In 1794, the Russian Empire convened the first high admiralty court for appeals to review petitions of merchants and privateers embroiled in the second Russian–Ottoman war of Catherine II's reign (1787–91). The Commission for Archipelago Affairs, as this admiralty court was called, decided more than 170 cases on the basis of Russian maritime law and its interpretation of the law of nations concerning commercial navigation and privateers. A year into its work, the commission determined that one case sat at the center of most disputes that pitted merchants against Russian-flagged privateers: the affair of Lambros Katsonis. The commission's decisions for most of the cases on its docket rested on its determination of Katsonis's standing in the Russian Empire. Once decided, the outcome of the matter went on to define the distinction between Russian privateers and naval officers in Russian law: precedents that shaped Russian naval practices for the next 50 years.
The Russian appellate commission's inquiry into the legal standing of combatants commonly known as privateers (korsary or kapery in Russian) was not so far removed from similar queries in other seafaring states and empires at the time. In 1795, Georg Friedrich de Martens published his famous Essay on Privateers, a topic he saw as being immensely relevant to the ongoing European maritime wars.Footnote 1 With the waters around Europe and beyond being sites of captures and reprisals, Martens saw it topical to inquire into “the origins of […] privateers, and the laws subsisting with respect to them…” while recognizing that general knowledge of the law of nations and universal principles in Europe was not enough, and that one ought to inquire into the “public laws and interests of every state in particular.”Footnote 2 At the end of the tumultuous eighteenth century rife with legal disputes over prize doctrine and neutral states’ rights to commerce and navigation at sea in wartime, to Martens, as to his contemporaries Thomas Hartwell Horne who translated his treatise into English and the American lawyer Henry Wheaton, a full understanding of the laws and practices of privateering appeared to be necessary and practical.Footnote 3 To these jurists, as to the Russian government, the question of the legal basis of privateering seemed of central concern to state policy as well as to individual practitioners of activities surrounding prize capture.
The ongoing revolutionary wars in Europe at the time of Martens’ treatise wrought havoc on merchant shipping in European waters and beyond. As had been the case for most of the eighteenth century, privateers were still deemed to be the biggest perpetrators of maritime commercial violence. According to the data assembled by David J. Starkey, there were approximately 1,800 actual vessels commissioned in Britain during the period 1793–1815.Footnote 4 The battle over commerce raiding continued in admiralty courts, and both the High Court of Admiralty and the United States federal courts often decided in favor of their nations’ privateers in prize cases.Footnote 5 Devastating trade prospects compelled merchants to move their capital away from commercial vessels to financing privateers.Footnote 6 If studies of British naval power suggest that by the end of the eighteenth century privateers played a less significant role than they had before, this had little reflection on other states such as Russia and the United States issuing letters of marque and relying on auxiliary naval forces to augment their strength at sea.Footnote 7 The turbulent Spanish American revolutions in the 1820s provided further opportunities for commerce raiding and maritime predation, and the revolutionary governments issued letters of marque to United States privateers to combine these lucrative opportunities with their battle for independence.Footnote 8
As a longtime practice of European empires, but a relatively recent one for the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century, privateering offers insight into Russian legal acculturation, as the empire used European legal discourse to frame its practices. The study of privateers and admiralty courts is by no means new, but the aim of this article is to examine how European understandings of privateers held up to Russia's legal scrutiny. The few studies on Russian engagement with the law of nations in the eighteenth century point to a successful, but perhaps uncritical, appropriation of standards of European international law by Russian diplomats and statesmen.Footnote 9 The laws of maritime warfare, in particular, offer an example of a practice for which there were few pre-existing legal antecedents in Russia; in the late eighteenth century, privateers became a wholly new legal category in Russian naval service.Footnote 10 For this reason, it is especially interesting to examine which aspects of Russian practice were similar to other European practices and which were sui generis. This article will begin with an overview of the historical context in which the Russian Empire first commissioned large-scale use of privateers, and will examine the legal instruments through which it sought to control them; it will then turn to the Commission for Archipelago Affairs, a little-known, temporary judicial and administrative body that was imbued with a surprising amount of power over many lives in the Eastern Mediterranean; finally, it will analyze the commission's caseload, focusing on its central legal dilemma revolving around the activities of Lambros Katsonis and the social and legal implications of the decision in this case.
In contrast to Western jurists who defended the legitimacy of private combatants under a sovereign sanction, the Russian government at the end of the eighteenth century was more concerned with how to differentiate privateers from other naval irregulars and the state navy. As moral condemnations of privateering added up, Martens and his contemporaries sought to demonstrate the legal legitimacy of privateers while proscribing certain actions that would render privateer actions as piracy.Footnote 11 Drawing on a historical distinction between private and public warfare, Martens began his Essay by defining privateers based on their ownership of the vessel and a sovereign's explicit consent for privateer activities.Footnote 12 Sovereign consent came in the form of letters of marque or reprisals, authorizing the use of the flag as well as legal condemnation of a prize in an admiralty court, allowing the privateer to collect prize money from the sale of the prize and its cargo. Russian maritime law similarly sought to legitimize privateers’ actions while insulating the government from obligations to the privateers or on their behalf. Whereas the entire Western legal canon seemed to take the designation of a privateer as an a priori legal designation stemming from a financial or legal arrangement, in Russia it was this very distinction that sat at the heart of the Katsonis case.Footnote 13 As this article shows, the Russian Empire appropriated a wholly different standard for determining who was a privateer, not through ownership but through moral qualities. Faced with the question of whether Lambros Katsonis was a privateer, the Commission for Archipelago Affairs evaluated his actions based on eyewitness testimony, and made its judgment of his moral character the basis for its decision. It is tempting to attribute this difference to the old reading of Russian law as lacking the inalienability of private property;Footnote 14 however, as the discussion in the Commission for Archipelago Affairs shows, the idea of state and private ownership of vessels was well understood by all the participants in the case. But the legal differences to which I point rested on the ethos of the combatants themselves, and had much more to do with the ways in which the phenomenon of privateering under the Russian flag unfolded.
Russian Privateers in the Eighteenth Century
In commissioning privateers, the Russian Empire drew on a long tradition of supplementing its army with irregular forces; however, this specific kind of combatant had much to do with Russian encroachment into the Eastern Mediterranean in the late eighteenth century. In the reign of Catherine II (r. 1762–96), the Russian Empire fought two wars against the Ottoman Empire: the first from 1768 to 1774 and the second from 1787 to 1791. In both wars, Russia expanded its legal reach into the Eastern Mediterranean by utilizing ties to Eastern Orthodox communities in the region. Russia's connections with the Orthodox subjects of Ottoman and Austrian Balkan territories reach back centuries, and include a wide array of military, cultural, and religious exchanges. Individual studies have illuminated the importance of formal military and political ties, and their role in shaping Russian activity and politics beyond the empire's territory.Footnote 15 In Catherine II's reign, it was Russia's Admiralty—that is, the naval personnel, infrastructure, and bureaucracy—that exerted control over the fates of the Christian reaya (Ottoman tax-paying subjects). In advance of the 1768 war, Russian agents planted the seeds of rebellion among the Ottoman Orthodox populations. Agents travelled throughout Albania, the Peloponnese, and the Aegean Archipelago, conferring with local secular, spiritual, and military leaders about a coordinated rebellion timed to coincide with the arrival of the Russian naval fleet in the Mediterranean.Footnote 16 In the 1780s, with a second war with the Ottoman Empire imminent, the Russian government used its newly established consular service in the Levant to recruit combatants and captains, and to arrange financial and political support for Russian operations against the Porte.Footnote 17 Consuls worked with local merchants and townspeople to distribute money and credit to buy armaments, vessels, and provisions for combatants and skippers. Veterans of the 1768 war such as Antonios Psaros, Ghikas Bitsiles, and Damiam Zaguriskii occupied many of the consular positions throughout the region.Footnote 18 Drawing on the concessions from the 1774 peace treaty, Russian agents sailed around the Mediterranean under commercial flags, delivering instructions to consuls and other sympathizers in hopes of lining up political allies.Footnote 19 Additionally, Russian propaganda played an important part in recruiting combatants. Catherine II issued manifestos calling for Balkan Christians to mobilize against the Ottomans in anticipation of the arrival of the Russian fleet, which would bring necessary armaments and provide support in the upcoming showdown.Footnote 20
Seeing how the specificities of the Mediterranean region dictated some of the peculiarities of Russian privateering, situating the Russian Empire's maritime practices in this legal context also offers a new reading of the geopolitical quagmire traditionally referred to as the “Eastern Question.” Searching for the origins of Russian policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars have projected later assumptions about both Russian intentions and nationalist movements of the nineteenth century to an earlier period. From their perspective, international law might appear to be a pretext for action based on religious or ethnic affinity rather than being the method by which the Russian Empire extended its sovereign reach by means of its admiralty jurisdiction.Footnote 21 In contrast to numerous studies of Russian foreign policy that assert that religion or ethnicity constituted the ideological motivation for Russian action in Ottoman domains, I argue that many of these activities took place under the explicit legal approval of the Russian Empire and within the framework of Russian admiralty law, which itself was based on Russia's interpretation of the law of nations.Footnote 22 At the end of the eighteenth century, many of the modern stable political identities that were to emerge by the early twentieth century were in flux. Tensions cut across social lines just as much as they did across nationality and religion. Presupposing Russia's affinity toward particular groups overlooks the possibility that Russian actions shaped the processes of national identity formation in these groups, lending political valence to particular social categories.Footnote 23 This particular element of Russian sovereign power developed largely in the context of several Russian–Ottoman wars at the end of the eighteenth century, when the Russian Empire recruited large numbers of foreign subjects to serve under its flag and developed the legal infrastructure by which to manage them.
From the perspective of the law of nations, Russian recruitment of privateers to sail under its flag mirrored the state of European law described by contemporary jurists such as Martens and Wheaton, and historians’ accounts of French, British, and American practices. The Russian Empire was recognized as a sovereign polity endowed with the authority to issue letters of marque, or patents, in Russian terminology, without prompting the questions or disputes that arose with North African corsairs or other polities whose sovereign status was in question.Footnote 24 Nor did Ottoman and Habsburg subjects who accepted Russian commissions raise the same concerns about the legality of their status as enemy combatants as Dutch commerce raiders had in their rebellions against the Spanish.Footnote 25 Notably, many aspects of Russian privateering were drawn from the British experience. In 1769, the head of the College of Foreign Affairs Nikita I. Panin asked the Russian Special Envoy in London Ivan G. Chernyshev to explain how the British used admiralty patents and to whom they entrusted this power, and to relay other logistics of commerce raiding.Footnote 26 The structure and proceedings of Russian prize courts, however, was more comparable to the French Conseil des Prises, in which the commission that determined the legitimacy of prize vessels consisted of members appointed by the monarch.Footnote 27 Much as they did in the French system, Russian privateers relied on consuls throughout the Mediterranean region to help equip their ships, recruit crews, and serve on prize commissions.Footnote 28
In common with existing European practice, the Russian Empire regulated its privateers through individual patents and detailed rules and instructions, and with the assistance of prize courts. In Russia as elsewhere, the entire enterprise of approving and controlling privateers relied on regulation.Footnote 29 The Russian government expected its privateers to adhere to prescribed procedures in capturing merchant vessels, searching neutral vessels, and taking prisoners. The Rules for Privateers, which enumerated standards of behavior for privateers under the Russian flag in twenty-seven articles, were translated into several languages and circulated among the privateer captains.Footnote 30 The prize court (or prize commission, in Russian parlance) formed the cornerstone of this system. Privateers were expected to bring captured vessels and cargo to the nearest neutral or allied port for a thorough examination by a prize commission, which would assess the legality of the capture and condemn the vessel as a good prize, allowing the booty to be sold at public auction and the privateer to be remunerated with nine-tenths of the sum recovered. Prize commissions were required to provide both the petitioners and privateers with copies of their decisions: legal records of the event, which could then form the basis of an appeal of a consul or commission's decision concerning a captured prize to the Russian imperial court (dvor).
These practices, fine-tuned by European empires and their admiralty courts over centuries, were appropriated by the Russian Empire on a large scale in its wars against the Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth century. Russian activity in historically Ottoman domains in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea has been central to the narrative of Ottoman decline, and had been a subject of dispute in the political and diplomatic standoff between European powers in the region.Footnote 31 Naval practices in Russian–Ottoman wars saw the evolution of Russia's military strategy towards a more determined effort to attack Ottoman commerce, intercept food provisions in an effort to starve Constantinople, and interrupt Ottoman communications. By the 1780s, privateers acquired a greater strategic value in the eyes of Russia's military leadership. With the outbreak of the 1787 war with the Ottoman Empire, the Russian government turned to the experience of the 1768 war, particularly in the recruitment of irregular troops to augment its naval manpower.
However, the aftermath of the 1768 war and developments in Russia's policy toward seaborne raiding in the 1780s also accounted for notable differences in the role that privateers played in the second Russian–Ottoman war. In the intervening period, the government had taken a more resolute stance on the subject of neutral commerce at sea, declaring maritime trade an inviolable right, and making efforts to protect neutral states’ rights in maritime trade and navigation.Footnote 32 Russia's interpretation of the laws regarding the permissibility of seizing merchant vessels or enemy cargo were codified in several pieces of legislation and became the cornerstone of what Russian officials referred to as the “neutral system.”Footnote 33 At the same time, Russia changed its reward structure for privateers, introducing strong financial incentives to attract irregular combatants and reward them handsomely for their service.Footnote 34 The sudden outbreak of a war with Sweden in the summer of 1788 kept the Baltic Sea Fleet occupied in the north of Europe, and Russian-flagged privateers were the only Russian armed ships in the Mediterranean during the war. Without a strong official naval presence, the government attempted to introduce consular oversight to regulate the privateers; however, in reality, the government had few tools with which to restrain the unsavory activities of these soldiers of fortune.
Despite structural changes introduced in the 1787 war that marked many naval auxiliaries as distinct, it was still unclear who among the combatants fit the newly appropriated term “privateer.” True to what historian Eric Lohr has described as a “separate deal” model, Russian commanders recruited a variety of foreigners to serve the Russian Empire under different terms and contracts, and not all naval officers pledged an oath to the Russian monarch.Footnote 35 Among the variations of terms of service to the Russian crown were the propensity of British subjects to request a separate schedule for the allocation and distribution of prize money, whereas three Corsican captains asked for an enlistment bonus for all recruits and a priest for their exclusively Corsican battalion.Footnote 36 The indeterminate status of privateers vis-à-vis irregular naval troops is best exemplified by the government's decision to organize the flotillas sailing around the Mediterranean during the 1787–91 Russian–Ottoman War into a coordinated force.Footnote 37 The flotillas were intended to disrupt food supplies to Constantinople and divert at least some of the Ottoman naval forces away from the Black Sea, or, in Matthew Anderson's words, to add “nuisance value.”Footnote 38 One flotilla consisted of state-owned ships captained by Lieutenant Samuel de Chaplet of the Russian navy. In anticipation of hostilities with the Ottoman Empire over Russia's annexation of Crimea, Antonios Psaros and other Russian agents had begun making preparations—purchasing ships and stockpiling timber—for Russian naval action in the region.Footnote 39 Under the assumption that the Baltic fleet would soon arrive in the Mediterranean, as it had in the previous war, the state-owned flotilla had seemingly done very little before 1789. After the Swedish declaration of war in 1788 detained the Baltic fleet in the northern seas, Russian command placed Guglielmo Lorenzi, a corsair from Malta and one of at least a dozen other officers recruited into Russian service, in charge of the state-owned flotilla's nine vessels.Footnote 40 The second flotilla was headed by Lambros Katsonis, who had been terrorizing Mediterranean commerce since early 1788 and had already acquired a reputation as a notorious blaggard among many of the region's officials.Footnote 41 The French consul Pierre Frammery was one of many to express his outrage at Katsonis's “criminal conduct” to the Russian consul in Trieste Spiridon Varucca, likening Russian support of Katsonis's greed to the “prostitution of the respectable Russian flag.”Footnote 42 As will be discussed when his case is examined in greater detail, Katsonis began his commerce raiding operation with funds from senior government officials acting in a private capacity, but soon required government assistance to secure his release from jail and pay his debts. The government's efforts to corral him and his men into state service added further ambiguity to his position in the Russian navy.
The Commission for Archipelago Affairs
The records of the Commission for Archipelago Affairs are the best available source for the practice of Russian admiralty law in this period. Catherine II convened the Commission for the Affairs of the Archipelago Flotillas during the War with Turkey [sic] (Kommissiia po delam Arkhipelagskoi Flotilii v voinu s Turtsiei)—hereafter the Commission for Archipelago Affairs—after the end of the 1787–91 Russian–Ottoman War, tasking it with reconciling accounts and investigating the activities of Russian flotillas in the Mediterranean Sea. The Rules for Privateers that guided Russian practice in the Eastern Mediterranean in the war called for the creation of a high-level admiralty court to settle any disputes and address any dissatisfaction of merchants and privateers; however, it was the flood of complaints and requests for payment, reimbursement, and restitution after the war that necessitated prompt action and a thorough review of Russia-approved activities.Footnote 43 In 1794, the commission was formed under the purview of the Procurator General of the Senate (General Prokuror), Prince Alexander N. Samoilov. Consisting of two members of the Admiralty College—Vice-Admirals Wilhelm P. von Dezin (Vilim Fondezin, also spelled von Dessen) and Efim I. Lupandin—and two from the Department of Government Revenues—Ivan A. Naryshkin and Karl F. Moderakh—it continued to operate until 1798.Footnote 44 As Catherine herself noted, “keeping the flotillas in the Mediterranean Sea in the latest war against Turkey [sic] was both costly and troublesome” for Russia.Footnote 45 The costs were not only financial but also political.
Instructions given to the commission offered little by way of guidance, but the emphasis on procedure, evidence, and validity suggests the importance of the veneer of legality to the commission's proceedings. The commission was instructed to “rule on” the grievances presented before it “with due process” and to present to Catherine “those that were shown to be valid.”Footnote 46 The cases were adjudicated according to the Rules for Privateers and, where appropriate, the Naval Statute of 1720 (Peter the Great's regulations that had remained unchanged since 1720).
However, the commission's understanding of the sources of autocratic law extended beyond laws and edicts issued by the monarch; the commission also regarded orders and instructions from the monarch and military superiors as sources of law.Footnote 47 Dispatches from senior military officials such as Vice-Admiral Samuel Gibbs and Lieutenant-General Ivan Zaborovskii to their subordinates were treated by the commission as legally binding instructions. As others have shown, this emphasis on legal process was fairly typical of Catherine II's reign;Footnote 48 however, unlike domestic legal initiatives from the legislative commission to equity courts, which had mixed results, the Commission for Archipelago Affairs proved successful in establishing itself as a credible adjudicator of petitions and claims within its jurisdiction.Footnote 49 It was a felicitous example of Russia's practice of law-based governance.
As an institution, the Commission for Archipelago Affairs presents a unique example of Russian legal practice that drew on international norms and sought to make its decisions comprehensible to foreign observers. The commission's membership and mandate reflected the dual judicial and administrative roles of the Russian bureaucracy, with each case's successful resolution requiring the commission both to rule on legal questions and calculate the sums owed the petitioner. The procedure—a written inquisition, rather than an oral or adversarial trial—also made the format of this prize court different from British and American admiralty courts. Moreover, whereas petitions to the commission were submitted separately, it considered the cases together, as distinct pieces of a bigger whole (and as costly line items in the budget of the war). The records of the commission, particularly its opinions and case summaries, contain annotations referencing other claims simultaneously under consideration. The commission cross-referenced and applied evidence and decisions from one case to another, demonstrating how previous proceedings and other available evidence influenced its reasoning on a particular case. By this method, the commission identified important legal questions that required resolution before it could proceed to the mundane details of calculating and apportioning prize shares and evaluating restitution claims. The commission's guiding legislation was the Rules for Privateers, which contained commonly accepted practices among European powers such as the adherence to a prize court's judgment, relying on flags to determine the nationality of a vessel, and commonly accepted definitions of contraband. The Rules likewise upheld Russia's vision of the protection of neutral rights in maritime warfare, a position that Catherine II claimed was consistent with the law of nations. During the war, this important piece of legislation regulating Russian activities was widely circulated in many languages throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region.Footnote 50 The contents of the Rules and the principles behind them were likely known well throughout the region, as plaintiffs regularly referenced them in their petitions. Therefore, although it was a Russian institution, the commission was nevertheless both accessible to foreign petitioners or consuls acting on their behalf, and decided its cases in accordance with international norms, in an international context.
Although it was intended as a high-level prize court, the commission oversaw a wide range of cases addressing numerous disputes that arose during and after the war. Many of the records concerning the activities of Russian privateers in the Mediterranean are preserved in fond 150 of the Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Voenno-Morskogo Flota (Russian State Naval Archive). However, these were not the only records pertaining to privateer activity in the Mediterranean; other complains and requests bypassed the commission and ended up in the personal cabinet of Catherine II or one of her secretaries.Footnote 51 Some of the commission's files have been lost over the years, and others have been spliced together for efficiency. Today there are 141 discrete files, containing approximately 171 different complaints. More than 100 of the dela (cases) handled by the commission were linked to the activities of Lambros Katsonis. Of these, roughly half came from combatants on his flotilla (some petitions represented as many as seventy crew members), and the other half were complaints from creditors and merchants who sought reimbursement of their expenses or restitution of their property. Still, this division is more arbitrary than representative of any significant differences between the cases that were being decided.
With the exception of passing mentions in the few studies of Russia's privateers, the central role of the Commission for Archipelago Affairs in the aftermath of the 1787 war and in Russian legal history remains largely unexamined in scholarly literature.Footnote 52 For most historians, the commission's role in analyzing the legalities and apportioning costs for privateer activities generally held little interest, although several popular monographs valorize the privateers’ military accomplishments.Footnote 53 At the same time, jurists and legal historians have noted the existence of various pieces of legislation, but never the application of the laws. My research into the cases overseen by the Commission for Archipelago Affairs demonstrates its central role in resolving the many varied disputes that arose after the 1787 Russian–Ottoman War. What follows is a discussion of the central issue in front of the commission—the legal status of Lambros Katsonis and the combatants who fought alongside him for the Russian Empire—as well as the implications of that decision for merchants from the Eastern Mediterranean. Together, they reflect the procedure of the Russian admiralty courts, the values that underlay its decisions, and the surprising amount of authority wielded by this commission. They highlight the legal tensions in Russia's foreign policy, which had been previously discounted or overlooked in a broader narrative of the Eastern Question. Although seldom portrayed in this way by historians, prize courts constituted notable elements of Russia's foreign policy practice and were responsible for the adoption of international norms in this period and subsequently.Footnote 54
The War According to Katsonis
The petitions submitted by combatants from Lambros Katsonis's flotilla constituted roughly one-third of the commission's caseload, requiring it to consider the general principles that underlay the officers’ requests. With some variation, the privateers all made the same claims: plaintiffs sought salaries for their service, reimbursement of any personal expenses, and awards of prize money for themselves and their entire crews. They presented a short biography, service career and rank, and detailed their achievements in service and their loyalty to the Russian crown. These claims were supported with any available evidence, including patents for rank and testaments from their commanders attesting to their bravery, valor, and indispensable service. These duties included fighting enemy ships, completing secret missions, and recruiting and financially supporting crews on their vessels. Importantly, many requested a promotion in rank and a permanent placement in the imperial Black Sea Fleet. Overall, the simultaneous requests for prize money according to the divisions set out in the Rules for Privateers, and salary demands as officers, highlighted the ambiguity of how even the combatants themselves saw their position in relation to the state.
The most important question before the commission, therefore, became the need to determine the legal status of these combatants. As the commission insisted, the status of the flotilla was central to resolving nearly all other cases concerning the payment of salaries, prize money amounts, and reimbursements to merchants. Towards the end of 1794, the commission issued its first decisions to hundreds of Katsonis's crew members. In each of these cases the commission universally denied salaries and wages to the petitioners on the grounds that they were privateers. One typical denial read:
As the named petitioner Major Ziguri served on Colonel Lambros Katsonis's flotilla, which was as the facts of the case show organized as a privateer flotilla, and not from the treasury and which during its operations in searching for the enemy is not only not entitled to any salary, but also the privateer must on the basis of Article 9 pay one-tenth to the treasury. Consequently, he is not entitled to a salary for serving under Lambros Katsonis in time of war, and in light of Articles 1 and 9 of the aforementioned Rules, he is not entitled to 2000 florins for arming the frigate Achilles. Footnote 55
The commission's rationale rested on a distinction that it drew between a state-financed (kazennaia) flotilla and Katsonis's private or free (vol'naia) flotilla. At first glance, the commission's decision seemed to reinforce the conventional understanding between the two, in which the crewmembers of the former were entitled to wages and provisions from the treasury, whereas the crew of the latter would be paid through their prize earnings. However, the commission's decision not to use treasury funds to pay Katsonis's crew stemmed from a moral judgment of Katsonis and his men rather than from a doctrinal definition of a privateer in contemporary international law.Footnote 56 Behind the commission's differentiation between the two flotillas lay a more nuanced understanding of what constituted state service and its relationship to the common good.
The ownership structure of the flotillas—one owned by Katsonis and the other by the government—went some ways toward resolving the ambiguities of their legal rights and entitlements; however, it was not the starting point of the commission's reasoning but rather its direct consequence. The distinction was not theoretical but material, and the livelihood of hundreds hung in the balance. Despite the salience that ownership of private property acquired in Russia during Catherine's reign, even Katsonis's initial claims to ownership of his flotilla were not absolute.Footnote 57 Even if no procedure for expropriating private property existed in civil law, the Russian government had centuries of practice in mobilizing private or civilian resources for military purposes. The process existed in several forms, from making contracts with merchants at favorable (for the government) rates for delivery of provisions or timber, to purchasing or requisitioning merchant ships for military use. In the Aegean Archipelago in wartime, under the nebulous “laws of war,” Russian commanders took ships, provisions, and supplies as needed. When the local population provided these necessities willingly, they were reimbursed—often below market rate—for their property; otherwise provisions and supplies were claimed by force as if from enemy populations. The Russian government even reserved its right to employ its privateers in a military capacity in Article 22 of the Rules for Privateers.Footnote 58 State need in wartime, legitimated by most theories of government, expressed itself in the expropriation of merchant and private naval vessels for state wars in England and France just as much as in Russia. In the eyes of the Russian service elite of the late eighteenth century, morality and public service to the Russian Empire demanded personal sacrifice.Footnote 59 Nikolai S. Mordvinov, who later emerged as a liberal in absolute defense of property rights, freely recognized the government's right to requisition Katsonis's flotilla (which Mordvinov actually saw as his own) for state use in the middle of the 1787 Russian–Ottoman War.Footnote 60
The commission recognized the confusion over the indeterminable legal status of Katsonis's flotilla in the many requests that poured in from Katsonis's officers and sailors who asked to receive wages, table money, and expenses for their service to the Russian state. The source of the confusion was the 1789 effort to organize the privateer flotillas sailing around the Mediterranean into a united force. As part of this initiative, Katsonis received orders to set out as head of an “imperial Russian flotilla.”Footnote 61 The government's efforts to reorganize the flotillas and Katsonis's new orders have been interpreted by historians as a change in Katsonis's legal status.Footnote 62 But the idea that Katsonis's status changed from “privateer” to “Russian officer” came from Katsonis himself. Sensing the government's need for his services, he had apparently let the government's favor go to his head. Refusing to follow instructions given to him by Zaborovskii and Gibbs, Katsonis boasted “he was in charge and dependent on no one.” Katsonsis's insistence that he was no longer a privateer, but rather the head of an imperial Russian squadron, robbed Gibbs of means to restrain him. “Perhaps he has secret orders that he has not shared with me,” the latter surmised.Footnote 63 Katsonis's posturing as a Russian officer inclined would-be privateers to join his flotilla and creditors to lend him large sums. As later claimed in their appeals to the commission, these persons truly believed that they were dealing with an agent of the Russian government. For example, in his letters to the commission, Lorenzo Aleandri, a captain who had previously served under the Guglielmo Lorenzi in the state-owned flotilla, explained that Katsonis presented himself as a Russian officer, had a patent, and flew not a privateering flag but a naval ensign.Footnote 64 Katsonis's misrepresentation of his status was likely at the root of the many requests for salary that his former crew submitted to the Russian government, as well as the similarity in the language and arguments that the petitioners presented. Evidently, the commission was confused as well, but ultimately relied on testimony provided by commanders in the field, who stated that Katsonis and his crew were privateers, a determination that was reflected in the commission's 1794 decisions. Vasilii S. Tomara's memorandum on the course of events in the archipelago, written shortly after the Treaty of Jassy was signed in 1792, supported the legal distinction between the two flotillas.Footnote 65 Even Zaborovskii, whose instructions were the source of Katsonis's claims to be an officer, clarified that he considered Katsonis to be a privateer, underscoring that the money paid by the treasury for his vessels and his debts was intended to be repaid by Katsonis from the prizes he captured.Footnote 66
In 1795, in a letter presented to the commission by Count Platon A. Zubov, Catherine's young favorite, Lambros Katsonis disputed the commission's findings that his flotilla “must be considered a privateer flotilla by law.” He expressed “great regret” at learning of the commission's denial of his crew's petitions to be paid for their service. Katsonis clarified the nuances of his relationship to the state, offering a nuanced distinction that was later emphasized to the commission by the general procurator and Catherine II, conceding that until Zaborovskii's arrival in Italy in early 1789, he was indeed a privateer.Footnote 67 However, after he was given Zaborovskii's instructions, he acted solely with military purpose. Katsonis claimed that Zaborovskii's instructions transformed him from a privateer into an officer, articulating what he saw to be the differences between privateers and state war vessels in support of this view: “I fought not against merchant, but enemy military vessels and even ships of the line, where I earned nothing except cannonballs, bullets, and the loss of my vessels.”Footnote 68 Katsonis understood what the Russian government had, perhaps, been reluctant to recognize: that a privateer's aims differed from a country's strategic goals. He emphasized this distinction further by pointing out that were he “only a privateer,” he would have no reason to operate in his assigned location or coordinate with the captain of another flotilla (i.e., Lorenzi). On the contrary, he speculated that as a privateer he would cruise in more financially lucrative places. Katsonis's second line of argument drew a distinction between military and privateer organization and obligations, where privateers did not receive military ranks and did not find themselves required to fit out vessels for the navy or send reports of their battles to the military command. Nor would he be implicated in political intrigues, or have to surrender his prizes for political purposes, he noted, obliquely referencing another demand made on him.Footnote 69 Finally, he complained, that Russian officials treated his flotilla not as his private flotilla, but as one belonging to the state, in that they had sold off some of its vessels and transferred the rest to the Black Sea Fleet.
Katsonis's arguments gained traction with the monarch herself, and in light of his assertions to be a Russian officer, the commission was instructed to reassess its previous decisions with a new periodization of the flotilla's activities. The flotilla's activities were reclassified into three phases, each of different legal standing: in 1788, they were privateers; from 1789 until the ceasefire in 1791, they were in state service; after the peace, Katsonis acted without government authority.Footnote 70 In contravention of this instruction, the commission determined on June 21, 1795 that Katsonis's claim that his flotilla had been appropriated by the treasury was “entirely incorrect” (est’ sovsem ne spravedlivo).Footnote 71 In its next report, the commission addressed all of the warrants that Katsonis provided in support of his claims to be a Russian officer. Most cleverly, it invoked Article 22 of the Rules for Privateers, which anticipated the need for privateers to cooperate with the Russian navy as part of the service that all privateers owed to the Russian crown for authorizing their activities. In the commission's interpretation of Article 22, Zaborovskii had every right to issue instructions to Katsonis as he was acting on Her Imperial Majesty's wishes and instructions. This broad power gave the Russian navy the right to determine the location for Katsonis's activities (which, it claimed, was the most profitable for intercepting Ottoman vessels without encountering competition from Maltese and Sardinian corsairs). In response to Katsonis's other arguments about his obligations to report to superiors or coordinate with other flotillas, the commission deferred to testimony from Psaros, Gibbs, and Tomara, who all stated that Katsonis had never followed through on instructions to coordinate or connect with Lorenzi's flotilla, nor did he obey any of the other orders issued to him by Gibbs, head of flotilla activities in the Mediterranean. In short, the commission decided that Zaborovskii's orders were anticipated by several of the articles in the Rules for Privateers and, as a result, it stood by its decision of considering Katsonis a privateer throughout the entire 1787 war. These conclusions, the commission further declared, obviated any need for reassessment of its decisions in its previous cases.Footnote 72
On the basis of its earlier decision that he was a privateer, the commission decided that the State Treasury would not be responsible for Katsonis's numerous debts.Footnote 73 More extraordinarily still, the commission upheld its decision after being rebuked by the general procurator and the monarch for a second time and asked to reevaluate its decision once more.Footnote 74 In its second response, the commission emphasized that it based the decision on Russian law and on the testimony of the highest commanders of the Russian forces in the archipelago during the war.Footnote 75
The commission's findings spoke directly to the extant ambiguity between naval auxiliaries and privateers in their relationship to the Russian state. Although they operated outside of the regular structure of the armed forces, irregular troops had nevertheless been considered part of Russia's armed forces. They often operated under Russian commanders, and despite some variations, the treasury paid their salaries and provided them with ordinance and uniforms. Regardless of their special status or autonomy within the empire, in battle they contributed to the perception of Russia's conduct of war.Footnote 76 But drawing a legal and conceptual division between irregular, state-financed combatants and privateers allowed the government to distance itself from privateers’ unpalatable practices. After the ceasefire with the Ottoman Empire in 1791, the value of this distinction became even more relevant. In a conference with the Reis Effendi (the Ottoman foreign minister), Aleksandr Khvostov, the Russian Chargé d'Affaires in Constantinople, was put on the spot when he was asked to explain Lambros Katsonis's continued predations on Ottoman commerce in the early months of 1792. As a transcript of the conversation suggests, Khvostov was unsure how to answer for Katsonis's actions until he was able confer with St. Petersburg as to whether Katsonsis's commerce raiding was authorized. He stalled for time by insisting that, to his knowledge, there were no Russian ships of war remaining in the Mediterranean. This distinction proved important, as the Reis Effendi sought confirmation from Khvostov that Katsonis's actions were in no way supported by the Russian government.Footnote 77 The Reis Effendi asserted the Porte's rights to protect its waters and subjects against piracy, a right upon which Russia would also insist, he postulated. In response, Khvostov urged the Reis Effendi to “preserve the honor and integrity of the Russian flag” by not preying on Russian merchant ships in the Mediterranean. By the end of the conversation, Khvostov conceded that there were no more authorized Russian vessels in the Mediterranean, and that the Ottoman Empire was free to use any means necessary to stop Katsonis.Footnote 78 Khvostov's insistence was affirmed by Catherine's instructions to the commission that disavowed Katsonis's flotilla, stating that after the ceasefire it no longer had any legal standing under the protection of the Russian flag.Footnote 79
The commission's deliberations and justifications for its decision went to the heart of the question of whether privateer activities demonstrated commitment to state service. On the moral map of the eighteenth century Russian service nobility, state service was a calling, military rank was an honor, and soldiers were zealous servicemen. Shirking service or duty, as testimony from other officers showed Katsonis to have done, robbed Katsonis of moral virtue.Footnote 80 Even plunder taken in war carried a certain moral stigma.Footnote 81 Although these were idealized values, how could the Commission—composed of several high-ranking civil and military members of the service nobility—recognize Katsonis as one of their own? Their decision looked to Katsonis's own actions to reject his claim that he was a Russian officer. By defining him as a privateer, the commission explained how he could be acting in a semi-military capacity under a Russian mandate but not in accordance with Russian orders or in the spirit of Russian officers. The commission's reasoning articulated a conceptual understanding of how privateers differed from naval officers. The decision recognized that privateers’ activities might coincide with state interests, but that their adherence to and execution of the values that stood behind state interest—the common good—mattered as well.Footnote 82
The distinction between the flotillas’ status in the eighteenth century was more than a question of ownership. It hinged on a judgment of the combatants’ motivation. As legal articulations of a public or common good were still in their infancy, the commission's judgment rested on what it deemed to be the underlying purpose of Katsonis's activities.Footnote 83 Only a few days after it upheld its ruling, the commission's reasoning was accepted by the new emperor Paul I and his new General Procurator of the Senate, Alexander B. Kurakin.Footnote 84
The Consequences of the Katsonis Verdict
For Privateers
The commission's decision in the Katsonis case made the privateers’ requests for prize money to be paid to them all the more relevant and urgent as they could no longer count on state salaries or reimbursements. Whatever skepticism existed about Katsonis's role as an officer, it did not extend to the commission's approbation of the role privateers played in the most recent Russian–Ottoman war. The government's commitment to commending and rewarding privateers was evident from the commission's willingness to overlook lapses in protocol and missed deadlines. Major Spiro Caliga, for example, submitted his papers to the commission eight months after the advertised deadline. When the commission balked at reviewing the claim, the general procurator urged its members to proceed with the case and address the substance of Caliga's requests.Footnote 85 Because the privateers operated as a flotilla rather than as individual vessels, their respective captains submitted demands for each of the prizes that each flotilla captured. Guglielmo Lorenzi's prize money fell outside the scope of this commission and was instead administered by Catherine II's Secretary, Vasilii S. Popov. One can only speculate about the reasons for this alternative venue, but it is likely that fewer of the prizes that Lorenzi captured were contested by their original owners. More significantly, Lorenzi had reported to the prize commission in Syracuse with his catches, where the vessels and cargo were reviewed, condemned, and sold.Footnote 86 However, it was Katsonis who demanded the largest prize sums and rewards from the commission. That Katsonis frequently flouted the procedure of the prize courts did not seem to prevent the commission from evaluating his claims even while in other instances violations of protocol had changed outcomes of cases. The commission spent the better part of the year 1797 calculating the sums owed to Katsonis and his crew, eventually arriving at a figure of nearly 600,000 rubles. It should be noted that the money was intended not for Katsonis alone, but was given to him to satisfy his creditors and to distribute among his crew of several hundred.Footnote 87
The government's commitment to rewarding privateers was also evident in the charitable interpretation of the evidence Katsonis provided to support his claims to such handsome rewards. Ultimately, the main source for Katsonis's claims was his own testimony of his successes in the battlefield, although much of the corroborating evidence—such as his ship log, ownership papers, and even many of the ships that he claimed to have captured—was conveniently destroyed in his final skirmish with the Ottoman navy.Footnote 88 His largest score was the capture of the island of Zea [Kea] and its fortress, which he claimed to have done in compliance with a secret order from the by-then deceased Prince Grigorii A. Potëmkin-Tavricheskii. Although the commission recognized that Katsonis could prove neither the provenance of the order nor verify his extended presence on the island, it considered correspondence addressed to Katsonis on the island of Kea and subsequent mission instructions to sail from the island as substantiation of his presence there. From this, the commission reasoned that if Katsonis had been on the island, then he must have needed to take certain measures to secure it and defend his crew. From this deduction, the commission validated Katsonis's request for reimbursement for the fortifications that he had built on the island. Following this series of inferences, the commission recognized the validity of Potëmkin's oral instructions.Footnote 89 In another instance, when determining payment for captured prisoners, the commission relied on consular transactions concerning sale, ransom, and exchange of prisoners to come to a total of the number of persons from which it would reward Katsonis.Footnote 90 The commission's willingness to accept Katsonis's claims stands in striking contrast to the rigorous analysis of other petitioners’ requests for reimbursement of stolen property. Katsonis's own requests were punctuated with an impressive knowledge and understanding of the law, but even when petitioners did not reference specific statutes in their requests, the commission drew on all available legislation to guide its decisions.
For Merchants
The Commission for Archipelago Affairs also served as a forum that provided merchants with legal recourse in the event of capture or maltreatment by Russian-flagged privateers. This function of the prize court was an important component of the government's attempt to regulate the maritime violence it unleashed. The Russian government was sensitive to the impositions that war caused to neutral trade, and was even more aware that authorizing privateers posed a significant risk to the Orthodox Christians sailing under the Ottoman flags.Footnote 91 The delicate wording of the Rules for Privateers was designed to avoid these molestations; however, the Russian government nevertheless foresaw the need for additional mechanisms to satisfy aggrieved merchants. Merchant complaints travelled through several channels and by no means did all of them end up in front of the commission.Footnote 92 Many merchants submitted complaints to their countries’ consular representatives, who in turn complained to Russian officials posted around the Mediterranean. Eventually, word of these assaults reached Samuel Gibbs, who found himself powerless to compel Katsonis to return unlawfully seized property.Footnote 93 Outstanding grievances then reached the Commission for Archipelago Affairs after the end of the war, and the commission had the authority to recognize illegally taken prizes and compel restitution or reimbursement (if not the power to enforce these). A Greek merchant from Livorno, for example, who showed that he had been captured in 1792, after the end of the war, was able to successfully recoup most of his losses from the illegal capture by filing a case with the commission.Footnote 94
The biggest problem for the merchants in recouping their losses, however, was that in many cases the property they sought to have returned or compensated had not been taken by force. The Commission for Archipelago Affairs received numerous complaints from merchants, townspeople, and businessmen who had supplied the Russian flotillas with armaments, cash for provisions and victuals, crewmembers, loans and credit, bespoke dishes and barrels, and other high-cost items.Footnote 95 There were dozens of complaints from merchants from Trieste, Messina, Livorno, Zante, and other places claiming to have provided credit and provisions with the expectation that either Katsonis or the Russian government would reimburse them at the end of the war.Footnote 96 In contravention to the promises and representations Katsonis made to his creditors, the commission determined in many of these instances that the treasury was not obliged to pay for privateers’ expenses.
Although the commission sought to distinguish between voluntary donations of money and supplies and seizures of these items by force, in actuality this distinction was misleading. The Rules forbade the capture of Christian vessels or property, a law to which numerous petitions pointed when protesting the seizure of friendly nations’ vessels and cargo, and one that the commission upheld.Footnote 97 Certainly, many were willing to supply Russian combatants in the battle against the Ottoman Empire. However, others who wished to provide food or supplies feared Ottoman retribution for their assistance to the Russian forces. Captain Stepan P. Khmetevskii reported in his memoirs that sympathetic farmers often urged Russian forces to pretend to take provisions and livestock by force.Footnote 98 In other cases, privateers paid merchants and farmers for the produce and livestock they took, or offered a letter of credit. However, as Lambros Katsonis's testimony to the commission in response to an accusation of theft shows, Katsonis considered taking property from Ottoman subjects or in Ottoman territory as legal under the laws of war. The commission upheld his reasoning, refusing payment for any property that was claimed by Russian irregulars by right of war.Footnote 99 Katsonis's actions suggest that merchants who did not voluntarily provision the troops might have their property seized anyway under a perfectly legal pretext.Footnote 100
In contrast, merchants who gave Katsonis or his captains money, loans, or supplies received a passport that allegedly protected them from further searches or seizures by Russian-flagged privateers for the remainder of the war. As the commission's records show, many merchants were willing to extend credit to the privateer flotillas for a variety of reasons. Chief among them was the perceived credibility of the investment, as they were led to believe that by dealing with Katsonis they were dealing with the Russian government. Katsonis's credibility as an agent of the Russian government was elevated by his assumed power to distribute patents to privateers and travel passports to merchants. As a result, more than a few merchants found themselves disappointed by the commission's final determinations.
Russian Maritime Law After Katsonis
Within the confines of bureaucracy and procedure, which at times restrained the decisions of the Commission for Archipelago Affairs, many have suggested that achieving justice or fairness was an impossible task. Still, the Russian government empowered this appellate-level admiralty court to resolve the deluge of merchant and privateer requests. In substance, if not in procedure, the cases were adversarial, as they placed the interests of the privateers in seeing vessels and cargo condemned as prize against those of the merchants seeking restitution for their losses. But the true significance of these cases was that even though neither side could be truly satisfied, their application to Russia's admiralty courts gave these courts legitimacy and reaffirmed their credibility as arbiters of disputes. Whichever side of the prize case they fell on, Ottoman subjects flocked to Russian admiralty courts, creating the conditions of and adding to the perception of encroachment on Ottoman sovereignty that lay at the heart of the Eastern Question.
Russia's active use of the law of nations as a basis for its relationships with the denizens of the Eastern Mediterranean provides new insight into the Russian–Ottoman confrontation. Most analyses of this relationship look to Articles VII and XIV of the 1774 Treaty of Küçük-Kaynarca, the interpretation of which by the middle of the nineteenth century mutated into claims of protection over all Christians in the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 101 However, this bilateral treaty was not the only basis for Russia's relationship with Orthodox Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire. Other international norms provided a legal basis for this relationship, and the relationship was not unidirectional. Appeals by Ottoman subjects, former Ottoman subjects, and other mariners from the Mediterranean to the Russian government for legal recourse made a powerful statement about the legitimacy of legal institutions and the search for justice through the Russian Empire. Many privateers sought out the Russian legal system to reward them for their service, and many aggrieved merchants went directly to the Russian admiralty courts to seek restitution for their property. Although Russian admiralty courts, at times, made decisions that weighed against Russia's short-term or financial interests, it is notable that Russia's admiralty courts became a central mechanism by which individuals and groups asserted their interests and received legal standing irrespective of the outcome. The cases in front of the commission reflected different conflicts evident in the Mediterranean: conflicts that did not always fall across national and religious lines, but rather across social or socioeconomic lines. It is fitting that the Russian admiralty commission should have been called upon to resolve these tensions, as it was Russia's maritime legal politics that created them in the first place.
The Commission for Archipelago Affairs established important precedents for the practice of Russian admiralty law. The ambiguity of Katsonis's standing in Russian service compelled the commission to confront (and accept) certain realities in sanctioning privateers. For one thing, the Russian Admiralty no longer seemed conflicted about the privateers’ motivations. Having decided that a privateer's status had more to do with his financial motivations than the relationship to the state, the Russian commission elided the debates in other parts of Europe about the morality of privateering.Footnote 102 In 1854, when moral outrage combined with political expediency to compel the first international agreements to abolish privateering, the Russian navy looked to its previous experiences with Katsonis and other privateers in an effort to organize new fleets to assist with commerce raiding during the Crimean War.Footnote 103 Russian consular officials and naval commanders recruited privateers in naval campaigns throughout the first half of the nineteenth century; however, to my knowledge, none of these recruits were ever Russian subjects. In response to a suggestion at the height of the Napoleonic Wars to permit Russian subjects to sail as privateers, the Admiralty College vetoed the proposed plans to do so.Footnote 104 Privateers recruited in the 1806–7 Mediterranean campaigns even received less favorable prize payouts than the privateers of the 1787 war. Naval officers, on the other hand, saw their financial prospects from seizing merchant ships improve dramatically in 1806, with the passage of a new comprehensive prize law.
The decisions of the Commission for Archipelago Affairs demonstrate the difficulties of using European conventions of prize law to understand the Russian practice of privateering. It points to an oft-forgotten truth that adopting common European practices required reconciliation with Russian laws and practices more than those who see international law as universal would have one believe, even among jurists in the late imperial period. The imperial Russian jurist Fedor F. Martens believed international law to be an essential component of Russia's Europeanization.Footnote 105 Like other theoreticians and practitioners of international law in the late nineteenth century, Martens saw international law as a civilizing process, comparable with that which Russia had undergone through the forceful will of Peter the Great.Footnote 106 However, Martens's view of Russian sovereigns’ willing engagement with conventions of the law of nations is at odds with much recent scholarship on the relationship between imperialism and the development of modern international law. The Third World critique of international law, for example, demonstrates the inherent unevenness and biased categories within which international law operates, challenging the anodyne view of international law among its first proponents and many practitioners today.Footnote 107 But what of states like Russia that willingly engaged in a legal discourse with Europe to better and secure their positions in international society? Whatever the role of law inside Russia, the empire used European legal norms to empower its subjects and institutions. It tried to protect these principles by encoding them in its own legislation, and upheld them through its own legal system. Russian elites perpetuated these ideas and spread them to new geographic locales. Through their application to international legal norms, both the empire's elites and its subjects showed that they understood the malleability of these norms and their power to advance their own interests. Whatever the eighteenth and nineteenth century foreign observers wrote of Russia's legal institutions, through its practices, the Russian Empire demonstrated that it understood much about the European law of nations and its advantages in helping Russia achieve its imperial aims.
