The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that it occurred already in these centuries, but others
see such supremacy solidifying only in the nineteenth century. The early modern
period that we shall survey witnessed multiple major players driving dynamic
change, Russia holding its own among European, Ottoman empire, and Chinese
powers, as well as myriad smaller entities, in trade and war.
Let us conclude by situating the Russian empire in the context of its global
neighbors, trade partners, and rivals. When Russia rose to regional power starting in
thefifteenth century, Siberia was a vast and sparsely populated forest, inhabited by
numerous, widely separated tribes and peoples, weakly controlled by the western
Siberian khanate at Kuchum claiming Chinggisid heritage. To Russia’s east and
south the steppe was inhabited by volatilely shifting nomadic confederations, many
like Kuchum also having splintered from the Mongol Horde. They included settled
and powerful khanates at Crimea and Kazan and loose confederations in the Black
Sea and Caspian steppes. The Caspian Sea and Central Asia steppe constituted
distant objects of imperial expansion; Russia obtained eastern trade through the
intermediaries of Bukharan merchants.
Russia’s most direct political rival was its neighbor to the west, the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania, which was joined dynastically with Poland from 1387 and then in
federation from 1569 as the“Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania.”It controlled
modern Belarus’an and Ukrainian lands to the steppe borderland and from
Moscow’s point of view the Grand Duchy stood between it and the Baltic. From
the Grand Duchy’s point of view, the rising Russian grand principality was a
tempting target in eastward expansion. The result was almost constant warfare on
Russia’s western front through the early modern period. Russia and Poland-
Lithuania shared the steppe frontier with the Habsburg empire, which was caught
up in defending or regaining its Hungarian territories from the Ottoman empire
from 1526 to 1699; for Russia the Habsburg realm served as a useful allyflanking
Poland. All three of these powers, as Alfred Rieber has brilliantly shown, competed
for the“Eurasian borderlands”through the early modern centuries.
The Ottoman empire loomed as a potent rival to Russia, vastly outpacing it in
wealth and expanse throughout this era. Taking advantage of the weakness of the
Byzantine empire in Anatolia in the late 1300s, the Osmanli dynasty rose to power
in thefifteenth century by securing Anatolia, Bulgaria, and some Balkan territories.
Until 1453 Italian trading centers at Tana (on the Sea of Azov) and Caffa on the
Crimea, and Crimean trading ports of Perekop and Ochakov, had dominated the
northern Black Sea shore; the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul in 1453 opened up
Ottoman expansion here and by 1475 the Ottoman empire ruled the Black Sea
shore, forcing Italian, Jewish, Armenian, and other non-Muslim merchants out or
into subject status. The Chingissid Girey dynasty of Crimea became an Ottoman
vassal in 1478. In the sixteenth century the Ottoman realm reached its greatest
extent by conquering Egypt, Syria, other Middle Eastern lands, and more of the
Balkans, including much of Hungary in 1526.
The Ottoman empire provides an interesting comparative example of early
modern empire, since, like Russia, it deployed many of the strategies of a“politics
of difference”empire: central control, supranational ideology, tolerance of diverse


34 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801

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