Black Sea

BLACK SEA

large inland saltwater sea between turkey on the south and ukraine on the north, connected to the mediterranean sea.

About 180,000 square miles (466,000 sq. km.), the Black Sea is connected to the Aegean Sea, the northeast arm of the Mediterranean Sea, by the Turkish Straits (the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus). Until the late eighteenth century, the Black Sea was controlled almost entirely by the Ottoman Empire, but the sea was opened to Russia in the Treaty of Kuçuk Kaynara (1774). Over the next century and a half, the Russians and the Ottoman Turks vied for control of the Black Sea. The Ottoman Empire attempted to keep Russia from establishing a military presence in the Black Sea, and the Russians attempted to push the Ottomans ever southward and prevent access to the Black Sea by the other European powers through the Turkish Straits. Control of the straits remained a live issue well into the twentieth century. After World War II, Josef Stalin, USSR premier, unsuccessfully pressured Turkey to revise the 1936 Montreux Convention, which barred belligerents from the straits and hence limited the ability of the USSR to use the Black Sea as a naval base. The Black Sea is also a major commercial shipping region. It is thus a vital economic link between Eastern Europe, Russia and other states of the former USSR, Turkey, and the states of western Central Asia, as well as a link between these states and the countries of the Mediterranean and the world.

see also montreux convention (1936); ottoman empire; straits, turkish.

Bibliography

Lenczowski, George. The Middle East in World Affairs, 4th edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Shaw, Stanford, and Shaw, Ezel Kural. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976–1977.

Zachary Karabell