Recognizing Empire: How Muscovy Became Russia, from the Ottoman Legal Viewpoint

• In Event: Legal History at the Margins of the Ottoman and Russian Empires

Abstract

Recognition is at the heart of modern international law: states become states, and thus actors in the legal system, through their recognition by other states. Likewise, territorial changes can be recognized, or not—as in Palestine, Nagorno-Karabakh, or Crimea. In the early modern world, sovereignty was much blurrier, and territorial conquest more accepted. But recognition still mattered, and this paper will explore the Ottoman Empire’s use of the concept, with reference to the Ottomans’ post-Mongol rival, Muscovy/Russia. Traditionally, that state was called Moskov in Ottoman Turkish, while Ukrainians, Ruthenians, and Cossacks were Rûs. Drawing mainly on Ottoman-language chronicles, treaties, and archives, I will trace how and when this usage changed, both in law and in the vernacular. The Sublime Porte understood perfectly well what symbolic prestige Peter the Great hoped to gain from declaring himself leader of the “Russian Empire,” and the dual descent it implied from both Rome and the Kievan Rus’. Therefore, Ottoman officials deliberately and systematically withheld recognition of both titles (empire, and Russia) long after Peter’s death. When Ottoman diplomats eventually conceded these titles in a 1741 agreement, they did so in exchange for political concessions. The prolonged nonrecognition policy offered a precedent for later Ottoman protests against the Partitions of Poland. But more importantly, the Ottoman recognition of Russia’s new name erased any Ottoman acceptance of a Ukrainian/Ruthenian polity or identity; it created an Ottoman idea of political (not ethnic) “Russian subjecthood”; and it may have offered the Porte a model of multiethnic empire.

Author

• Will Smiley, U of New Hampshire