Charles King's The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus

 "The mountains are full of free and ungoverned people..."

-Gen. Alexei Petrovich Ermolov

But there were various attempts to clamp down on that, including by a certain Russian General Ermolov in the early 1800s...

Continuing my reading of Charles King's back catalog and my voyage this year round the Black Sea, I got his book of 2008 from the library. It's another fascinating study.

It's a meeting place of continents and languages. In Arabic it's referred to as djabal al-alsun, the mountain of languages, and it's home to a half-dozen (or more, depending how you count) language families, of which Indo-Europenan is only one. Turkic and Semitic languages are widely spoken. And there are three language families indigenous to the area as well: Kartvelian (the best known of which is Georgian); Caspian (including the Chechen language) and Northwest Caucasian.

It's also the meeting ground of empires. The frontiers of Persia, of the Ottomans, and of Russian collide in the Caucasus. King's book really only starts in the 1700s, as Peter the Great tries to expand Russia into the area. By then the Persians and even the Ottomans are weakening, and it's mostly a story of Russian expansion. But 'imperialists are congenital optimists' as King says, and it wasn't an easy progress as the locals attempted to remain a 'free and ungoverned people', at least ungoverned by outsiders.

One of the themes King emphasizes is how the region functioned in Russian identity. Before Siberia it was their wild west, and is important in their writing to Pushkin (his The Captive of the Caucasus provides King his title), to Lermontov (A Hero of Our Time), and to Tolstoy (Hadji Murad, among other works). Pushkin's view remains fairly romanticized, according to King; Lermontov and Tolstoy are more realistic.

It's not just the Russians who have fanciful images of the Caucasus. The Russian tsar sends German scholars into the Caucasus; one of the questions he wants to know are the Circassian women as beautiful as they're reported to be. But so does Woodrow Wilson (!) want to know that. In the 19th century Circassian beauties were a regular feature of P. T. Barnum's (and others') expositions. (Though King says they were generally Irish girls with their hair frizzed.)

King tells the story of Jan Saremba, a Pole who fought against the Russians in his homeland. After the fall of Warsaw, he was drafted into the Russian army and sent to fight in the Caucasus. He and a group of Poles decided to cross over into the Ottoman lines, and join up to fight Russians instead of serving them, but the Ottomans sell them into slavery instead. Saremba eventually escapes, takes refuge with the French consul in Trebizond, marries a Greek woman, and later leads tours of the Caucasus, and it's through that he becomes known. But on other occasions Russians complain the forces ranged against them shout their battle cries in Polish. 

In the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution and World War I, the Caucasus is united into TransCaucasian State, but it breaks down pretty quickly into three countries Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All three of those countries are gone by 1922, reabsorbed into the Soviet Union, only to reemerge after the collapse of the USSR. King ends with the wars that follow; the Second Chechen War still going on as he was writing the book, though by then winding down.

All in all, a pretty fascinating read and a good introduction to the area.

There are four countries from Gilion's list that occupy the Caucasus today: Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. (There are some other places that claim to be countries, but aren't widely recognized.) Azerbaijan seems to me the one I'm least likely to read another book from, and it's a country I've never covered in my years of doing the European Reading Challenge. So today's visit is to Azerbaijan!

I read the book in a place I couldn't obsess over the news:

If I was sitting in that chair and looking out...

The Black Sea: A History

"There is a deep landlubber bias in historical and social research. History and social life, we seem to think, happen on the ground."

A couple of years ago I read Charles King's Midnight at the Pera Palace (looking at 20th-century Turkey though the lens of a luxury hotel/night club in Istanbul) and liked it a lot. More recently I read his Gods of the Upper Air (about American anthropologists, such as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead) and liked it, though a bit less. I didn't manage to blog about either. 

But then, in a moment of idleness, I was looking through Charles King's back catalog and checking what my library had, and there was this volume: The Black Sea: A History. We've all been thinking about the Black Sea far more lately. I thought I should check this out. (Both literally and figuratively.)

The volume begins by discussing why we should consider the Black Sea a unit; it's often not these days; the countries involved are divided under Russian studies or Balkan studies or Near Eastern studies. He makes a good case, but I have to say I wasn't necessarily engaged with that question. Then he discusses the geography and geology of the region, which was pretty fascinating. Good harbors, which products were available for trade, where and when the fishing was good are all hugely important questions to anyone near the sea. 

But that's all pretty quick. Then we're on to the history. As I said once before, any history that can conceivably start with Herodotus ought to do so, and the historical part of this one does, too. One of King's recurring motifs is that the Black Sea is an inland sea for somebody--or it's not. Is it a place of trade or of conflict? For the Greeks, it seems, at least in the early years, it was an inland sea, with a number of Greek colonies trading with their respective hinterlands, but in fairly regular communication with each other and the Greek homeland. Most of the Greek colonies were of Milesian origin. But already by the time we think of as high classical Greek civilization (5th-4th century B.C.) this was falling apart. Alexander's ascendancy didn't last long, and none of the successor kingdoms dominated the sea.

Nor did the Romans. Their inland sea was, of course, the Mediterranean (Mare Nostrum) and the Black Sea was the frontier, where they fought against states they bordered on the east: Pontus, Parthia, Armenia.

It was closer to an inland sea for the Byzantines at their peak, but never quite. Italian city states--Venice, Genoa--pick up a fair amount of the trade and maintained entrepôt of their own. And by the later years of their empire the Byzantines controlled very little of the Black Sea littoral.

But then the Ottomans, after they took Byzantium (1453) again held the sea under one power. Some of the states on the Black Sea were tributaries and not directly part of the empire, but for roughly 300 years after the fall of Byzantium, the Black Sea was an Ottoman lake, and trade was relatively free and easy. 

Eventually the Ottoman empire grew weaker--and the Cossacks came on the scene. The Cossacks were perfectly happy--and perfectly capable--of conducting piracy on the sea in addition to their raids on horseback. But by themselves they weren't able to dominate the Black Sea. But their piratical successes were one of the things that revealed the increasing weakness of the Ottomans. The Russians took note.

The latter history of the Black Sea is story of the conflict between Russia and Turkey over control of the Black Sea--and the efforts of other players, the British, the French--to keep one party from dominating. The Crimean War, among other conflicts, was the result. Among the results of the Crimean War was an attempt to de-militarize the Black Sea.

The book comes out in 2004 and at that time King was optimistic. There were new environmental initiatives to counteract years of neglect and damage. "[C]onflict among the states of the Black Sea zone is now virtually unthinkable." [p.240] Alas. As Yogi Berra may (or may not) have said: It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

Still, it's a pretty fascinating book, even if it needs updating. If you've read his other books you'll know, King likes anecdotes and uses them well. There's some good stories in it and it's pretty readable. And especially now, worth reading.

As King notes in the beginning, six countries currently border the Black Sea; if you counted the countries in the Black Sea drainage area, there are 22 possibilities. Out of all those choices, I guess I won't pick the most obscure... King is a professor in the foreign services school at Georgetown, and at least at the time of this book held the Ion Raţiu chair in Romanian studies. Romania is important in the book, I need to keep up my Romania streak, and so...Romania it is! for the European Reading Challenge.