corsica and that the island was up for sale. The Russians were said to be keen to fund a bid by the Genoese government to buy back Corsica, seeing it as a potential naval base in the western Mediterranean.25 These rumours stimulated British interest in Corsica, which grew once Great Britain found itself at war with France.
While Toulon was in British hands, Pasquale Paoli became more and more enthusiastic about a Corsican alliance with Britain. He understood the significance of the loss of Toulon by the British, noting: ‘the capture of Toulon is fortunate; it obliges the English to liberate us.’ What Paoli overestimated was the usefulness of Corsica. The island has not featured in this book as often as Sardinia, Majorca, Crete or Cyprus simply because it offered fewer facilities for trans-Mediterranean shipping, and fewer products of its own than the other islands. There was some grain available in the Balagne, an area in the north that had been exploited ever since it had fallen under Pisan rule in the twelfth century, but this was a society that looked inwards, isolated, conservative, whose interior was of difficult access. It was therefore not surprising that the Genoese eventually gave up their attempts to hold the island.26 The British, however, began to imagine that Corsica possessed untapped potential as a naval base. Maybe, it was wildly suggested, Ajaccio could eventually become a port to rival Livorno, and Corsica could become ‘an emporium which may command all the markets of the Mediterranean and Levant’. In 1794 Saint-Florent in the Balagne was stormed by the British, and within a few weeks a Corsican parliament voted for union with Great Britain; the island was to be a self-governing community under the sovereign authority of King George III. The Corsicans were granted their own flag, carrying a Moor’s head alongside the royal arms, as well as a motto: Amici e non di ventura, ‘friends and not by chance’.27
The relationship between the British and the Corsicans turned sour, however: Paoli became disillusioned, and revolutionary committees became increasingly active, as Napoleon infiltrated activists into his native island. During 1796 William Pitt’s government decided that the British position in Corsica was untenable; the Corsican union with Britain was dissolved, and British troops were withdrawn. The hopes that had been raised about the value of the island had been rapidly disappointed. Pitt wondered whether Catherine the Great might be willing to take on Corsica, in return for a promise of special access for British shipping; he wanted her to believe that she could hold the island with no more than 6,000 troops and the goodwill of the Corsican parliament. Catherine died before the proposal ever reached her. The British view of a Russian presence in the Mediterranean was, then, that the Russians might serve as useful idiots who could perform secondary tasks for Britain, while Britain’s major effort and expense were dedicated to the war against revolutionary France and, subsequently, Napoleon.
It became the task of Nelson and his very capable colleagues – Hood, Collingwood, Troubridge and others – to prise control of the Mediterranean from the French. One important purpose was to block Napoleon’s attempts to establish a French base in Egypt, from which he could interfere with British imperial projects still further to the east, in India, for the British had been building their power out there since the mid-eighteenth century. A French letter intercepted by the British set out the arguments behind an Egyptian campaign:
The Government have turned their eyes towards Egypt and Syria: countries which by their climate, goodness and fertility of soil may become the Granaries of the French Commerce, her magazine of abundance, and by the course of time the depository of the riches of India: it is almost indubitable that when possessed of & regularly organized in these countries we may throw our views still farther, & in the end destroy the English Commerce in the Indies, turn it to our own profit, & render our selves the Sovereigns also of that, of Africa, & Asia. All these considerations united, have induced our Government to attempt the expedition to Egypt.28
Nelson was a commander of exceptional brilliance, but it was his opponent, Napoleon, who drew the conflict between Britain and France deep into the Mediterranean and, once again, a good, though unorthodox, way of viewing the course of events is from the Russian and Maltese perspective.
Bonaparte could see from the start that Malta was a prize worth winning. While still an employee of the revolutionary Directory, in 1797, he wrote to his masters that ‘the island of Malta is of major interest for us’, arguing that France needed a sympathetic Grand Master. This could be arranged, in his view, for at least half a million francs: the current Grand Master had never recovered from a stroke, and his successor was expected to be the German von Hompesch:
Valletta has 37,000 inhabitants who are very well disposed towards the French; there are no longer any English in the Mediterranean; why should not our fleet or the Spanish, before going into the Atlantic, sail to Valletta and occupy it? There are only 500 Knights and the regiment of the Order is only 600 strong. If we do not, Malta will fall into the power of the king of Naples. This little island is worth any price to us.29
These were very acute comments, even if he overestimated the value of Malta as a supply base, given its shortage of wood and water. The magnificent fortifications of Valletta were a mask behind which sat an inadequate army of defenders, men who were, in any case, often seduced by fine living – the passionate, even fanatical, ideals of the earlier Hospitallers had become greatly diluted, even if the war against the infidel Turk remained the set purpose of the Maltese corsairs.30 Moreover, the danger of a Neapolitan takeover of Malta had more than local significance. The ‘king of the Two Sicilies’ enjoyed close ties to Nelson and to Britain, and his historic claim to be the ultimate suzerain of the Maltese archipelago was recognized in the tribute of a falcon paid each year by the Grand Master.
Von Hompesch was duly elected Grand Master in July 1797. He saw in the Russian tsar an ally who could restore the Order’s fortunes through the Polish-Russian priory, while also hoping for support from the Austrian emperor, in whose lands he had been born, and from the French Knights, who were appalled by what had been happening in France, where the Order held many lands.31 Von Hompesch rightly assumed that Napoleon’s real concerns lay elsewhere; but Napoleon was convinced that in order to achieve his objectives in the eastern Mediterranean he must control Malta. When a massive French fleet left Toulon in May 1798, bound for Egypt by way of Malta, von Hompesch continued to place his trust in the Russians and the Austrians, as if they were really in a position to offer him any help. Doublet, who had served as secretary to the previous Grand Master, observed that ‘never had Malta seen such a numberless fleet in her waters’, and the leaders of the native Maltese community reflected on the irony that it was a western European and not a Turkish navy that was now poised to take the island from the Order.32 Once the French fleet reached Malta, von Hompesch cautiously insisted that ships could enter the harbour only four at a time, and Napoleon’s emissary complained: ‘what length of time, indeed, would it not take for 500 to 600 sail to procure in this way the water and other things they urgently need?’ The emissary went on to complain that much better favours had been shown in the recent past to the British.33 Still, this was the answer Bonaparte had wanted. He now had ample excuse to unload 15,000 men and take charge of the island. Von Hompesch realized that he had no chance of holding out against massively superior forces. He surrendered the island, and on 13 June Napoleon expelled the Knights; he melted down great quantities of silver plate and appropriated their archives, not in order to read the documents, but because ammunition shells were usually packed with paper. Thus the Knights were stripped of their identity and thrown on the mercy of the Christian powers, as they had been after the fall of Acre and after the fall of Rhodes. Once again the survival of the Order was much in doubt.
The capture of Malta only strengthened the determination of Tsar Paul to bring Russian navies back into the Mediterranean. That he overestimated its usefulness as a source of wood and water is undeniable. But he fully expected to move on from Malta to more substantial conquests.34 His first move was to persuade the Russian priory of the Order to declare von Hompesch deposed, and to elect the tsar as their new Grand Master, in November 1797.35 He proceeded to appoint a number of Russian Orthodox nobles as Knights of Malta, and he wore his magisterial robes every day, giving the impression that he was as proud of his (contested) position as Grand Master as he was of his position as Russian emperor. He saw himself as a paragon of chivalry. ‘Just now,’ an Austrian minister observed, ‘the Tsar’s sole preoccupation is with Malta.’36
One of the many surprises Paul gave his contemporaries was his alliance with the Ottomans. This followed Admiral Nelson’s great victory over Napoleon’s fleet at Aboukir Bay, close to Alexandria, in summer 1798 (the Battle of the Nile); after this, the British were able to expel French armies from Egypt, though not before Napoleon had despoiled the country of vast numbers of its antiquities.37 The Sublime Porte had remained broadly content with its French alliance since the sixteenth century. A French landing in Ottoman Egypt could not, however, be tolerated. Besides, there were troublemakers in the Balkans who seemed dangerously sympathetic to France, notably the great Albanian warlord Ali Pasha, lord of Ioannina. Now, clearly, it was time for the sultan to turn against a France which had shown itself more ambitious in the Levant than the Ottomans could allow, and at the same time had shown itself more vulnerable than observers of Napoleon’s fleets and armies might have expected. The most important feature of the Russo-Turkish alliance was the preliminary agreement, signed only a few weeks after Aboukir, which permitted the Russian navy to sail through the Bosphorus into the Mediterranean.38 Fortunately, the Turks and the Russians could agree on a common objective: the Ionian isles, which Napoleon had seized shortly before, while he was sweeping up the remnants of the Venetian empire following his capture of Venice in May 1797. The Turks suspected that Ancona was to be used as a base for a French invasion of the Balkans, and saw control of Corfu and its neighbours as a necessary step towards a blockade of the Adriatic. Each side managed to put aside deep distrust for its new ally. Indeed, the Russian naval commander, the boorish, monolingual Ushakov, reserved his jealousy for Nelson, since he did not want the British to win all the glory, and Nelson, for his part, was determined to keep these unlikely allies within the eastern Mediterranean, while winning Malta and Corfu for Britain. ‘I hate the Russians’, he wrote, describing Ushakov as ‘a blackguard’.39 The Turks possessed a finely constructed fleet of modern French ships, but their sailors, many of whom were in fact Greek, were not well disciplined, while the Russian shipyards in the Black Sea were incapable of producing ships that would have the stamina for a long war far from home.40 Still, the combined forces of Turkey and Russia had taken control of the Ionian islands by early March 1799. Typically, the tsar remembered the Order of St John when he rewarded Ushakov, who now became a Knight of Malta. The provision made for the government of the Ionian isles was distinctive. The seven islands would constitute an aristocratic ‘Septinsular Republic’, under the sovereignty of Turkey; however, Russia would exercise special influence as the protecting power.41
Setting aside his real doubts about the seaworthiness of the Russian fleet and about its commander, Nelson wrote to Ushakov proposing a joint attack on Malta, a prospect that seemed more real now that a Russian army was advancing southwards from Turin. Nelson was worried that this would turn into a Russian invasion achieved with British support. He insisted: ‘although one Power may have a few more men in the Island than the other, yet they are not to have a preponderance. The moment the French flag is struck, the colours of the Order must be hoisted and no other.’42 According to one historian, ‘Russian prospects in the Mediterranean never looked more promising than in October 1799’. Ushakov knew this too, and in December he was shocked to receive an imperial ukaz telling him that the tsar had changed his mind: he was to leave the Mediterranean forthwith, and retreat with the entire Russian fleet to the Black Sea; Russian positions in Corfu were to be handed over directly to the Turks, in the expectation that this would lead the sultan to favour the passage of a Russian fleet from the Aegean into the Black Sea. Withdrawal came none too soon. Russian intervention in the Ionian isles threatened to interfere with Habsburg control of the Adriatic, and the Austrians were just growing comfortable in the possession of Venice, which Napoleon had handed over to them as a piece of candy. Paul’s calculations were out of touch with reality, and he grandly offered the Holy Roman Emperor a choice between Venice and the Low Countries, as he imaginatively carved up post-revolutionary Europe among the reluctant allies who faced Napoleon.43
How far Paul’s ambitions were from reality was further revealed when Ushakov found it impossible to sail his decaying fleet into the eastern Mediterranean, and was obliged to winter in Corfu. The Russians impotently sat out the siege of Malta by the British, only leaving Corfu for the Black Sea in July 1800. Napoleon had no hope of holding on to Malta, and, so as ‘to cast an apple of discord among my enemies’, he offered it as a gift to Paul; the tsar fell into the trap by accepting the offer, only to learn in November 1800 that it had been seized by the British a couple of months earlier.44 The British decided to forget that their avowed intention had been the restoration of the Knights, nor did they bother to raise the flags of any of their allies when they captured Valletta: neither that of the tsar-cum-Grand Master, nor that of the Order of St John, nor that of the king of Naples, ancient overlord of Malta. The Foreign Office in London murmured, in best Foreign Office style, about the irregularity, and expressed timid fears about the offence caused to the tsar as ‘acknowledged Grand Master’ (something of an exaggeration). But the British army and navy, in situ in Malta, would have none of this.45 It was the British flag that would fly over Malta for more than a century and a half. Napoleon could only have dreamed of what happened next: the tsar created an ‘Armed Neutrality of the North’ with the help of Denmark, Sweden and Prussia, and placed an embargo on British ships. Then Napoleon’s dream developed into a nightmare. Conflict erupted in the Baltic and North Sea; Nelson, though technically only second-in-command, once again emerged as the brilliant victor at the battle of Copenhagen in April 1801, when the Danish fleet was smashed to pieces.46 About a week earlier disgruntled Russian officers forced their way into the tsar’s bedchamber and throttled him. The British were relieved to learn of the fate of this unpredictable ally; Napoleon, recognizing another megalomaniac, was deeply moved, and decided that a British conspiracy lay behind the assassination. But Paul was his own worst enemy.
Paul’s successor, Alexander I, began his reign more cautiously. When Russia was proposed as guarantor of Malta’s autonomy under a restored government of the Knights, following pan-European peace negotiations with France in 1801, the tsar politely demurred: who else but the king of the Two Sicilies should guarantee Malta, in his capacity as suzerain of the island?47 On the other hand, Alexander was keen to reactivate Russian interest in the Ionian isles, especially since the Ottoman Empire seemed to be tottering (it would be a long totter). The imperial counsellor Czartoryski called Turkey ‘rotten and gangrenous in its principal and vital parts’.48 Were the Ottoman Empire to dissolve, Czartoryski envisaged a division of Turkey-in-Europe between the Romanovs and the Habsburgs, with shares for Britain and France in the Aegean, Asia Minor and North Africa, as well as independence for the Greeks. The Habsburg emperor would gain the Dalmatian coast, including Dubrovnik, while Russia would hold on to Kotor and Corfu, as well, of course, as Constantinople itself. Practical actions were taken: the defence of the Ionian isles was strengthened, in the face of a French threat from southern Italy, and consuls were sent to towns such as Kotor, in the hope of winning them over to Russian sympathies.49 But the Peace of Amiens arranged with France fell apart in 1803 (partly over Britain’s refusal to surrender Malta), and Napoleon, soon to become self-crowned emperor of France, began to flex his muscles again on the mainland.50 These events persuaded Alexander to return his ships to the Mediterranean. The task was rendered easier with the ‘glorious victory’ obtained by Lord Nelson at Trafalgar, just outside the Mediterranean, on 21 October 1805.51 The Mediterranean was made safer for anti-French shipping, but the dead hero Nelson was no longer there to warn against the unreliable Russians, who had, in fact, been working hard to improve the seaworthiness of their fleet.
Under Alexander, as under his predecessors, Russian interest in the Mediterranean was closely tied to Russian sympathy for the Orthodox Slavs, over whom the tsar sought to extend his protection. It was for this reason that the Russians sent ships to the Bay of Kotor, which gave access to the mountain-girt Orthodox principality of Montenegro, a region the Turks had never bothered to bring fully under their dominion. The importance of Montenegro to the Russians was ideological, not practical, even if Kotor was said to be home to 400 trading vessels, though this must include some that were no larger than skiffs.52 The religious question also came to the fore in Russian dealings with Dubrovnik. For fear of the Serbs, the Ragusans had traditionally discouraged the Orthodox Church within their narrow domains, and in 1803 the Senate even closed down the chapel of the Russian consulate. By March 1806 a French army was advancing down the Dalmatian coast, and the Ragusan government reluctantly agreed to let Russian soldiers man the defences of Dubrovnik if and when the French arrived. But at the end of May, as the French entered Ragusan territory, the Senate decided that French Catholics were preferable to Russian Orthodox, setting off a struggle that took place over their heads between French troops and Russian ones, aided by Montenegrin Slavs. Although the Russians managed for a time to extend their influence along the Dalmatian coast, Dubrovnik remained a French base, and in 1808 its republican government went the way of the Venetian republic, with barely a whimper. A representative of the French commander Marmont declared: ‘my lords, the republic of Ragusa and its government are dissolved and the new administration is installed’. Dubrovnik was placed under the authority first of Napoleonic Italy and then of the new province of Illyria. Marmont was rewarded with the novel title duc de Raguse.53 The collapse was not merely political, for, even though Dubrovnik was home to 277 sailing ships in 1806, only forty-nine were still in use in 1810.54 The republic had become caught up in wars that could not possibly serve its interests. The fading power of the Ottomans left the Ragusans without the traditional Turkish guarantee of their neutrality and safety; an attempt to secure Turkish support was fruitless, because the Ottomans were, at this stage, largely beholden to the French.55 It was an ignominious end to a republic that optimistically took LIBERTAS as its motto.
It was also the beginning of the end for Russian intervention in the Mediterranean. The Russians still found it difficult to maintain control over operations so far from St Petersburg. Operations were compromised by the collapse of the Russian-Turkish entente late in 1806, following deep disagreements with the Turks about the affairs of Wallachia, in modern Romania. The Russians and the Turks were surprised to find themselves at war. With misgivings, Great Britain gave some support to the Russians, but it was the Russian fleet that fought one of the great naval battles of the Napoleonic Wars off Mount Athos at the end of June and start of July 1807, hoping to break open the mouth of the Dardanelles.56 On paper, this was a Russian victory, but in reality the Turkish fleet was still able to block the Dardanelles, and the tsar had in any case had more than enough. The lucrative trade from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean had dried up during the conflict; following reverses in Europe the tsar made his peace with Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807 and abandoned his Mediterranean ambitions. He also abandoned his fleet in the Mediterranean. The Russian ships were simply stuck there. Those that tried to escape into the Atlantic were easily captured by the British. Several ships made for Trieste, Venice and Corfu, but there was nothing for them there, and they were surrendered, abandoned or even scuttled; others reached Toulon and joined the French navy: Napoleon had been hoping that one advantage of peace with Russia would be the acquisition of its fleet. French officers raced to Corfu to raise the French flag there in place of the Russian.57 Mediterranean intervention had cost Russia a great deal of money and in the end brought it no permanent advantage.