Last weekend RCH delivered the 10 Most Important Battles in Ottoman History, sans those fought against (and with) the Russians, due to the fact that the two empires were such bitter rivals. From the late 16th century to the end of World War I - a span of roughly 350 years - the Russians and the Turks fought each other in contests for imperial dominance over the Balkans, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the straits of the Bosporus and Dardanelles.
Today, the Balkans are a hodgepodge of independent nation-states, the Black Sea and the Caucasus are dominated by Russia, and the straits of the Bosporus and Dardanelles are colloquially referred to as the “Turkish straits.” So the 350-year rivalry went unresolved. To complicate matters, the predecessor state of the Ottoman Empire's main power base, Turkey, allied itself with the enemy of the Russian Empire's predecessor state, the Soviet Union, and the countries remained locked down in a Cold War for another half century after their empires collapsed.
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