The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

68 ~ THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE WORLD AROUND IT ~
‘Independence’ for the Tatars also constituted a demand to which the Ottoman
government only acquiesced under grave duress. In previous wars, the
Tatars always had provided the sultans’ armies with formidable raiding forces,
weakening the enemy by the enslavement of the local peasantry and the removal
of livestock. These activities greatly facilitated the advance of the Ottoman
armies, even if the manner of fighting employed by the Tatars made them all but
useless in the siege of fortress towns that constituted the major wartime activity
on the Habsburg–Ottoman frontier. Moreover, the Tatar political establishment
did not at all wish to be independent, and even less did its members desire to
accept a Russian protectorate. In consequence, the Ottoman government almost
went to war in order to retain the Crimea in 1778–9/1191–3; but in the long run,
it proved impossible to prevent Russian annexation of the peninsula (1783/
1197–8). 156
Peace negotiations that ultimately resulted in the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca
(1774/1187–8) were complicated, rather than facilitated, by the fact that Prussia
and Austria, whose governments had just joined the tsarina in the first partition
of Poland (1773/1186–7), acted as mediators between the two warring parties. 157
But even though, in this period of royal absolutism, friendly personal relations
between rulers sometimes eased negotiations – this applied particularly to Frederick
II of Prussia and the tsarina – the Austro-Prussian mediation should in no
way be regarded as disinterested. 158 Frederick II was concerned that the Russo-
Ottoman conflict might escalate into a European war. For such an eventuality his
small and poor kingdom, which in the recent Seven Years War (1756–63/
1169–77) had barely survived the overblown military ambitions of its king, was
ill prepared. As to the Habsburg rulers Maria Theresa and Joseph II, they saw
their own ‘sphere of interest’ in Walachia and elsewhere in the Balkans threatened
by the expansion of tsarist Russia: Viennese diplomats felt that a greatly
weakened Ottoman Empire was less problematic as a neighbour than the
dynamic state of Catherine II. In consequence, peace negotiations involved not
only balancing the interests of the two actual belligerents, but also, the concerns
of the four other states (England, France, the Austrian Habsburg territories and
Prussia) that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, determined the ‘European
balance of powers’. 159
It is of some interest that in the course of the peace negotiations, Austrian diplomats
proposed to include the Ottoman Empire as a member in this European
balance. Such an inclusion would have implied the understanding that the realm
governed by the sultans was no longer the territory of a power considered hostile
‘on principle’, but rather a ‘legitimate’ state on a par with the other members of
the European ‘club’. 160 As such, the Ottoman Empire, in the case of territorial
losses or gains made by its partners, would have been entitled to compensation
elsewhere, an arrangement common enough in eighteenth-century peace conferences.
However, Catherine II, who in the 1780s/1193–1204 was to go to war with
the explicit ambition of dismantling the Ottoman Empire in Europe for the benefit
of two yet-to-be-founded Russian vassal states, did not consent to this