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hundred years the scene of the final stages of the southwardexpansion of the Russian people. This historicexpansion from the mixed forest into the steppe zonesand the immense transformation of New Russia along thenorth of the Black Sea have been sketched in Chapter I(see pp. 39-47 and 50-52). This is the cardinal fact inregard to the Black Sea in modern Russian history.The advance was in part planned, in part one ofindependent groups acting for themselves. In eithercase it involved an armed struggle against the Tatarpeoples, above all the Crimean Tatars, grazing and raidingfrom the steppe lands. The Tatar peoples were thesubjects or vassals of the Ottoman empire; and the twooutstanding features of the Russian conquest of theBlack Sea steppes were that it was both the triumph ofthe agriculturist over the nomad and the triumph of theorganized Russian state over the organized Ottoman state.In the late seventeenth century Muscovy turned to theoffensive in the south (cf. p. 43). Seven times between1676 and 1812, for over thirty years in all, Russia andTurkey were openly at war. By 1812, with the acquisitionof Bessarabia (see map 4) and the Turkish strongholdsnear the modern Novorossisk, Russia was mistressof the great arc from the Danube to the Caucasus.She began with costly failure. Peter the Great indeedscored a notable success by capturing Azov, at his secondattempt (1696), and scared the Turks with the portentof the first Russian fleet in what hitherto had beenregarded as their own lake; but thereafter the internationalsituation and other Russian interests divertedPeter to the Baltic (cf p. 262^). When Charles XII afterPoltava fled to Turkey, and. urged her to renew war,Peter suffered a catastrophe on the Pruth (1711), whichbut for the venality of the grand vizier would haveeclipsed Narva. Azov and the other gains of Peter hadto be retroceded.This first foothold on the Black Sea was regained afterfour years of war (1735-39), in which the Russian armieshad won, though with terrible wastage of life, successafter success, only to be rewarded with the shamelessburlesque of the treaty of Belgrade (1739). The treatys—R.H. 273