Medieval Perevoloka and the Construction of the Volga-Don Shipping Canal under Peter the Great

Abstract

The ancient Cossack portages through the Volga upland — perevoloka — were the main transport communications between the Volga and the Don in the 16th–17th centuries in the area of their maximum convergence. Repeated attempts to construct the Volga-Don shipping canal along one of these portages were made in the Middle Ages but were crowned with success only in Soviet times. This issue has not been sufficiently studied in the scholarhsip. Researchers have written about three old Cossack portages: Kamyshinskii, Dubovskii, and Tsaritsynskii. Practically nothing is known about the Sarpin portage. As a result of the conducted research, the authors of the article come to the conclusion that originally the are between the Volga and the Don was called perevoloka, which was limited to the mouths of the Don rivers — Tsaritsa and Panshinka — and the Volga rivers — Mechetka and Sarpa. It was here that Turkish soldiers in the 16th century tried to build a canal. At the beginning of the 17th century, after the construction of the Tsaritsyn fortress at the mouth of the Tsaritsa river, the Don Cossacks mastered the Kamyshinskii-Ilovlinskii portage, making it the main one and thereby expanding the territory of the portage. Through this portage, Peter the Great made a second attempt to establish the Volga-Don canal between the rivers Kamyshinka and Ilovlia, for which, in order to protect the future waterway between the Volga and the Don, he built the Tsaritsyn line on the perevoloka.

Keywords:

history of Russia of the 16th–17th centuries, source studies, Don Cossacks, Cossack portages, Volga-Don perevoloka, Peter’s Epoch, Volga-Don shipping canal