Limits of Protection: Russia and the Orthodox Coreligionists in the Ottoman Empire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Influence over the Ottoman Christians was the single most important manifestation of Imperial Russia’s “soft power.” In the context of the Russian-Ottoman wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, appeals of the Eastern Christian elites to Moscow and St. Petersburg for protection met with the attempts of the tsars and their commanders to rally the support of the co-religionists. However, Russia’s relations with the Orthodox subjects of the sultan were fraught with great ambiguity. Temporary Russian occupations of particular territories of Turkey-in-Europe during the wars incited among the local Christians the hopes for independence that subsequent restoration of the Porte’s authority would all but destroy. In order to maintain Russia’s standing among the co-religionists, the peace treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji of 1774 and subsequent Russian-Ottoman agreements included certain guarantees in favor of the Christian population of the returned territories. The present paper offers a comparative perspective on these arrangements, which served the basis for trilateral relations between Russia, the Porte and the elites of Moldavia, Wallachia, the Archipelago and Serbia in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The difference in attitudes and behaviour of the Romanian, Greek and Serbian leaders arguably explains varying degrees of autonomy that the territories in question enjoyed on the basis of the Russian-Ottoman treaty stipulations. More broadly, the paper seeks to problematize the notion of Russia’s protectorate over the Orthodox co-religionists. It shows that the legal basis of this protectorate remained very uneven, and, that for a long time, the makers of Russia’s Eastern policy dealt with particular Christian elites of Turkey-in-Europe rather than with the entire Orthodox community of the Ottoman Empire.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".