Michell, Steven. White Wolf, Brown Bear. 2017, Acrylic on Canvas, 24x24, United States. You can view more of Robert’s artwork on his website: stephenmitchellart.com
RISE OF THE TSARS AND SULTANS
The Mongol Empire swept across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe in the thirteenth century. The largest contiguous land empire in the history of the world, the Khans ruled from Beijing across an empire that stretched from Calcutta to Baghdad to Kyiv, fundamentally transforming the cultural geography of West Asia and Eastern Europe. After the Black Death ravaged the known world a century later, the empire broke apart into pieces and was gradually consumed by regional powers. The vacuum of power created in Eastern Europe allowed for Ivan III — later known as Ivan the Great — to dramatically expand his Grand Dutchy of Moscow across Central Eurasia in the early 1500’s. Taking the niece of the last Byzantine emperor as his queen, Ivan took the title of “Tsar,” a Slavic rendition of the Latin “Caesar.” His grandson, Ivan IV “the Terrible” expanded the Russian Empire even further south and east in the mid-sixteenth century, and was crowned as the “Tsar of all Russia.”
The disintegration of the Mongol Golden Horde in West Asia also facilitated the ascendency of the Ottoman Empire. After the Muslim armies of the sultan finally took the grand prize of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks began driving deeper into Europe and the Middle East. Selim I took Syria, Jerusalem, Arabia and Egypt by 1520. Selim’s son, Suleyman the Magnificent, grew his father’s empire further, taking Baghdad and Basra in modern Iraq, and Tripoli in Libya. Suleyman also drove further into Southern Europe than any sultan before him, taking Belgrade in modern Serbia and laying siege to Vienna before being turned back.
As the Russian and Turkish empires expanded in the sixteenth century, their borders grew closer together. Confrontation was only a matter of time and shrinking geography.
A CLASHING OF EMPIRES
Building upon the conquests of his grandfather, Ivan the Terrible concentrated on securing the entire expanse of the Volga River. As Europe’s longest river, the Volga empties into the Caspian Sea, near the strategic port city of Astrakhan. A fragment of the old Mongol order, Astrakhan acted as a hub of East-West trade. Ivan took the city relatively easily in 1554, later annexing the small khanate into the Russian Empire, thereby cutting off a main artery of East Asian trade to the Ottoman Empire.
Suleyman the Magnificent was preoccupied with other campaigns at the time and did not take action against Ivan before his death twelve years later. But Suleyman’s son and successor Selim II was more easily influenced by his court of advisors, who urged him to oppose the Russian advance through the Caucus and to reclaim the lost trade routes along the Volga. In 1569, Selim sent a massive expeditionary force north through the steppes of the Caucus to besiege Astrakhan, where Ivan had built a fortress. The Turkish fleet sailed north to confront the Russians in the Sea of Azov near modern Ukraine. But the young sultan would be disappointed. The Ottoman ground force was routed, and his fleet was decimated in a storm. In the ensuing treaty, the Ottomans were forced to recognize Russian sovereignty over the Volga, while receiving some trade privileges. A tense peace would exist for almost a century, but confrontation between the two burgeoning kingdoms was far from over. In total, the Ottoman and Russian Empires would fight nine more wars over the course of the following 350 years for dominance over the steppes and seas of southern Europe and the Caucus.
During the second half of the seventeenth century, in an eerily familiar scenario, the Russian Empire was fighting for control of the territory of modern-day Ukraine in order to gain a port along the vital Black Sea trading route. The armies of Tsar Alexis managed to secure the territory along the eastern banks of the Dnieper River, while a Ukrainian vassal of the Ottomans held the territory along the western banks. An attempt by an Ottoman-aligned noble to claim the throne of Ukraine in 1676 would draw the Russian army into its next major conflict with the Turks. The Russians captured and then lost territory to the Ottomans and their allies, reaching a stalemate in 1681 and fixing the Dnieper River as their shared border in the center of Ukraine. Although the Turks had managed to hold their ground, the ensuing conflicts would turn in Russia’s favor, as a series of strong Romanov tsars took advantage of a declining Ottoman dynasty.
The storied Tsar Peter I took the throne of Russia in 1682. Capable and ambitious, he joined a growing alliance of European states who perceived the time had come to begin driving the Muslim Turks from the European continent. Known as the Holy League, the Russians joined the kingdoms of Austria and Poland, along with the Republic of Venice, to drive the Ottomans out of modern Poland and Hungry. Peter led two failed invasions of the Crimean Peninsula in 1687 and ‘89 before finally capturing the Ottoman fortress at Azov in 1696. The subsequent treaty in 1700 allowed the Russians to annex the port city of Azov, finally giving the tsars access to the Sea of Azov, which feeds into the Black Sea.
Ten years later, the tsar's rival, the king of Sweden, suffered a major defeat at Peter’s hand, barely escaping with his life into modern-day Moldova. Peter pursued him there, while the Swedish monarch persuaded the Turkish sultan to declare war on their mutual enemy. The armies of the tsar and sultan met once again in 1711 near the Prout River. In a stunning defeat, Peter’s army took heavy losses after three days of battle and was forced to return Azov to the Turks. It seemed that the Ottomans were resurgent, but the victory would be their last against the Russian state, as the tide of history turned against the sultans.
The next conflict between Russia and Turkey between 1735-39 would prove inconclusive, as both sides formed alliances with European and Middle Eastern powers to keep each other preoccupied. But the beginning of the end of Ottoman dominance in the Caucus and southern Europe would come soon afterward at the hand a woman. Catherine II the Great was crowned tsarina of the Russian Empire in 1762. Ruling for almost 35 years, Catherine would oversee a series of devastating campaigns against the Ottoman state, tipping the scales of hegemony in favor of Russia for centuries. When the sultan made demands on Catherine’s government in 1768 in regards to a brewing rebellion in Poland, the armies of the empress retook Azov, along with the long-coveted Crimean Peninsula. After overrunning Moldova and finally routing the Turks in Bulgaria, a peace treaty was signed in 1774 that recognized the independence of Crimea, gave the Russian fleet access to the Black Sea, and made the Russian Empire the “protectors” of Christians in the Ottoman-held Balkans.
Emboldened by her victories, Catherine annexed the Crimean Peninsula, sparking another war with Turkey in 1787 which would end with Russian gains along the entire northern coast of the Black Sea, consolidating the tsarina’s grip over southern Ukraine. But just as news of Catherine’s death from a stroke circulated through Europe in the Fall of 1796, a 27-year-old officer in the army of the French Republic was scoring remarkable victories against the armies of Austria and Italy. Eight years later, Napoleon Bonaparte would be crowned as the Emperor of France, and the geopolitical landscape of the European continent would change dramatically.
ENEMIES IN A CONTINENTAL WAR
Tsar Alexander I, the grandson of Catherine the Great, sought to further his predecessor’s legacy of Russian expansionism by first securing his grip over a recently partitioned Poland. But soon afterwards, he faced a looming threat from the West, as Europe’s first transcontinental war of the modern era began to take shape. The armies of Napoleon drove deep into Eastern Europe during the first decade of the nineteenth century, and although Alexander had signed a treaty with the French emperor, their relationship was tenuous.
Seizing the opportunity presented by the Napoleonic distraction, the Ottomans deposed two pro-Russian leaders in modern Moldova and Romania, sparking the next round of Russo-Turkish conflict in 1806. But the Russian military effort was perfunctory, as Alexander feared making a larger commitment with the formidable armies of France at his borders. As the writing on the wall became apparent in 1811, Alexander made a sudden push against the Ottomans in advance of an impending Franco-Russian war, managing to capture the disputed Moldovan territory from the Turks. Soon afterwards, in the spring of 1812, France and Russia would finally go to war, and Napoleon marched a massive army towards Moscow. After a failed campaign which devastated both the Russian countryside as well as the French ranks in the winter of 1812, Bonaparte was forced with withdraw from Russia. The mandate of the tsars over the Russian Empire was more firmly established than ever before.
The Turkish and Russian empires fought three more brief wars in the nineteenth century. Russian support for Greek independence from Ottoman rule in 1829 led Tsar Nicholas I to invade Ottoman-held Bulgaria and the Caucus region. With the Russian force approaching Anatolia, the homeland of the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, the sultan relented. The resulting treaty granted Russia territory along the eastern shores of the Black Sea, as well as Georgia and parts of Armenia. Unsatisfied, Nicholas sought further concessions from the Turks in 1853, sparking the Crimean War, which saw Britain and France join the Turks in an alliance against Russia in the nineteenth century’s only major European conflict in the post-Napoleonic era. The united opposition managed to tame the ambitious tsar, whose advance further into Ottoman territory was halted.
Although the outcome of the Crimean War gave the Turks a temporary reprieve, it would be short-lived. Known as the “sick man of Europe” during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the vestiges of the Ottoman Empire on the European continent was easy prey for the Russian Empire. In 1877, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria rebelled against Ottoman rule. Russia and Serbia came to the aid of the nationalists, landing a heavy blow against Turkish forces which forced them to withdraw from Romania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro. Alarmed by the Russian victory, the Austro-Hungarian empire compelled the tsar to sign a treaty which severely restricted Russian territorial gains. Although seemingly inconsequential, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 would set the stage for an Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans, which would in turn become the catalyst for the outbreak of the greatest war that the world had ever known, and the end of both the Russian and Ottoman empires.
THE FALL OF THE SULTAN AND THE TSAR
As Europe slipped into the abyss of militant nationalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the formation of two major alliance systems made a major, multinational conflagration inevitable. The spark which lit the forest aflame would come in June, 1914, when the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire was assassinated by a pro-Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Austria’s subsequent declaration of war dragged all of the major global powers into the world’s first war. Russia entered on the side of its ethnic cousin, Serbia, along with Britain and France, while Germany allied with Austria.
After four months of neutrality at the outbreak of war, Sultan Mehmed V decided to enter the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Ottomans had been finally driven from the European continent only a year before in the Second Balkan War by an alliance of Greece and Serbia. Russia was the key ally of Serbia, making Turkey a natural ally of the German-led Central Powers. As the war progressed, Russia and Britain pushed into the Ottoman sphere of influence in the Caucus and Persia. The Russian army managed to push into the eastern regions of Asia Minor in Turkey proper before a shocking turn of events halted its advance. Centuries of absolutist rule and imperial mismanagement had paved the way for the rise of modern political forces in Russia. The Romanov dynasty, which had ruled the Russian Empire since the seventeenth century, was suddenly overthrown by the forces of the Bolshevik proletariat army, and the Soviet Russian state was established in February, 1917. The coup ended Russia’s involvement in the war, followed by a Russian Civil War, which saw eventual Soviet victory over pro-tsarist and pro-democratic forces. But for all of Russia’s troubles in the overthrow of the empire, the Ottomans did not fare any better.
By 1918, the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, as was the Turkish alliance with Germany. Confrontations with Germany over its relationship with the new Republic of Armenia and the control of resources were on the rise. The new nations of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia would remain within the Soviet sphere of influence. By the end of the war in November, 1918, the Ottomans had been stripped of almost their entire territorial empire, afterwards limited to the regions of western and central Turkey. A modern secularist party known as the Young Turks led a revolution which finally dismantled the remaining Ottoman institutions in 1922, abolishing the sultanate and declaring the Turkish Republic in 1923 under the leadership of reformist Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The Treaty of Kars established borders between Turkey and the Russian satellite states in the Caucus, which joined the newly-formed Soviet Union upon its formation in 1922. The fall of the empires and establishment of a modern, post-war order had finally brought an end to Russo-Turkish conflict in the twentieth century.
WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS
As the end of the Great War led to the onset of a Second World War, many of the European territories of the old Russian tsars were overrun and reclaimed by the Soviet army under the leadership of Josef Stalin, in the formation of a new iteration of the old empire that came to be known as the Soviet Bloc. As the Iron Curtain descended on Eastern Europe, the nascent mutual-defense collective known as NATO found a strategic partner in the Republic of Turkey. Situated in a strategic geographical location on the southwestern flank of the Soviet Union, the secular Turkish state was a natural candidate for NATO membership in 1952, and a vital part of the Western world’s strategic defense. Shortly afterward, the United States began storing nuclear weapons throughout Europe, including in Turkey. The presence of US Jupiter ballistic missiles so close to the Mortherland prompted Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschchev t0 deploy Russian nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba in 1962, triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis. On the brink of nuclear war, the administration of President John Kennedy secretly agreed to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey. However, between 50-90 US nuclear bombs are still stored at Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey to this day.
After the Iron Curtain lifted across Eastern Europe in 1989, followed by the replacement of the Soviet Union by the Russian Federation in 1991, the relationship between the modern states of Russia and Turkey continued to improve. As Turkey’s economy continued to develop, the need for oil and gas made Russia one of Turkey’s largest trading partners, while Turkey remains the top destination for Russian tourism. The beginning of the twenty-first century saw the rise of strong, autocratic leaders in both nations as well, with Vladimir Putin first elected as President of Russia, followed by the ascendency of the Islamist AK Party in Turkey in 2002, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Both men are ardent nationalists who publicly lament the loss of their historical empires. And although they maintain close political and economic ties, the two states have found themselves on opposite sides of several strategic conflicts.
As public protests across Syria over government abuses and corruption devolved into a military revolution in 2011, Russia and Turkey took opposite sides. Vladimir Putin’s government continued to support the regime of Bashar al-Assad in a long-term alliance that dates back to the height of the Cold War in the 1960’s. Turkey showed immediate support for the Sunni Muslim-led rebel forces, most of whom were eventually concentrated along Syria’s northwestern border with Turkey. Beginning in 2015, the Russian military arrived in Syria to intervene directly on behalf of the weakened Assad regime and its allies, including Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah. Although a limited force which mostly provides air support and air defense with minimal footprint, Vladimir Putin’s expedition in Syria marked a major escalation in the expansion of Russian influence outside of its federation. Turkey, on the other hand, invaded northern Syria twice under the leadership of President Erdogan, ostensibly to create a “security zone” for Turkey vis-à-vis Kurdish rebels who operate in the autonomous region of Syrian Kurdistan. Islamist anti-government militias now operate openly along the Turkish border, where the last two leaders of the jihadist Islamic State were found and killed by US forces, with the help of Syrian Kurds.
The proximity of Russian and Turkish forces in and around Syria has led to several confrontations, including the downing of a Russian military jet by Turkish air defense along the border. Then in 2017, a Russian warplane bombed a rebel-held building in the northern city of el-Bab, killing three Turkish soldiers inside. As Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov prepared to speak at an art show in the Turkish capital of Ankara in 2016, he was shot to death by an off-duty Turkish police officer who yelled, “Do not forget Aleppo, do not forget Syria.” Despite these confrontations and support for opposing proxies, Erdogan and Putin have sought to maintain good relations, especially as Erdogan’s government slides more towards Islamic dictatorship and drifts further further from the orbit of the US and NATO. However, the areas of opposition continue to mount as both men seek to expand their political and military influence across a common region.
In 2008, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to occupy the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, on the border of Russia, which he labeled “breakaway republics.” The campaign signified the first time that the Russian military has crossed the border of a foreign nation outside of the Russian Federation since the end of the Cold War, but it would not be the last. In 2014, the Russian president also ordered the reoccupation of the Crimean Peninsula, now part of the sovereign territory of the nation of Ukraine. The Russian military and intelligence began direct support for rebel groups in the eastern Ukrainian provinces along the Russian border as well, biding time in a conflict that lay almost dormant for seven years, until Putin approved a major Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022. Turkey has offered support to the Ukrainian government in the form of drones and other military technology, in a scenario reminiscent of the wars between the tsars and the proxies of the sultans over 400 years ago.
Meanwhile, Erdogan continues to expand his reach across the Muslim world, including north and east Africa where his support for the Islamist government in Libya, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and his partnerships with Iran and China continue to fuel Turkish expansionism despite Turkey’s economic stagnation at home. After two military campaigns inside Syria, Erdogan is now publicly announcing plans for a third, while Turkish commandoes and warplanes push deeper into Iraqi Kurdistan.
One example of where Turkish and Russian interests overlap and collide is in the ongoing conflict between Russian-supported Armenia and Turkish-supported Azerbaijan. After Azeri forces invaded the disputed border region of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, a brief tension hung over Russo-Turkish relations, as the war threatened a flashpoint in a historically-disputed Caucus territory between Russia and Turkey. Although the two powers are still adamant regarding their partnership, especially at the expense of the United States, history sets another precedent. Diplomatic marriages of convenience, mutual benefit, and common enemies can be a source of cohesion, but the historical force of two expansionist regimes within close geographical proximity cannot be escaped. Despite their best efforts, ambitious dictators who rule neighboring nations will eventually find themselves at odds and in arms. The prospect of direct military confrontation between Russia and Turkey seems unthinkable today, but in historical perspective, it would be far from the first time.
