Wallachia and Moldavia. If they reached and crossed the Danube, they could threaten the city of Constantinople itself. France, Turkey’s traditional ally, was also eager to curtail Russia’s growing influence in Poland. It was, therefore, not difficult for French diplomats in Constantinople to convince the sultan and the grand vizier that Russian expansion must be checked and that the wisest course would be to declare war before the Russians were ready. French bribes made this case persuasive in Constantinople. Turkey now needed only a pretext.
An ideal casus belli presented itself in October 1768. Russian troops, fighting Poles in southeastern Poland, pursued them over the border into Turkish territory. The Ottoman Empire responded by issuing an ultimatum to the Russian ambassador, demanding that all Russian troops be removed not only from Turkish territory but from all of Poland. When the Russian ambassador refused even to communicate this demand to St. Petersburg, the Turks escorted him to the Seven Towers and locked him up—the Ottoman protocol for declaring war. Frederick II, following these events from Berlin, clapped his hand to his head and groaned, “Good God, what does one have to endure to make a king of Poland?”
Catherine was undismayed by Turkey’s declaration of war. Indeed, she believed that it provided an opportunity to achieve significant Russian goals. Of course, she would be going to war without an ally; as long as Russia was fighting only a single hostile power, Frederick of Prussia was not obliged by treaty to mobilize a single grenadier. He limited himself to the payment of annual subsidies to Russia which the Russian-Prussian treaty required. Privately, he dismissed the war as a contest between “the one-eyed and the blind,” but he stopped this talk in 1769 and 1770 when the brilliant successes of Catherine’s generals proved him wrong.
In the the spring of 1769, Russian troops occupied and fortified Azov and Taganrog, which Peter the Great had conquered and subsequently, in 1711, had been forced to return to the Turks. Control of these ports and their fortresses meant command of the mouth of the Don, where the river enters the Sea of Azov. The Russians then took Kerch, at the point where the Sea of Azov meets the Black Sea, providing access to the Black Sea itself. Meanwhile, a Russian army of eighty thousand, using Poland as its base, advanced south into the Turkish provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. General Peter Rumyantsev’s forces occupied all of Moldavia and much of Wallachia up to the Danube. In 1770, Rumyantsev led 40,000 men across the Dniester and inflicted two devastating defeats on larger Turkish armies. At the Battle of Larga, on July 7, he defeated 70,000 Turks, and at the Battle of Kagul, on July 21, he routed 150,000. Rumyantsev was promoted to field marshal. Watching from St. Petersburg, an overjoyed Catherine boasted to Voltaire that “at the risk of repeating myself or becoming a bore, I have nothing to report to you but victories.” The empress met almost daily with her war council and constantly sent long letters of appreciation and encouragement to her generals. Officers on leave were entertained at the Winter Palace, and at every military parade in the capital, the empress appeared in the uniform of one of the regiments of which she was honorary colonel.
From the first months of the war, Catherine was also looking for ways to use her navy to fight the Turks. Russia had no Black Sea fleet because the Russian empire possessed no foothold on that body of water. Peter the Great had constructed a Baltic fleet, but it had been allowed by his successors to fall into decay. Early in her reign, Catherine had begun to rehabilitate this fleet by repairing old ships, constructing new ones, and asking the British government to permit her to hire some experienced Royal Navy officers. A number of British captains had been recruited, including Captains Samuel Greig and John Elphinstone, both of whom were given the rank of rear admiral and paid twice the salaries they had received in their own navy.
Catherine wished to put this fleet and these officers to use. When, at a meeting of the war council, Gregory Orlov wondered aloud whether this weapon could be employed in the Mediterranean to attack the Turks from the rear, Catherine was interested. It was a daring concept that would involve sending a large part of the Russian navy completely around the ocean periphery of the European continent. The fleet would sail down the Baltic, across the North Sea, through the English Channel, past the coasts of France, Spain, and Portugal, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and into the eastern Mediterranean, carrying the flag of the Russian empress into the Aegean Sea. To make this strategy work, however, Catherine would need the support of a friendly European power. Again, she approached England, and again Whitehall consented. When Russians were fighting Turks—so the British government reasoned—they were also fighting France, which was Turkey’s traditional ally. And anything that might damage France, England’s permanent enemy, would always be approved in London. Accordingly, Britain offered facilities to the Russian fleet to rest, resupply, and carry out repairs in the English naval harbors of Hull and Portsmouth, and again at Gibraltar and Minorca in the Mediterranean.
On August 6, 1769, Catherine watched the first Russian squadron sail from Kronstadt on the initial leg of its long voyage. The ships resupplied in Hull and then wintered at the British base in Minorca in the western Mediterranean. A second squadron commanded by Admiral John Elphinston followed in October, sailing across the North Sea to winter in Spithead, off the Isle of Wight. In April, these ships put to sea and arrived in Leghorn, where the Grand Duke of Tuscany resupplied them. In May 1770, the combined Russian fleet appeared off Cape Matapan, at the tip of the Peloponnesus, which marked the western entrance to the Aegean Sea. By then, senior command of the fleet had shifted to Gregory Orlov’s brother Alexis, who had joined the fleet in Leghorn. The tall, scar-faced Russian, instrumental in Catherine’s coup d’etat and the death of Peter III, made up in determination what he lacked in nautical experience, and he had retained Samuel Greig as his technical adviser. Gathering his ships, he began scouring the blue waters of the Aegean for the enemy. Near the end of June, he found them.
The island of Chios lies off Turkish Anatolia, and in the waters of Chios on June 25, a Turkish admiral commanding sixteen ships of the line saw an unexpected sight: fourteen large ships flying the white ensign with the blue cross of St. Andrew—the naval flag of Russia—approaching in line of battle. Orlov engaged immediately near the north end of Chesme Bay, a coastal inlet. A Russian ship rammed the Turkish flagship, and Russian and Turkish sailors grappled on deck in hand-to-hand combat. Fire broke out and both ships exploded. The remaining Turkish vessels scurried into Chesme Bay, where the Turkish admiral believed he was safe in the narrow, shallow waters in which Russian ships would have little room to maneuver. The next morning, Orlov attacked again. Greig entered the bay with three ships and assaulted a 96-gun Turkish ship of the line. Behind them, masked by the smoke and confusion of this engagement, three ancient Greek hulks configured as fireships and crammed with combustibles bore down on the anchored Turkish fleet; the Turkish sailors’ first sight was a towering wall of flame moving toward them. Fanned by a stiff breeze in a constricted space, the flames spread quickly, and, one after another, the Turkish ships caught fire and exploded. The result was annihilation; fifteen Turkish ships of the line were destroyed, and only one escaped. Nine thousand Turkish seamen died—and thirty Russians.
Chesme Bay was an astonishing achievement for a fleet and a nation with no naval reputation. The victory allowed Orlov, who now saw himself as the liberator of the Orthodox Greeks, to move his fleet at will around the Aegean, attempting to persuade the Greeks to rise against their Turkish overlords. Lacking the active support of an ally with a land army, he failed. For a while he blockaded the Dardanelles. By autumn, the Russian crews were suffering from dysentery, and the fleet withdrew to winter quarters in Leghorn. In the spring, Orlov was ordered to sail for home. He returned to a hero’s welcome. Kneeling before Catherine, he received the Order of St. George.
Russia’s surprising 1770 successes—the advance of Russian armies to the Black Sea and the Danube, the presence of a Russian fleet in the Mediterranean, and the total destruction of the Turkish fleet at Chesme—struck Europe with an astonishment heavily freighted with alarm. The rapid expansion of Russian power began to worry her friends as well as her enemies. One of these was Catherine’s ally Frederick of Prussia, who took little pleasure in imagining Catherine’s permanent domination of all of Poland. Neither Prussia nor Austria liked the prospect of Russia reaching deep into the Balkans or the idea of a Russian seizure of Constantinople. On the other hand, neither Frederick nor Maria Theresa saw how to prevent Russia from achieving these goals. Thus, although Frederick congratulated Catherine (“I cannot keep writing to you for every victory; I shall wait till there are half a dozen”), the last thing he desired was a wider war, which might bring in France and Austria against Russia and, therefore, require the participation of Prussia as Catherine’s ally in the fighting. In the 1764 treaty, Prussia had pledged to come to Catherine’s aid if Russia were attacked. In the present war, Turkey was clearly the aggressor, and, as a result, Prussia was already sending financial subsidies to Russia. But now Austria, alarmed by Russian penetration of the Balkans, was threatening to ally herself with the Turks. If this led to war, Russia would demand that Prussia fulfill her further treaty obligation, and he, Frederick, would have to fight Austria for the third time in his life. By now, Frederick had had enough of war. At fifty-five, he had already fought two wars against Austria to add
