resign from the Foreign Ministry and leave Russia for exile in 1822. He threatened war against the Turks unless they evacuated the Danubian principalities, and accepted plans from his military advisers to occupy Moldavia and Wallachia in support of the Greek cause. The Tsar was closely guided by his Foreign Minister, Karl Nesselrode, who had lost patience with the Concert of Europe and joined the war party, not out of love for the Greek rebels, but because he realized that a war against the Turks would promote Russian goals in the Near East. At the very least, reasoned Nesselrode, the threat of Russian intervention would force the British into joining Russia in efforts to resolve the Greek Question, if only to prevent the Tsar from exercising overwhelming influence in the region.17
In 1826 the Duke of Wellington, the commander of the allied forces against Napoleon, who was now a senior statesman in the British government, travelled to St Petersburg to negotiate an Anglo-Russian accord (later joined by France in the Treaty of London in 1827) that would mediate between the Greeks and Turks. Britain, Russia and France agreed to call for the establishment of an autonomous Greek province under Ottoman sovereignty. When the Sultan rejected their proposals, the three powers sent a combined naval force under the command of the fiery British philhellene Admiral Edward Codrington, with instructions to impose a resolution by peaceful means if possible, and ‘by cannon’ as a last resort. Codrington was not known for diplomacy, and in October 1827 he destroyed the entire Turkish and Egyptian fleets in the battle of Navarino. Enraged by this action, the Sultan refused any further mediation, declared a jihad, and rejected the Russian ultimatum to withdraw his troops from the Danubian principalities. His defiance played into Russia’s hands.
Nicholas had long suspected that the British were unwilling to go to war for the Greek cause. He had been considering an occupation of the principalities to force the Turks into submission, but feared that would encourage the British to renounce the Treaty of London. Now the Sultan’s rejection of his ultimatum had given him a legitimate excuse to declare war against Turkey without the British or the French. Russia would fight on its own to secure a ‘national government in Greece’, Nesselrode wrote to Kapodistrias in January 1828. The Tsar sent money and weapons to Kapodistrias’s revolutionary government, and received from him an assurance that Russia would enjoy an ‘exclusive influence’ in Greece.18
In April 1828 a Russian attack-force of 65,000 fighting men and Cossacks crossed the Danube and struck in three directions, against Vidin, Silistria and Varna, on the road to Constantinople. Nicholas insisted on joining the campaign: it was his first experience of war. The Russians advanced quickly (the land was full of forage for their horses) but then got bogged down in fighting around Varna, where they succumbed to the pestilent conditions of the Danube delta and suffered severe losses. Half the Russian soldiers died from illness and diseases during 1828– 9. Reinforcements soon got sick as well. Between May 1828 and February 1829 a staggering 210,000 soldiers received treatment in military hospitals – twice the troop strength of the whole campaign.19 Such huge losses were not unusual in the tsarist army, where there was little care for the welfare of the serf soldiers.
Renewing the offensive in the spring of 1829, the Russians captured the Turkish fortress of Silistria, followed by the city of Edirne (Adrianople), a short march from Constantinople, where the cannons of the nearby Russian fleet could be heard. At this point the Russians could easily have seized the Turkish capital and overthrown the Sultan. Their fleet controlled the Black Sea and the Aegean, they had reinforcements on which they could draw from Greek or Bulgarian volunteers, and the Turkish forces were in complete disarray. In the Caucasus, where the Russians had advanced simultaneously, they had captured the Turkish fortresses of Kars and Erzurum, opening the way for an attack on Turkish territories in Anatolia. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire appeared so imminent that the French King Charles X proposed partitioning its territories between the great powers.20
Nicholas, too, was convinced that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was at hand. He was prepared to hasten its demise and liberate the Balkan Christians, provided he could get the other powers, or at least Austria (his closest ally with interests in the Balkans), on his side. As his troops advanced towards the Turkish capital, Nicholas informed the Austrian ambassador in St Petersburg that the Ottoman Empire was ‘about to fall’, and suggested that it would be in Austria’s interests to join Russia in the partition of its territories in order to ‘forestall the people who would fill the vacuum’. The Austrians, however, mistrusted Russia and chose instead to preserve the Concert of Europe. Without their support, Nicholas held back from dealing the fatal blow to the Ottoman Empire in 1829. He was afraid of a European war against Russia should his attack on Turkey move the other powers to unite in its defence, and even more afraid that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire would result in a frantic rush by the European powers to seize Turkish territories. Either way, Russia would lose out. For this reason, Nicholas abided by the viewpoint of his cool and calculating Foreign Minister: that it would best serve Russia’s interests to keep the Ottoman Empire in existence, but in a weakened state, where its dependence on Russia for survival would enable the promotion of Russian interests in the Balkans and the Black Sea area. A sick Turkey was more useful to Russia than a dead one.21
Consequently, the Treaty of Adrianople was surprisingly kind to the defeated Turks. Imposed by the Russians in September 1829, the treaty established the virtual autonomy of Moldavia and Wallachia under Russian protection. It gave the Russians some islands in the mouth of the Danube, a couple of forts in Georgia and the Sultan’s recognition of their possession of the rest of Georgia as well as the south Caucasian khanates of Erivan and Nakhichevan, which they had wrested from the Persians in 1828, but compared to what the Russians might have forced out of the defeated Turks, these were relatively minor gains. The two most important clauses of the treaty secured concessions from the Porte that had been wanted by all the signatories of the Treaty of London: Turkish recognition of Greek autonomy; and the opening of the Straits to all commercial ships.
The Western powers did not trust these appearances of Russian moderation, however. The treaty’s silence on warship movements through the Straits led them to conclude that Russia must have gained some secret clause or verbal promise from the Turks, allowing them exclusive control of this crucial waterway between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Western fears of Russia had been growing since the outbreak of the Greek revolt, and the treaty fuelled their Russophobia. The British were especially alarmed. Wellington, by now the Prime Minister, thought the treaty had transformed the Ottoman Empire into a Russian protectorate – an outcome worse than its partition (which at least would have been done by a concert of powers). Lord Heytesbury, the British ambassador in St Petersburg, declared (without any intended irony) that the Sultan would soon become as ‘submissive to the orders of the Tsar as any of the Princes of India to those of the [East India] Company’.22 The British may have totally supplanted the Mughal Empire in India, but they were determined to stop the Russians doing the same to the Ottomans, presenting themselves as the honest defenders of the status quo in the Near East.
Fearful of the perceived Russian threat, the British began to shape a policy towards the Eastern Question. To prevent Russia from gaining the initiative in Greece, they gave their backing to the independence of the new Greek state, as opposed to mere autonomy under Turkish sovereignty (which they feared would make it a dependant of Russia). British fears were not unwarranted. Encouraged by the Russian intervention, Kapodistrias had been calling on the Tsar to expel the Turks from Europe and create a larger Greece, a confederation of Balkan states under Russian protection, on the model once proposed by Catherine the Great. However, the Tsar’s position was seriously weakened by the assassination of Kapodistrias in 1831, followed by the decline of his pro-Russian party and the rise of new Greek liberal parties aligned with the West. These changes moderated Russian expectations and cleared the way for an international settlement at the Convention of London in 1832: the modern Greek state was established under the guarantee of the great powers and with Britain’s choice of sovereign, the young Otto of Bavaria, as its first king.
The ‘weak neighbour’ policy dominated Russia’s attitude to the Eastern Question between 1829 and the Crimean War. It was not shared by everyone: there were those in the Tsar’s army and Foreign Ministry who favoured a more aggressive and expansionist policy in the Balkans and the Caucasus. But it was flexible enough to satisfy both the ambitions of Russian nationalists as well as the concerns of those who wanted to avoid a European war. The key to the ‘weak neighbour’ policy was the use of religion – backed up by a constant military threat – to increase Russian influence within the Sultan’s Christian territories.
