Crimea

The photograph looks at the Khan’s Palace in Bakhchysarai from the street. A.Savin took it on 5 April 2014. It is a later view of the khanate’s old centre, not a drawing from the annexation year. Use it as a place-name made visible. The Crimean khanate was one of the successor states to the Mongol empire, founded in 1443 and centred here. In 1475 it became a Turkish vassal. For Muscovy it had been a raiding neighbour, no longer the threat the Golden Horde had been even after that vassalage, but still a Black Sea power under Ottoman suzerainty. This page is how that structure ended in Catherine’s reign. It is not the Crimean War of the 1850s, which belongs to a later chapter with other allies and another siege.

The Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74 closed with Küçük Kaynarca. Fortresses on the Kerch Peninsula went to Russia. The treaty’s political invention for the peninsula itself was independence: the Crimean Tatar state was to stand alone, the Ottoman sultan-caliph remaining a religious figure only. Independence, in that wording, was already a Russian interest. It removed direct Ottoman control without yet painting the peninsula the same colour as Kherson. Nine years later the colouring would finish. Do not collapse 1774 into 1783. The sources keep the two dates apart, and so should this article. A khanate told it was free was not yet a Russian province. It was a pause with a religious reservation written in.

The Ottoman Empire had been the dominant force in the region for several hundred years, but the expansion of Russia’s southern frontier, begun in earnest in the late seventeenth century by Peter I, frequently brought the two powers into conflict. Over the next two centuries they fought a series of wars for the Black Sea. The war of 1768–74 was one of those conflicts. Catherine’s annexation in 1783 belongs on that line, not on the later line that ends at the Crimean War. Peter had pushed south. Catherine took the peninsula. The palace in the photograph had been a capital under a vassal khan. After 1783 it was a palace in a Russian province. The harbour at Sevastopol would try to make that province look like a fleet, with ships of the line to match the claim.

The courtyard is the same palace, the same photographer, the same April day. An inner yard is not a treaty. It is a reminder that a khanate had architecture, not only a place on someone else’s map. Walk the yard, then return to the years.

Founded in 1443, centred at Bakhchysarai, a Turkish vassal from 1475: that is the khanate’s own chronology before Catherine. Occasional raids on emergent Muscovy had not been the threat the Golden Horde had been. Ivan III had already declared Moscow independent of the Horde in 1480; Ivan IV had taken Kazan and Astrakhan, the other great Tatar khanates. Crimea lasted longer. It lasted into a century when a northern Black Sea shore could be written into a treaty and then, nine years later, the peninsula itself. The courtyard is what lasted as building. The next paragraphs are what did not last as a state.

Potemkin sketched a plan for the conquest of Crimea in 1776. It was subsequently realised. In 1783 Catherine II annexed the peninsula; it became Russian territory. Britannica’s Potemkin biography treats the annexation as the execution of that plan. After he became field marshal, in 1784, he introduced many reforms into the army and built a fleet in the Black Sea. Do not invent a speech from the annexation day. The dated facts are enough: a plan in 1776, a year of taking, a rank, a new imperial province where a khanate had been told it was independent. The last article’s towns on the shore now had a peninsula behind them. Protection of agricultural settlements and trade routes through the Black Sea were the stated prizes of the whole southern push.

The harbour of Sevastopol was built in 1784. With the Kherson arsenal begun in 1778, it served a new Black Sea fleet: fifteen ships of the line and twenty-five smaller vessels, monuments, in Britannica’s wording, to Potemkin’s genius. The same paragraph records exaggeration in all his enterprises. He never calculated the cost of colonising the Ukrainian steppe. A harbour can be a fact and still sit inside a policy that overclaimed. The arsenal and the harbour were a pair: inland workshops and a deep-water home for the new fleet. The fleet served in Catherine’s second Russo-Turkish War of 1787–91. That war is a continuation, not a new peninsula and not the Crimean War of the next century. This article stops before that later coalition. 1787–91 belongs here only as the test of a harbour and a fleet built to hold what 1783 had taken.

He was also busy with the so-called Greek project, which aimed at restoring the Byzantine Empire under one of Catherine’s grandsons. In many of the Balkan lands he had well-informed agents. The project is a horizon, not a completed conquest on this page. It explains why a Crimean harbour could look, from St Petersburg, like a step toward something older and more theatrical than a grain route. It does not license a story of Constantinople taken. The sources give the aim, the agents, the fleet. They do not give a restored Byzantium. Keep the horizon as a horizon. The peninsula remains the subject: taken, fortified, shown.

Independence lasted nine years. The harbour was meant to last as a fleet.

In 1787 the empress toured her new holdings. Britannica’s note on “Potemkin village” records the later legend: fake pasteboard settlements, happy peasants moved in for the occasion, herds and fireworks along the river, arranged so that a tour would not see the shortfall of colonisation. The same article says legend has it. Keep that wording. Do not promote cardboard streets into a documented set of measured façades. What is not a legend is the voyage itself, the need to show a frontier, and the documented costliness of the southern scheme. A phrase that later named any elaborate façade began as a story about this trip. The story is part of the memory. It is not a substitute for Sevastopol’s date or for the fifteen ships of the line.

Annexation completed a process the last article began: a northern Black Sea shore, then the peninsula that had watched that shore. The political cost was a deeper entanglement with Ottoman decline. Russification, Britannica notes, did take place on a significant scale among some native elites in the Crimea and the Caucasus, even as the wider policy of staged progress defeated some of its own aims in other borderlands. Do not turn that sentence into a census of who became Russian. Turn it into a limit: taking a khanate is not the same as finishing a people. Bakhchysarai remains the visual centre of what was annexed. Sevastopol is the visual centre of what was built. The 1774 independence clause is the legal centre of the interval between them.

Readers who want Odessa’s grain or the Cossack hosts’ lost autonomy should stay with the previous article. Readers who want Poland should wait one more page. This one is a peninsula: vassal from 1475, independent on paper from 1774, Russian from 1783, a harbour from 1784, a famous voyage from 1787, a legend attached to that voyage, and a war in 1787–91 that tried to hold the annexation. A courtyard photograph and a later seascape can sit on either side of a word, Крым, without pretending to be 1783. The honest last sentences are administrative and naval, not picturesque. Catherine took the khanate. Potemkin had planned the taking and then tried to make the taking look like a civilisation of ports.

Aivazovsky painted Sevastopol in 1852: ships, bay, cloud. It is a later marine of a harbour begun in 1784. Use it for the fleet’s intended home, then remember the painter was born after Potemkin died. A roadstead in oil is not a slip from 1784.

Some of that civilisation was stone and timber and ships of the line. Some of it was exaggeration. The legend of pasteboard villages is how later language remembered the exaggeration. The palace at Bakhchysarai is how the khanate had remembered itself. Both remain on the same peninsula. Only one remained a capital. Stop. The 1850s are not due, and neither is a speech from the tour. The next article turns west, to a commonwealth that three neighbours would erase while this harbour was still new. Crimea’s file, for this chapter, is already complete: two dates of legal status, one annexation, one harbour, one voyage, one legend kept as legend.

A street photograph, a courtyard, a later bay: three views that do not replace a treaty. Küçük Kaynarca had called the khanate independent. 1783 ended that sentence. 1784 gave the new sentence a fleet. 1787 showed the sentence to an empress and, in later telling, to anyone who needed a word for a false village. Keep the sequence. The golden age of the empire, on this page, is a taken peninsula and a harbour that had to be believed. Poland will be a different kind of taking, without a khan’s palace to photograph. That is why the articles are separate. A sea and a commonwealth are not one map, even when the same woman signed both. The 1850s can wait for another numeral. This numeral is finished with Crimea when the harbour has a date and the legend is kept as legend.