42 Chapter One
a proposal to establish a Russian consulate in Mecca. The idea grew out of the
awful suffering of Russia’s hajj pilgrims in 1850, and was first proposed by one
of Russia’s Muslim subjects. In what Bazili described as the “worst hajj in years,”
20,000 to 30,000 pilgrims had died in and around Mecca and Medina from a
cholera outbreak. As a result of bad decisions by the “inept” commander of the
Damascus hajj caravan, who insisted that the caravan go out in torrential rains,
several Russian subjects had died along the route through the desert. “It’s been
many years since the hajj caravan returned in such a state of misery and suffer-
ing,” Bazili told Titov in his annual report.^75
Bazili was unsure how many Russian subjects died in the 1850 Damascus
hajj caravan. Some had gotten to Mecca by way of Cairo and never registered
with him or Telatinidis. They included a group of pilgrims from Dagestan, who
came to Telatinidis for help as soon as the caravan reached Damascus. They
complained that their camel drivers had double-charged them for the arduous
trek through the desert. Telatinidis took their complaints to the Ottoman
authorities in Damascus, and got them “justice.” Impressed by the assistance
they had received, one of the pilgrims, named Ibrahim Bek Mahmudoglu,
stopped to see Bazili in Beirut on his way home. Mahmudoglu described the
troubles they had suffered, and all that Telatinidis had done to help them, and
proposed to Bazili that Russia establish a consulate in Mecca.^76
Eager to expand Russia’s presence in the Ottoman Arab provinces, Titov
embraced the plan for a Russian agent to Mecca. He presented it to the Otto-
man grand vizier in Istanbul as a way for Russia to “protect the interests of its
subjects in Arabia.” His correspondence with other Russian officials suggests
that he had begun to see the hajj as central to Russia’s rivalries with France in
Ottoman Arab lands. He pointed out that the French in Algeria were support-
ing their Muslim pilgrims, by providing them with a free-of-charge steamship
to Jeddah every year.^77 And just the year before, in 1850, Titov had praised
Bazili for his “ingenious” plan to take over a property adjacent to the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, on the premise of housing Russia’s visiting
Muslim pilgrims. Titov warned Nesselrode in an 1850 memorandum that Rus-
sia should quickly take over the building before the French could claim it for
their own Muslim pilgrims from Algeria, to house them on their way to
Mecca.^78
Elsewhere, from Baghdad to Jeddah to Bombay, Russian military officials
began to invoke Russia’s duty to “protect” its Muslim pilgrims to justify open-
ing new Russian consulates in areas of strategic interest and imperial competi-
tion abroad. In Baghdad, for example, where British communication routes to