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fortress tower

Historical background to the AFP.

With its high walls and square or rounded towers, Akkerman fortress today presents a medieval, pre-Vaubanian aspect. Although it was in Ottoman hands for over three centuries, previous investigators have assumed that the Ottoman contribution to its construction history was negligible. Using as one of their resources historical maps of the site, earlier researchers could see that bastions were added to the original enclosure in the 18th c., in keeping with the demands of siege warfare at that time, but failed to work with the wealth of Ottoman documentary sources which we for the first time utilise in the elucidation of Akkerman’s history. These provide a wealth of information on many aspects of the building of the fortress, as well as on the frequent alterations and additions to its fabric over the centuries that it was a key stronghold on the Ottoman frontier.

The Prime Ministerial Archives in Istanbul (BOA: Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi) preserves much disparately-organised material relating to the building and repair of Ottoman infrastructure around the empire, such as roads, bridges, and fortresses. Although the documentation that must be relied upon to piece together the early construction and reconstruction of these structures is far from consistent, following a period of bureaucratic reorganization around the turn of the 17th to 18th c., the progress of such works, from inception to completion, was recorded in dedicated registers of the central financial department (maliye). Prior to the appearance of these registers information on building works around the empire was haphazardly distributed, and consisted for the most part of lists of designated and disbursed monies with little to no explicit, descriptive information on the circumstances relating to the activity that was being financed. By contrast, the new-style registers contain copies or summaries of petitions, reports, memoranda, and orders. They provide in intricate detail information on such matters as when construction or reconstruction works were carried out and what form these took; the location and dimensions of works to be undertaken and damage to be repaired; the amount, source and costs of the materials to be used in the works; the sources and costs of transportation of these materials; the sources and costs of labour needed to carry out the works in question; and a step-by-step record of the administrative procedures involved in undertaking the works.

Whereas the information in these registers is largely quantitative in nature, there are also archival documents concerning repairs at Akkerman that are more descriptive than quantitative. These refer, for instance, to the fact that building works were necessary, but provide no estimate of costs or precise extent. In both these classes of document mention is made of specific locations or features of the fortress, such as named towers and gates, localisation of which is an essential preliminary to ascertaining which parts of the fortress have undergone repair or modification.

Narrative sources in Ottoman and Russian are also being consulted, in order to provide an accurate timeline of the later history of Akkerman. We are consulting some of the many plans of the fortress in Russian and Ukrainian repositories in order to improve on the poor reproductions available in existing publications as well as locate hitherto unknown ones. References to plans of the fortification or of proposed modifications to its form are referred to in various of the Ottoman archival documents described above, but these were separated from the texts to which they pertain and to date we have been unable to locate them.