40 Orientalism and EmpireGeorgia and on the slopes of the Caucasus.”^13 Since that time the
“peaceful,” “agricultural,” and “trading” Slavic tribes had been as-
saulted by their “militaristic neighbours” and protected only by the
Cossacks, whose “single goal was to stand in defence of Christian
land against Muslims and Tatars.” This encounter was “repeated al-
most everywhere on the borders [of the empire].”^14 Following a well-
beaten path through the Caucasus of the Russian literary imagina-
tion, at the age of twenty-four Khomiakov was inspired to experience
this encounter personally, and he accompanied the Russian army as
far south as Adrianople in 1828.^15 The many Muslims of the empire
also posed a threat to Russia’s cultivation of its native soil.
Russia’s version of Latin Europe’s crusading impulse was wrapped
up with its memory of Byzantium. While Constantinople after 1453 re-
mained distant from medieval Russia’s rulers, by the eighteenth cen-
tury Russia’s expansion south brought its frontiers close to those of
early Christianity. Islam, according to this crusading mentality, was
historically illegitimate, an intruder into Christian holy lands and re-
gions formerly held by the city of the first Christian emperor,
Constantine. Russia’s rulers were eager to claim for themselves the
role of the protector of Orthodoxy during their many subsequent con-
flicts with the declining Ottoman Empire.^16 Catherine the Great con-
cluded that Russia had the right and duty to defend the faith “in the
places of its upspringing, protected from all oppression and vio-
lence.”^17 However unlikely was her “Greek project,” or the notion of
restoring some form of the old Byzantine Empire based in Constanti-
nople (Aleksandr Pypin referred to it as a “grandiose plan,” Zhigarev
as a “dream”), it included a prominent role for Russia, and the south-
ern expansion initiated during her reign was presented by the regime
as part of this project of recovery.^18 The new territories included
Kherson (after the Greek Khersones), Odessa (Odysseus), and Taurida
province (after Tauris, the Greek name for the Crimean region). The
fortress at Kherson proclaimed, as Richard Wortman notes, the “Route
to Byzantium,” and a medal created in honour of the second grandson
of Catherine featured the cathedral of St Sophia from Constantino-
ple.^19 The boy was named Constantine, and the medal presented the
StSophia with Christian crosses rather than Muslim minarets. This
imperial impulse endured through the nineteenth century. At the start
of the fourth Russo-Turkish War of the century in 1877 , Tsar
Alexanderii proclaimed: “Our faithful and beloved subjects know the
lively interest which we have always devoted to the destinies of the
oppressed Christian population of Turkey.”^20 While officials in the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs were skeptical of the viability of Russian
control over the straits of Constantinople, the imperial family, Pan-