From the sixteenth century until the Russian Empire's end, the Ottoman Empire loomed large in the Russian imagination, was a constant concern of Russian diplomats, and often the foe of Russian military forces. For these reasons, Victor Taki's Tsar and Sultan represents a welcome contribution to imperial Russian history. Taki addresses the Russian-Ottoman engagement from the sixteenth century to the Crimean War of 1853–56, with particular focus on the last century and a half of this time period.
Taki's central argument is that Russian perspectives on the Ottoman Empire were crucial to its discovery of the Orient and to its own westernization. Historians of the Russian Empire have neglected this critical relationship in favor of studies of imperial institutions and peripheries informed by the concept of Orientalism. Taki expands the range of materials used to frame Russian understandings of the Ottoman Empire as Russia's orient by extensive use of diplomatic and military texts. He further seeks to describe how “a religious frame of reference gradually gave way to the secular Orientalist modes of emplotment” (15) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
He develops his argument through five chapters. The first is devoted to how Russians worked out their understandings of their country's status vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire through diplomatic protocol. Russia asserted its own standing as a European power through efforts to embrace European diplomatic principles of “equality, reciprocity, and extraterritoriality” (44). Taki next turns to captivity narratives that emerged from some of the thousands of the tsar's subjects sold into Ottoman slave markets. Taki convincingly shows a shift from a primarily religious understanding of captivity to one based on more secular notions of integrity in the late eighteenth century, especially among noble captives. Taki then examines how important the military engagement with the Turks was to Russian understandings of the Ottoman Empire. Russians saw the Turkish fighting style as at once more primitive and based on passion than their own European military style. Military writing also accentuated exotic locales to minimize Turkish agency and to explain Russian military difficulties. These three chapters are the most original in the book. Taki takes advantage of little-used sources to give us a fresh perspective on the Russian-Ottoman encounter.
The next two chapters consider somewhat more familiar material for understanding the Russian perspective on the Ottoman Empire. Taki traces the emergence of the concept of the Ottoman Empire as a “sick man” in the eighteenth century—well before Nicholas I famously used the expression. Russians, through their uses of “Western Orientalist idioms” (130) both asserted their membership in European civilization and interrogated its meaning. In the early eighteenth century, schools of Oriental studies emerged in Kazan and St. Petersburg. Taki points out that Russian Orientalists had little role in policy making in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus, Said's concept of Orientalism as a nexus of western knowledge of and power over the Orient does not apply in this period. Taki carefully traces the translation of European orientalist texts into Russian to show what material was omitted as too conducive to the Orientalization of Russia itself. Understandings of the Ottoman relationship with Europe also changed. Rather than emphasizing the Ottoman distance from Europe, in the early nineteenth century Russians criticized Ottoman efforts at reform as “untimely and incompatible with the traditional sources of Ottoman might” (155). A final chapter analyzes Russian understandings of the peoples of the Ottoman Empire, and particularly the elevation in the Russian imagination of the Serbs as “virtuous heroes, noble savages and a staunchly Orthodox people, all at the same time” (185). The book ends with the Crimean War of 1853–56, when Russia's war against an allied European coalition forced educated Russians to confront the meaning of Russian Europeanization anew.
Tsar and Sultan addresses a wide range of material in a thorough and clear fashion. It is particularly valuable for anyone interested in Russian-Ottoman relations and the development of Russia's self-perception in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
As is the case with most books that take on large, important subjects, it leaves the reader wanting more in some respects. More comparative context would have made the book's argument more powerful. For example, since the Ottoman Empire took captives from many European countries, study of captivity narratives provides an opportunity to evaluate what distinguished Russian understandings of captivity from that of other countries. Taki includes Linda Colley's influential Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World 1600–1850 (2002) in his bibliography (although with her name misspelled) but does not engage it in his text.
Taki is right to suggest in his conclusion that “Orientalist discourse does not necessarily present the Other as immutable, stagnant, or ahistorical” (211). Taki's careful work through much rich material illuminates well Russia's changing understanding of itself and the Ottoman Empire.
