The Ottoman-Russian War of 1877-1878 is known in Turkey as the "War of '93", because the year fell in 1293 of the Rumi calendar. Russia declared war on 24 April 1877 and sent its army against Ottoman territory in two columns, one through the Balkans and one through the Caucasus, so that the Ottomans had to fight on two fronts at once. Plevna in the west and Kars, and later Erzurum, in the east became the critical points of the defence, and the Anatolian cities behind these lines worked as supply bases that furnished soldiers, provisions and animals. Amasya was one of the links of this chain in inner Anatolia. Together with Tokat and Sivas it was among the places where auxiliary cavalry units for the front were raised, and at the same time it sheltered migrants arriving from the Caucasus and the Balkans.

Amasya as a Campaign City

Amasya's role in the war years did not appear overnight. In Ottoman times the city lay on the trade and post-road routes running east from the Balkans. The central branch from Üsküdar to Diyarbekir passed through Merzifon, Amasya, Turhal, Tokat and Sivas, and the left branch from Üsküdar to Kars followed the same course as far as Merzifon. For this reason Amasya and Tokat were regarded as junctions that met the lodging, provisioning and transport needs of armies marching east. That Amasya was a city of princes and contained palace buildings also influenced the sultans' choice of it as a campaign camp. Selim I and Süleyman the Magnificent are among the sultans who used the city this way, and some received Austrian and Iranian envoys in Amasya and took decisions there that shaped the course of wars.

During the Ottoman-Iranian wars, which stretched over three centuries, the burden on the city was heavy. In peacetime the post stations (menzilhane) underpinned communication, while in wartime they became places where provisions were stockpiled and munitions bound for the front were held. This arrangement lasted until the post-station organisation was abolished in 1829. The Amasya quarter called Devehane (Camel Yard) takes its name from the place where the state camels hired to carry grain and ammunition to the troops were stabled. Supplying pack animals was also among the city's duties: for the Iranian campaign prepared in the summer of 1730, part of the mules and camels needed were bought in Amasya. Turning to the city again in 1877 was therefore the continuation of an old habit.

The Cavalry Shortfall and the Idea of Migrant Units

The Ottoman army entered the War of '93 without comprehensive preparation. The War Ministry had no campaign plan; on the eastern front the views on defence of Mehmed Fevzi Pasha, chief of staff of the Fourth Army, served in practice as the plan of operations. A good part of the shortages had to be made up during the war, from behind the lines. One of the most obvious was cavalry. The Russian force in the Caucasus numbered about 75,000 men, 30,000 of them mounted. Ottoman cavalry was incomparably smaller. The mountainous terrain of the Caucasus, cut by passes, limited large cavalry manoeuvres, but for reconnaissance, liaison and flank protection the only element that could move quickly was still the cavalry.

The answer was sought among the Circassian migrants settled in Anatolia. In the years after the Crimean War there had been migrations from the Caucasus to Anatolia at irregular intervals, and a large Circassian population had accumulated especially in the Central Black Sea region. A good share of the migrants landed at the port of Samsun and were dispersed from there to towns and cities in the interior; large numbers, on a temporary or permanent basis, were settled in the centres and villages of Terme, Akçay, Havza, Ladik, Merzifon, Çorum, Amasya and Erbaa. The Circassians' skill on horseback and their knowledge of the terrain supported the idea. In addition, there were high-ranking Circassian officers in the Ottoman army whose word carried weight among their people. Foremost among them was Brigadier General Musa Pasha (Kundukov).

It was Musa Pasha who first voiced the idea. While serving in Tokat in August 1876 he announced that he wished to join the war together with the migrants of Tokat and its surroundings. The reply from the Imperial Army headquarters said that this patriotic feeling was welcome but that the state considered it more useful for the Pasha and the migrants to go on serving where they were (27 August 1876). Nor was the Circassian migrants' wish to serve new. From the first half of the 1860s many migrants had applied by petition to be enrolled as volunteer or paid soldiers. According to the assessment Hadi Belge relays, this wish is linked to the effort to overcome material hardship, to become established where they had been settled, and to win standing with the public and the government by serving the state. To treat the process as one-sided sacrifice therefore falls short; both the state and the community had mutual expectations.

Forming the Units and Preparations

At the request of Fourth Army officials, as a precaution, the matter was discussed in the Special Council of Ministers (Meclis-i Mahsus-ı Vükela) on 30 November 1876. Under the proposed plan, four cavalry units of a thousand men each would be raised from Circassian migrants living around Sivas, Canik (Samsun) and Erzurum and gathered under Musa Pasha's command. The choice of these three provinces is explained by their dense Circassian population and their proximity to the eastern front. Archive documents use differing wording on whether the units were to be organised as regiments or battalions. The record in the Council speaks of regiments of a thousand men, while a document dated 13 January 1877 describes battalions of a thousand men being sent from Tokat and Sivas to Erzurum.

The assistance for the volunteers was fixed from the start. A cavalryman who brought his own horse, arms and clothing was to receive, once sent to his unit, 300 dirhems of bread a day and as much straw as he needed, plus 30 kuruş a month. As for weapons, it was planned to give every soldier a revolver and an American-made Winchester rifle. Winchester rifles had been bought in the hundreds of thousands before the war and caused no difficulty; revolvers could not be found in sufficient numbers. The correspondence stresses that the close-range fighting had shown the cavalry's need for pistols even more clearly in this war.

Forming an armed unit from civilians could provoke a reaction in European public opinion. The blame laid on irregulars made up of Circassians during the suppression of the Bulgarian uprisings had become an important basis of the propaganda run against the Ottomans. For this reason it was decided to prepare a new and orderly regulation of fourteen articles for the auxiliary forces (asakir-i muavene). Circassian opinion leaders were also asked to take part in the process. Brigadier General İbrahim Pasha, a Circassian and son of Sefer Pasha, and Major Reşit Bey were appointed by imperial decree; these two officers sent telegrams to Circassian notables and tribal chiefs in places such as Sinop, Samsun and Sivas, met them in person, and explained that fighting to protect religion and homeland was a religious duty. It is striking that a call in the name of the "homeland" was made to a community whose history in Anatolia did not exceed fifteen or twenty years. That the call leaned on religion suggests that Muslim identity was more decisive than the idea of defending a homeland.

Those Who Went to the Front from Amasya and Its Surroundings

The units were dispatched to the front on a set schedule, in the numbers needed where they were needed. The base of the eastern front was Erzurum; material and soldiers reaching Trabzon by the Black Sea route were distributed to the front largely from there. In January 1877 five battalions each of first-, second- and third-class soldiers were prepared in Zile, Karahisar, Amasya and Tokat and sent to Erzurum. Ahmed İzzet Pasha, governor of Sivas, reported that eight thousand soldiers in the province had been examined and kept ready and that two regiments would be formed from migrants. Within a few months about 1,106 mounted migrants from Sivas alone were sent to be placed under Musa Pasha. The records of April 1877 show five battalions each of migrant cavalry from Sivas, from Canik and from other provinces such as Ankara, Maraş, Yozgat, Aleppo and Adana being sent to Erzurum; each regiment evidently numbered between 1,000 and 1,200 men.

The clearest record naming Amasya directly concerns the western front. In August 1877 Hacı Hikmet Efendi, one of the Circassian notables, gathered more than 300 cavalrymen from Amasya. These horsemen were sent as auxiliary forces first to Samsun and from there by steamer to the Danube. According to some researchers the number of migrant cavalry on the Danube front reached 15,000 at one point and even exceeded the regular cavalry; this claim rests on Russian archives. The units' provisioning was supplied as far as possible from near their place of duty, and orders were written for this purpose to the people of the sanjaks of Kars, Erzurum and Çıldır and to the tribes of Çarsancak and Muş. For the total number of migrant auxiliaries on the Caucasian front, figures between 12,000 and 50,000 are given. The gap arises from counting infantry as well, from the units reaching the front piecemeal, and from some being sent back. The figure Ahmed Muhtar Pasha gives in his own memoirs lies between 12,000 and 14,000.

Success and Problems at the Front

The Circassian auxiliary cavalry was given patrol, reconnaissance, pursuit, raiding and support duties for the main body. Because the volunteers went to the front with no training or with inadequate training, they were far from the discipline of the regular army. To keep their customary hierarchy and to reduce the coordination problems arising from some of them not knowing Turkish, the units were divided by tribe, the tribes were split into three groups to form regiments, and ranked officers of the regular army were placed at their head. Two of the four regiments were put under the Circassian commanders Brigadier General Musa Pasha and Mustafa Safvet Pasha.

The cavalry took part in the battles of Delibaba, Zivin, Göle and Gedikler. After the cavalry engagement at Gedikler on 18 July 1877, Ahmed Muhtar Pasha reported that the zeal and gallant charges of all the cavalry, and especially of the Circassian migrants, would adorn the pages of history, and he sent warm greetings to their officers and men. The weaknesses of the same units showed when the fighting was turning toward defeat. Units weak in authority and discipline broke easily from the chain of command and scattered in small groups. Those who put the defeat down to causes outside themselves complained of inadequate equipment and of provisions and pay not being given. That some of them troubled and plundered villagers around the battlefield made the picture, already darkened by the defeats at Alaca Dağ and Deveboynu, still worse. Mehmet Arif Bey, who conducted Ahmed Muhtar Pasha's correspondence, relates that the Circassian horsemen often went to Musa Pasha's headquarters to demand compensation for pistols and horses they had lost, insisted that their wounded be treated only by one of their own, and took the seriously wounded home with two or three riders. In his view these attitudes did not fit the obedience that soldiering requires and were one of the reasons the migrant horsemen could not be used well enough.

At the beginning of July 1877 the Circassian cavalry that had joined the front from Sivas deserted, giving the pretext that they had not been paid. In his telegram of 12 July 1877 Ahmed Muhtar Pasha wrote that no one was left in a regiment of eleven hundred migrant horsemen, and that of the roughly two thousand who had come from the Sivas migrants, half were wounded and exhausted and had dispersed. He noted that the real capital consisted of gendarmes, Anatolia's local auxiliary forces and Lezgins, attributed the desertion chiefly to the Circassians' own unruliness, and added that the unpaid wages were being put forward as a pretext. Some of the deserters were caught and given heavy disciplinary punishments; these punishments cost some of them their lives.

In spite of all these drawbacks, the idea of raising cavalry from migrants was not abandoned until the end of the war. In February 1878 Circassian horsemen were still being prepared for the Fourth Army in the province of Sivas. But because peace negotiations had begun and each Circassian horseman would be paid 150 kuruş a month, the practice was no longer thought necessary (17 February 1878).

The End of the War

For most of the war the Ottoman armies remained on the defensive. On the Caucasian front Ahmed Muhtar Pasha halted the Russian advance at Zivin, Gedikler and Yahniler; the Russians, reinforced, turned the Ottoman defence line from the rear at Alaca Dağ in October 1877, and the Ottoman forces lost five to six thousand dead or wounded and 8,500 prisoners. Kars was besieged again on 17 November 1877 and fell, defended by about 25,000 men. The Ottoman army withdrew to Erzurum and set up a new defence line there. In the west, after the fall of Plevna, the Russian army advanced to the gates of Istanbul, as far as Ayastefanos (Yeşilköy). On 31 January 1878 the Ottoman state asked for an armistice, and on 3 March 1878 the Treaty of San Stefano (Ayastefanos) was signed. After objections from the great powers this treaty did not take effect, and the Treaty of Berlin was signed on 13 July 1878. Batum, Kars and Ardahan remained under Russian rule.

The Wave of Migration and the Migrants Who Came to Amasya

The war uprooted a large part of the Muslim population of the Balkans and the Caucasus. Estimates of the number of refugees range from 130,000 to 1.5 million; it is often said that more than a million Ottoman subjects became refugees. Those fleeing occupied lands made for regions they thought safer and took shelter in mosques, schools and houses in Ottoman cities. The Muslim Laz and Georgians around Batum were likewise forced to cross into Ottoman territory. Detailed studies of Amasya's share in these migrations are limited. It is said that some of those from the Batum and Adjara region were settled in Amasya, and that those from Ardanuç were settled around Tokat, Amasya and Sivas; this information has not been confirmed by an archive document.

The effect of earlier waves of migration on the city, by contrast, is documented. In 1863-64 the Amasya section of the road running from Diyarbekir to Samsun was delayed because very many Circassian migrants were then coming and settling in Amasya and the attention of the bureaucracy was turned to this task. Migration was a burden for the settled population too, and places where services were postponed were not few. On the other hand the Ottoman administration had granted land to the migrants and set up migrant commissions, and the Sublime Porte had judged that abandoning the Muslims of the Caucasus to Russian oppression did not befit the prestige of the caliphate. The Circassians who took up arms in 1877 regarded the land where they had settled as home and set out to defend it. For them this war meant not losing a second time the homeland they had once been forced to leave.

Chronology

1863-1864: Many Circassian migrants settle in Amasya; completion of the Amasya section of the Diyarbekir-Samsun road is delayed.

August 1876: Brigadier General Musa Pasha in Tokat proposes raising a cavalry unit from migrants; the proposal is answered with instructions to serve where they are (27 August).

30 November 1876: The Special Council of Ministers discusses forming four migrant cavalry units from around Sivas, Canik and Erzurum.

January 1877: Five battalions each from Zile, Karahisar, Amasya and Tokat are sent to Erzurum.

24 April 1877: Russia declares war on the Ottoman state.

July 1877: The success of the Circassian cavalry at Gedikler is praised; Circassian cavalry from Sivas deserts over pay (12 July).

August 1877: More than 300 cavalrymen gathered from Amasya by Hacı Hikmet Efendi are sent from Samsun to the Danube by steamer.

17 November 1877: The Russian army besieges Kars; the city falls.

17 February 1878: Raising further Circassian horsemen in the province of Sivas is judged unnecessary.

3 March 1878: The Treaty of San Stefano is signed; it is superseded by the Treaty of Berlin on 13 July 1878.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • Hadi Belge, "1877-1878 Osmanlı-Rus Savaşı'nda Amasya ve Tokat Çevresinden Oluşturulan Muhacir Birlikleri", Göç ve İskan Araştırmaları Dergisi, vol. 3, no. 2, 2025, pp. 180-197.
  • Mehmet Beşikçi, "Başıbozuk Savaşçıdan 'Makbul' Tebaaya: 1877-1878 Osmanlı-Rus Savaşında Osmanlı Ordusunda Çerkez Muhacirler", Hacettepe Üniversitesi Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, no. 23, 2015, pp. 85-123.
  • Yusuf Halaçoğlu, "Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda Menzil Teşkilatı Hakkında Bazı Mülahazalar", Osmanlı Araştırmaları, vol. 2, no. 2, 1981, pp. 123-132.
  • Uğur Şakar, "Açıklamalı Bir Kaynakça Denemesi: 93 Harbi (1877-1878 Osmanlı-Rus Savaşı) Üzerine Bazı Çalışmalar", Yakın Tarih Dergisi, vol. 1, no. 4, 2018.

Books

  • Gazi Ahmed Muhtar Paşa, Sergüzeşt-i Hayatımın Cild-i Sanisi, Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, Istanbul 1996.
  • Mehmet Arif Bey, Başımıza Gelenler, ed. Yüksel Kanat, Kapı Yayınları, Istanbul 2024.

Other sources

  • Nedim İpek, "Kafkaslardaki Nüfus Hareketleri", Türkiyat Mecmuası, vol. 20, 1997, pp. 273-313.
  • Mahir Aydın, "Doksanüç Harbi", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 9, Istanbul 1994, pp. 498-499.

Online sources