46 Chapter One
of the nineteenth century, Russia assumed control over a region closely tied to
Mecca by way of Syria. In this same period, Russia was in the process of expand-
ing its consular presence in Syria, as part of its rivalries with Britain and France
in the Ottoman Empire. As these two processes unfolded, Russian officials on
the ground in the Caucasus and Syria came to see these two regions as bound
together, as a historical zone of interaction and exchange, largely due to the
network of hajj routes that connected the two regions, and the pilgrim traffic
moving between them.
In the end Russia did not open a consulate in Mecca, probably because the
Ottomans resisted the idea. However, Russia did embrace Titov’s idea of
expanding Russian influence abroad through hajj networks. Over the second
half of the nineteenth century, Russia opened a constellation of new consulates
and facilities along major hajj routes that connected the empire to Arabia. Cen-
tral to this emerging hajj support network was Russia’s Jeddah consulate,
founded in 1891, and located at the hub of sea traffic to Mecca. Much as Titov
had envisioned, Russia’s Jeddah consulate was first headed by a Muslim subject
of the tsar—a trusted Tatar intermediary who had served the regime in
Turkestan—who had access to Mecca and could act as an authority for Russia’s
hajj pilgrims within the holy city.
Over the next several decades, as Russia’s hajj traffic grew apace with the rise
of modern transportation, and as a result of its late nineteenth-century con-
quest of Turkestan, Russia would create a multiple-branch system of hajj
patronage connecting the empire to Arabia. With branches connecting Tiflis to
Damascus, Tashkent to Odessa, and Jeddah to Bombay, Russia’s hajj infrastruc-
ture connected disparate places that had little or no previous relations or con-
tact. This infrastructure was both riddled with internal tensions, as we will see,
and integral to Russian imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.