CHAP. XLIX.] BREACH BETWEEN RUSSIA AND TURKEY. 205 introduced at Constantinople by a Hungarian renegade; but it had many opponents and made but very slow progress. By granting the Janissaries an exemption from import duties, he induced a large number of them to engage in commerce, and thus rendered them anxious for the tranquillity of the government. These regulations, however, contributed to break the military spirit of the nation, as was but too manifest in its subsequent struggles with Russia, Mahmoud I. died in his fifty-eighth year, December 13th, 1754, while returning from Friday prayers. He was succeeded by his brother, Osman III., whose tranquil reign of two years presents nothing of importance. On his death, December 22nd, 1756, Mustapha III., son of Achmet III., then forty-one years of age, became Sultan and Caliph. Mustapha was an accomplished and energetic Prince, an astrologer and poet, and deeply religious.

The Porte had at first manifested great indifference to the fate of Poland. During the vacancy of the Crown it had contented itself with presenting a moderate note to the Russian Resident, protesting against any interference in the election. When the tumults broke out, Count Vergennes, the French Ambassador to the Porte, endeavoured to incite it in favour of the Polish patriots. Catharine II., stimulated by ambition and the desire of aggrandizement, had not confined her views to Poland. She had also cast her eyes on some of the Turkish provinces, and had marked them out as her future prey; but, so long as the affairs of Poland remained unsettled, she wished to remain at peace with the Porte, and with this view she had bought with large sums the votes of some of the most influential members of the Divan. Hence, though Mustapha himself was inclined for war, the counsels of his ministers were long undecided. The progress of the Russian arms was, however, watched with jealousy and alarm. The incursions of Russian troops across the borders in pursuit of the Poles, and especially the burning by the Russians and Saporogue Cossacks, of Balta, a little town on the frontier of Bessarabia, belonging to the Tartar Khan, excited the anger of the Porte in the highest degree; but it was not till after the taking of Cracow by the Russians that an appeal to arms was decided on. The Mufti gave his long expected Fetwa for war; the Grand Vizier, who had been an advocate of peace, was deposed; and, although Catharine had made apologies, and promised satisfaction for the damages. committed by her troops, the new Grand Vizier, after upbraiding Obreskoff, the Russian Resident, with the treacherous conduct of

206

DEFEAT OF THE TURKS.

[CHAP. XLIX. his mistress in keeping her troops in Poland, caused him to be confined in the Seven Towers.

Sultan Mustapha now made vigorous preparations for war, and assembled a numerous army. But the time of his declaration had been badly chosen. A great part of the Turkish troops were only bound to serve in the summer, and thus six months were spent in inaction, during which the Russians had time to prepare themselves. The Turkish regular troops were no longer very formidable; but the Tartars who inhabited the Crim, and the desolate regions between the Dnieper and Dniester, and even to the Pruth, were numerous and warlike. The Tartars of the Budziac, and the Nogai Tartars, inhabiting the Crimea, were under a Khan who was subject to the Sultan. The reigning Khan was now deposed, and his predecessor, Krim Girai, who was living in banishment, being a bitter foe to the Russians, was recalled, and commissioned to begin the war with his hordes. Early in 1769, supported by 10,000 Sipahis and a few hundred Poles, Krim Girai invaded New Servia, where he committed the most terrible devastations.2 But soon after his return, this last of the Tartar heroes was poisoned by his Greek physician Siropolo, an emissary of the Prince of Wallachia.

The main Turkish army, under the Grand Vizier Mohammed Emir Pasha, effected little or nothing. The Russians, under Galitzin, were indeed repulsed in two attempts upon Choczim, but Emir Pasha, accused of conducting the war with too little vigour, was recalled and beheaded at Adrianople. His successor, Mustapha Moldawanschi Ali Pasha, was still more unfortunate. After two or three vain attempts to enter Podolia, the Turks were compelled to make a general retreat, and the Russians occupied Moldavia and Wallachia; in which last province a strong Russian party had been formed. An attempt made by a Turkish corps to recover Bucharest, in February, 1770, was frustrated. Romanzoff, who had succeeded Galitzin as commander of the Russians, gained two decisive victories and compelled the Turks to abandon Ismail. By the end of the year the Russians had penetrated into the Crimea. Their arms had also been successful in Asia, where a great part of Armenia, Circassia, and Kabarda had been reduced.

The family of Girai, or Gherai, descended from Zingis Khan, formed a particular dynasty of the Mongols of Kipzak, called the Great Horde, or Golden Horde, which, from 1237 till the end of the fifteenth century, had ruled Russia with a rod of iron. Koch et Schöll, t. xiv. p. 458.

2 For this war see the Mémoires of Baron de Tott, t. ii. De Tott's father was a Hungarian who had fled into Turkey with Ragotski. He himself took refuge in France, and assisted the Turks in this war as an engineer.

CHAP. XLIX.]

PROJECTS OF A GREEK REVOLUTION.

207

Voltaire was at this time endeavouring to awaken a spirit of Phil-hellenism in Frederick and Catharine; he urged them to partition Turkey, and to restore the Greeks to independence. Frederick, however, avowed that he should prefer the town of Dantzic to the Piræus.' His dominions were at too great a distance from Greece to enable him to derive any material advantage from such a project. But with Catharine the case was different. Her views had long been directed towards this quarter, and for some years Russian emissaries had been striving to awaken a spirit of revolt among the Greek Christians in all the Turkish provinces. The conquest of Greece is said to have been suggested by a Venetian nobleman to Count Alexis Orloff; and in 1769 Orloff had concluded a formal treaty with the Mainotes and other tribes of the Morea and of Roumelia. He had engaged to supply them with the necessaries of war, and they had promised to rise so soon as the Russian flag should appear on their coasts. Fleets were prepared at Cronstadt, Archangel, and Revel, which, under his conduct, were to attempt the conquest of Constantinople. The British Ministry of that day approved the project, and even signified to the Cabinets of Versailles and Madrid that it should regard as an act of hostility any attempt to arrest the progress of the Russian fleet into the Mediterranean.2 Choiseul, on the contrary, endeavoured, but without effect, to persuade Louis XV. to sink it, as the only method of reviving the credit of France, both with the Porte and Europe. The first division of the Russian fleet, consisting only of three ships of war and a few transports, with about 500 men on board, appeared off Port Vitolo, near Cape Matapan, towards the end of February, 1770. The Mainotes rose, but no plan of a campaign had been arranged, and the whole affair degenerated into a sort of marauding expedition. Navarino alone seemed for a time likely to become a permanent conquest. But after some fruitless attempts on Modon and Coron, the Russians took their departure towards the end of May, abandoning the Greeks to their fate. They suffered dreadfully at the hands of the Turks for their temerity, and the Morea became a scene of the most frightful devastation. The Russian fleet, under Admiral Spiridoff, which originally consisted of twelve ships of the line, and the same number of frigates, besides smaller vessels, remained in the Mediterranean three or four years; but the only action of

3

See his correspondence with Voltaire. Eton's Survey of the Turkish Empire, ap. Zinkeisen, B. v. S. 929.

3 Politique de tous les Cabinets, t. ii. p. 173 sq.

208

PARTITION OF POLAND IN EMBRYO. [CHAP. XLIX.

any importance which it performed was the burning of the Turkish fleet in the Bay of Chesmeh, near the Gulf of Smyrna, after defeating it off Chios. This victory (July 5th, 1770) was wholly due to the British officers serving in the Russian fleet, namely, Admiral Elphinstone, Captain Greig, and Lieutenant Dugdale, though all the honours and emoluments fell to Orloff. Elphinstone now wished to force the passage of the Dardanelles, and sail to Constantinople, but Orloff prevented him.'

These successes awakened the jealousy and alarm of the European Powers. England now recalled her seamen from the Russian service, and proposed her mediation to the Porte, while France offered to supply the Sultan with men-of-war, in consideration of a subsidy. Austria and Prussia, neither of which desired to see Turkey destroyed, were still more nearly interested in the Russo-Turkish war. The Eastern question formed the chief subject of the conferences between Joseph II., who had now ascended the Imperial throne, and Frederick II. of Prussia, in their interviews at Neisse, in Silesia, in August, 1769, and at Neustadt, in Moravia, in September, 1770. A collateral effect of the war was to hasten the partition of Poland. There can be no doubt that, at the interview at Neustadt, where Kaunitz was also present, the necessity was recognized of setting bounds to the advance of Russian power; or rather the main object was, that Russia should not be suffered to aggrandize herself alone, and without the participation of Austria and Prussia. Of this policy Poland was to be the victim. Frederick, indeed, in his account of these proceedings, says not a word to this purpose; whence some writers have concluded that the affairs of Poland were not discussed at these interviews. But this conclusion seems highly improbable. The partition of Poland must for some years have occupied the thoughts of Austrian and Prussian statesmen as an inevitable catastrophe. Such a conviction had at all events forced itself long before upon the minds of observant politicians. Already, in 1766, Von Essen, the Saxon Minister at Warsaw, had expressed in his despatches his opinion that the Court of St. Petersburg and the Kings of Prussia and Poland were agreed on a partition; and he further thought that Austria was also implicated in the scheme. The steps taken by Austria and Prussia, in 1770,

1 Hermann, B. v. S. 623.

3

2 Frédéric II., Euvres, t. vi. p. 29 (ed. 1847).

See Ferrand, Hist. des trois Démem. bremens, t. i. p. 119.

• Essen's Bericht vom 1 October, 1766, ap. Hermann, Gesch. Russlands, B. v. S. 394 f. It may also be shown from Von Hammer's account of the events immediately preceding the war between

CHAP. XLIX. THE AUSTRIANS AND PRUSSIANS IN POLAND. 209 were almost universally regarded in political circles as the result of the conferences of the two monarchs.' About the middle of that year, Austrian troops took possession of the Starosties of Zips and Zandek, the salines, or salt works of Bochnia and Wieliczka, whence the King of Poland chiefly drew his revenues, and spread themselves even beyond Cracow. In November these. districts were declared reunited with the Kingdom of Hungary; an Austrian government was established in them, the motto of whose official seal purported that they had been lawfully recovered. In the autumn of the same year the King of Prussia, on pretence of forming a cordon against the plague, caused his troops to enter Polish Prussia and other districts. In the anarchy which reigned in Poland, and the devastation which ensued, commerce and agriculture were almost suspended; the peasants sought refuge in the towns, the nobles carried their property into neighbouring countries; and the want and famine which followed produced a pestilence. The Prussians, if they did not, like the Austrians, take formal possession of the districts they had invaded, acted at least as if they were the absolute masters of them, and even conducted themselves more arbitrarily than the Russians. Wood, forage, provisions of all sorts, were collected and forwarded into Brandenburg, which were paid for in a base and depreciated currency worth about one-third of its nominal value, and thousands of the inhabitants were carried off as recruits or colonists.3

In such a state of things it seems idle to inquire to whom the guilt attaches of first proposing a partition of Poland. The idea probably originated with the Empress Catharine, whose two great objects of ambition were, the subjection of Poland and the annihilation of Turkey. Since the time of Peter I. Poland had been virtually dependent on the will of Russia, and in the earlier part of her career Catharine was content with a vassal King of Poland; but in process of time she began to entertain the idea of making it a Russian province. Pozzo di Borgo explained to the Emperor Alexander, at Vienna, in 1814, that the

Russia and Turkey (B. viii.), that Austria was then acquainted with the views of Russia and Prussia respecting Poland, and in general agreed with them. Schlosser, Gesch. des 18ten Jahrb. B. iii. S. 212.

1 Hermann, ibid. p. 484.

See

2" Sigillum administrationis terrarum recuperatarum."

3 Von Raumer, Polens Untergang, er

roneously denies this. From a certain number of acres Frederick required a young woman, a cow, a bed, and three ducats in money. Essen's Despatch, March 18th, 1771, ap. Hermann, B. v. S. 497. From these and other oppressions the Poles detested the Prussians even more cordially than they hated the Russians.