Hello and welcome to a history of Europe Key Battles podcast.

This is the French Revolutionary Wars, part two of six.

Music Last week I gave some background to the state of Europe on the eve of the French Revolution of 1789.

The 1780s witnessed a revolt in the Dutch Republic,

which in 1786 was put down by a Prussian army with the encouragement of the British.

However, the main conflict of the continent of that decade

occurred on the other side of Europe, in the south and the southeast which initially the French were not involved in.

The The author Tim Blanning in his book The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars

dates the beginning of the upheavals which shook Europe at the turn of the century

to the 17th of August 1787, two years before the French Revolution.

On that day in Constantinople, the Ottomans arrested the Russian ambassador Count

Burgarkov in the Topkapi Palace and declared war on St. Petersburg.

In May and June of that year, Catherine II, the Great of Russia, had made a tour through

her newly acquired territories to north of the Black Sea,

and celebrated the formal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.

The acquisition of these territories after the Russian victory over the Ottomans is described in a previous episode on the Russo-Turkish Wars 1768 to 74.

Catherine made no secret that her ultimate objective was to capture Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and its restoration to Orthodox Christianity.

In the year 1779, she gave her grandson the provocative name of Constantine,

and the infant prince was taught the Greek language and reared by a Greek nanny.

In addition, she proposed to the Hebsburg Emperor Joseph II, a joint offensive on Turkish

possessions in Europe.

Moldavia, Velakia and Bessarabia would be combined to form the new kingdom of Dacia, to be ruled

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