power of the monarch, army, and noble government. Peter I went on to win treaties
of cooperation—Prussia (1720), Turkey (1720), Sweden (1724), and Austria
(1726)—to prevent reform in the Commonwealth, under the cynical guise of
protecting its (decentralizing, politically paralyzing)“golden freedoms”from any
meaningful reform. Throughout the century Russia and others manipulated elec-
tions of Polish kings and bribed noble factions to exercise the paralyzingliberum veto
in Parliament or to stage revolts (confederations) supportive of Russian interests.
Russian ambassadors in Warsaw systematically imposed obstacles to political and
economic reform.
Prussia was an eager partner in this anti-Polish policy. Intent on geographically
uniting its two halves—the Duchy of Brandenburg and Prussia—and expanding
further by winning from the Commonwealth Royal Prussia, Gdansk, and Samo-
gitia on the Baltic and some of Poland’s fertile central plain, Prussia excelled at
diplomatic maneuvering. It negotiated itself out of vassal status to Poland in 1657,
for example, convinced the Habsburg emperor to award Brandenburg the title of
“King in Prussia”in 1701 and elbowed its way into Habsburg/Polish/Russian
politics from 1770 onward in order to win a share in each of the three partitions
of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795). The Habsburgs were, meanwhile, less threatened by
the Commonwealth, but cooperated to secure territory and support against the
Ottoman empire.
Russia’s policy of controlling the Polish Commonwealth worked well through
the century; the Commonwealth’s political forces were so divided in the 1760s, for
example, that Russia and Austria were able to use a war with the Ottoman empire
that spilled into Commonwealth territory to engineer what became thefirst
partition of Poland (1772). When in 1788 the three imperial powers were distract-
ed by war and revolution elsewhere, liberal reformist forces in the Commonwealth
seized the best opportunity all century to put their state in order. Calling a Diet that
delegates prolonged beyond the usual two to four years (1788–92) by manipulating
parliamentary rules, they passed the sweeping Constitution of 3 May 1791. It
would have established a modernfiscal regime, centralized state, standing army,
and efficient republican representative institutions. Calling this“Jacobin,”Russia
and Prussia moved in to suppress reform (the second partition 1793). When
Tadeusz Kościuszko led the Poles in revolt, further invasion and the third partition
quickly followed (1795). Poland was wiped off the map as a sovereign state, Russia
winning all of modern day Belarus’and ethnic Lithuania and most of modern day
Ukraine.
In Russia’s traditional direction of expansion towards the Black Sea steppe, the
Ottoman empire became the most important focus of Russian foreign policy.
A vulnerable target, already in the late seventeenth century the Ottoman empire
had lost territory to the Habsburgs in Hungary and Transylvania; by the Treaty of
Karlowitz in 1699 it also lost a recently acquired piece of the Commonwealth
(Podole). For the Ottoman empire the eighteenth century saw weakening central
power, state indebtedness, and emerging provincial power centers. Three major
Russian campaigns (1735–9, 1768–74, 1787–92) resulted in the annihilation of
the Turkishfleet at Chesme in 1770 and control over the Black Sea littoral from the
Prologue 17