The Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca

The Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca, signed on 21 July 1774 at a village of that name near the lower Danube in what is now north-eastern Bulgaria, ended the long and disastrous war of 1768 to 1774 between the Ottoman empire and the Russia of Catherine the Great, and is reckoned one of the heaviest blows to Ottoman power in the whole eighteenth century. The chief Ottoman negotiator was Ahmed Resmi Efendi, a scribe and diplomat who had served as envoy in Vienna and Berlin and who left his own bitter account of the campaign; the Russian terms were pressed by Prince Repnin, and the document was sealed for the empire under the grand vizier Muhsinzade Mehmed Pasha and for Russia by Field Marshal Rumyantsev. By its articles the empire gave up its hold on the northern shores of the Black Sea, long an Ottoman sea closed to others: the Tatar Khanate of the Crimea, a Muslim state that had been an Ottoman vassal and ally for three centuries, was declared independent of the sultan, a formula that in fact opened the way for Russia to annex it outright within a decade, in 1783. Russia gained territory on the northern coast, including Kerch, Yenikale and the mouth of the Dnieper, free navigation and trade on the Black Sea, and a vaguely worded right to make representations on behalf of a church to be built in the Ottoman capital; later Russian statesmen would stretch this into a claim to protect all the Orthodox Christians of the empire, a standing pretext for intervention down the generations. The treaty marks a turning point in the long Ottoman retreat and the rise of Russia as the empire's most dangerous neighbour, and the loss of the Crimea was felt across the Muslim world as the surrender of a Muslim land and its people. The Ottoman chroniclers, Ahmed Resmi Efendi among them and later the historian Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (rahimahu Allah) in his Tarih, set the defeat down without flinching. This scene depicts the conference rather than a battle: an indoor hall fitted out in a timber building, a long green-covered table laid with papers, candle stands and inkstands, the Ottoman delegation in turbans and robes facing the Russian delegation in European coats, the rolling Danubian country visible through the windows, the diplomacy of a hard defeat. In keeping with the project's ethics any figures are anonymous and at a distance.