The European Powers and the Eastern Question • 161Reformation, the age of exploration and discovery, the expansion of trade,
the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, the West would not have
surpassed the Muslim world in the eighteenth century. The Ottoman Em¬
pire had not undergone all the changes these movements brought to West¬
ern culture. But neither had such traditional Ottoman foes as Venice,
Poland, and Spain; by 1750 they no longer menaced Ottoman security.
Habsburg Austria still played its customary role as Christendom's chief de¬
fender against Islam. But Austria's leadership was paling before a new star
rising in the north, czarist Russia. Many English-speaking people have be¬
lieved that Russia would have taken over all Ottoman lands but for the de¬
termined opposition of the other European states. To test this belief, let us
now look at the Middle East policies of the most important European coun¬
tries of the nineteenth century—the Great Powers: Russia, Habsburg Aus¬
tria, Britain, and France.
Czarist Russia
Unlike the other Great Powers involved in the Ottoman Empire, Russia had
experienced Muslim rule under the Mongol Golden Horde. It had emerged
in the fifteenth century as a small but independent state, centered on Mos¬
cow and close to the sources of central Eurasia's main rivers and portage
routes. Some historians argue that the expansionist policy of Muscovite
rulers was made possible by their control of these rivers and dictated by
their ceaseless quest for outlets to the high seas. Rivers flowing into the
Baltic Sea or the Arctic Ocean are apt to be icebound for half the year;
therefore, Russia needed the Black Sea as a warm water outlet for trade. In
the seventeenth century this body of water was almost completely sur¬
rounded by Ottoman lands. As a result, Peter the Great and his successors
fought several wars against the empire in the eighteenth century in order to
ensure Russian access to the Black Sea. By the middle of the nineteenth
century, the Russians could regard the Black Sea as mainly theirs, but their
ships still had to pass through the Ottoman-ruled Bosporus and Dard¬
anelles (the Straits) in order to reach the Aegean and hence the Mediterra¬
nean. Russia therefore sought control of the Straits, or at least assurances
that the Ottomans would not bar passage to its warships and merchant ves¬
sels. Russia also wanted to rule the Straits in order to better defend its Black
Sea ports from naval attacks from invaders.
Some Russians had an additional motive to seize the Straits: They
wanted to rule that great city on the Bosporus—Istanbul. Up to the Otto¬
man conquest, it had been Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Em¬
pire, hence the "Second Rome," and chief jewel of the Greek Orthodox