405 EHR, cxxxii. 555 (April 2017) BOOK REVIEWS thesis maintains that the ‘radical’ Enlightenment was ‘necessarily based on the monist metaphysics of Spinoza’ (p. 126) and that its central thrust was rejection of religious belief (p. 15). Let me therefore take the opportunity to correct this misconception. The thesis holds that the Radical Enlightenment originated not in Spinoza but in a structural political rift in the Netherlands that caused a group, the cercle spinoziste, to tie their attack on religious authority to democratic republicanism (with Franciscus van den Enden the very first to do so in print). Radical Enlightenment was not rejection of religious belief, since it furiously defended toleration and freedom of expression and the right of everyone to believe what they wanted. Its essence was the linkage of democratising republicanism with rejection of religious authority, which it tried to expunge entirely from politics, law and education—recreating the moral order on a purely secular basis. Any account of the thesis which fails to centre this essential link between rejection of religious authority and democratising republicanism is ipso facto inaccurate. JONATHAN ISRAEL doi:10.1093/ehr/cex018 Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton The Russo-Turkish War, 1768–1774: Catherine II and the Ottoman Empire, by Brian L. Davies (London: Bloomsbury, 2016; pp. 315. £22.99). Brian Davies has already become a recognised expert in the military history of Russia before the reign of Peter the Great, having published extensively on steppe warfare before 1700 and on the establishment of a Russian military and administrative presence on the southern borderlands in the seventeenth century. He is now establishing his reputation as an eighteenth-century Russian military specialist with a particular focus on warfare in the south. This present book explains how Catherine the Great’s Russia was able to defeat both the Ottoman Empire and the Polish confederates in the period 1768–74. These were the wars which led to the territorial expansion of Russia to the northern coast of the Black Sea, the acquisition of a large part of what had been the eastern lands of Poland–Lithuania and the conquest of the Crimea or, put another way, finally established Russia as a European great power. This is the first thorough English-language study of the first Russo- Turkish war of 1768–74. It is based on a wide range of published primary and secondary sources. The book is divided into eight chapters, which outline the diplomatic background to the conflict and describe the military organisation of the Ottomans and the Russians by the mid-eighteenth century, followed by a detailed account of the campaigns themselves and ending with an analysis of the terms of the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji in 1774. In the process, Davies analyses both the process of the extension of a Russian military presence in the south and the relationship between Cossack hosts, and other military servitors on the frontiers, and the Russian regular military forces and the Russian government. Davies is particularly strong on the campaigns themselves, taking the reader carefully and skilfully through all the manoeuvres, sieges and battles with an impressive grasp of both tactics and the often complex sequence of events. He also provides excellent background on the process of Russian military and administrative extension of authority to the southern Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article/132/555/405/3894553 by guest on 22 February 2023