Crimean War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Crimean War began in October 1853 when Russian troops crossed the River Prut into Ottoman-controlled Moldavia and Wallachia, and it would not end until the Treaty of Paris was signed on the 30th of March 1856. What started as a tsar's demand that the Ottoman Empire's Orthodox subjects be placed under Russian protection spiraled into a collision of four empires. Russia faced not only the Ottomans but the combined forces of Britain, France, and eventually the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont. Fewer than half of the 80,000 Russian soldiers who crossed the Prut in 1853 survived, and nearly all of those deaths came not from enemy fire but from disease. How did a diplomatic quarrel over Christian holy sites become one of the bloodiest sieges of the century? What did it mean for the future of Russia, for nursing, for ironclad ships, and for the map of Europe? And who was the British ambassador so feared in Constantinople that Russia's tsar cursed his name?

• 2. The Sick Man and His Rivals

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  The historian A. J. P. Taylor argued that the war grew not from aggression but from interlocking fears: Nicholas I needed a subservient Ottoman government for Russian security, Napoleon III needed a foreign success to shore up his domestic position, and Britain needed an independent Ottoman state to safeguard the eastern Mediterranean. Those fears had deep roots. The Serbian Revolution of 1804 had already carved out the first autonomous Balkan Christian nation under Ottoman rule. The Greek War of Independence, which began in 1821, exposed the empire's military fragility. In 1826, Sultan Mahmud II disbanded the centuries-old Janissary corps in what became known as the Auspicious Incident, stripping the empire of its standing army in the short term. A year later, an Anglo-Franco-Russian fleet destroyed almost all of the Ottoman naval forces at the Battle of Navarino. By 1830, Greece was independent. Muhammad Ali of Egypt, the empire's most powerful vassal, declared independence in 1831, and Ottoman forces were defeated so badly that Mahmud II had to ask Russia for help. A Russian army of 10,000 landed on the shores of the Bosphorus in 1833 to keep the Egyptians from capturing Constantinople. That intervention produced the Treaty of Hunkar Iskelesi, which gave Russia a military alliance with the Ottomans and a secret clause allowing the Ottomans to close the Straits to foreign warships whenever Russia was under threat. Britain reversed that advantage by pressing for the London Straits Convention in 1841, which deprived Russia of its right to block warships from entering the Black Sea. Meanwhile, the trade treaty of 1838 opened Ottoman markets to British goods on unrestricted terms, transforming the empire into what Orlando Figes described as a virtual free-trade zone. British exports to the Ottoman Empire nearly tripled between 1840 and 1851. Russia, for its part, never grasped how much that commercial stake had changed British priorities. Tsar Nicholas continued to seek a negotiated partition of Ottoman territory with Britain, not understanding that a weak but intact Ottoman Empire now suited British interests far better than any carve-up.

• 3. The Holy Places Pretext

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  French Emperor Napoleon III set the immediate chain of events in motion in May 1851 by appointing Charles, marquis de La Valette, a prominent Catholic clericalist, as his ambassador to the Ottoman court. La Valette's mission was to assert French sovereign authority over the Christian population of Palestine, directly challenging Russia's sponsorship of Eastern Orthodoxy. Napoleon reinforced the point by sending the ship of the line Charlemagne into the Black Sea, violating the London Straits Convention. That show of force, combined with money, persuaded Ottoman Sultan Abdulmecid I to sign a new treaty granting France and the Catholic Church supreme authority over the Christian holy places, including the Church of the Nativity, which had been held by the Greek Orthodox Church. Nicholas I responded by deploying his 4th and 5th Army Corps along the River Danube. He then sent Prince Menshikov on a special mission to the Ottoman capital in February 1853 to demand a Russian protectorate over all 12 million Orthodox Christians in the empire. The Sultan rejected the sweeping demands, strongly encouraged to do so by the British ambassador, Stratford Canning, 1st Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, whose influence at the Ottoman court was so great that Russia's tsar fumed at what he called the infernal dictatorship of this Redcliffe. The ambassador was known in Constantinople as the Great Elchi, and the Sultan's ministers lived, as one account put it, in terror of a personal visit from him. A compromise was reached on Orthodox access to the Holy Land, but Menshikov's main demand was rejected. Nicholas then crossed the River Prut in late June 1853, occupying the Danubian Principalities. Most historians today accept that the dispute over the holy places served as little more than a pretext.

• 4. Sinop and the Road to War

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  On the 30th of November 1853, a Russian squadron of six ships of the line, supported by five smaller warships, attacked the Ottoman fleet harboured at Sinop. The Russians destroyed eleven Ottoman warships, mostly frigates, while they sat anchored under the protection of onshore artillery. The Ottoman fleet suffered a crushing defeat. The press in Britain and France immediately labelled the engagement the massacre of Sinope and used it as propaganda to build public support for entering the war, even though Russia and the Ottomans were already at war and there was no evidence of Russian atrocities. Britain's outrage was further stoked by the presence of HMS Retribution, which had approached Sevastopol on the 22nd of December 1853 and whose commander received an ultimatum not to allow any ships in the Black Sea. By the 27th and the 28th of March 1854, after Russia ignored an Anglo-French ultimatum to withdraw from the Danubian Principalities, Britain and France formally declared war. Karl Marx, writing for the New-York Tribune around 1853, saw the conflict as a contest between the democratic ideals set in motion by the great movement of 1789 and the absolutism of the Tsar. Among the notable passages that Tsar Nicholas himself annotated in the margin was a memorandum by Moscow University professor Mikhail Pogodin, pointing out that France had taken Algeria and Britain was annexing Indian principalities without disturbing the balance of power, while Russia's far more limited moves in Moldavia and Wallachia were treated as a threat to European peace. Nicholas wrote beside that passage: This is the whole point.

• 5. Battles on Multiple Fronts

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  After the allied landings at Varna in June 1854, the Ottomans under General Omar Pasha crossed the Danube and captured Calafat in October 1853. On the 6th of January 1854, Russian forces attempted to retake it, and the resulting fighting around the village of Chetatea, nine miles north of Calafat, drove the Russians out. Russian forces then laid siege to the city from the 28th of January 1854, but the siege was lifted by May. At Silistra in the east, Russian forces besieged the city from the 14th of April with 60,000 troops against a garrison of 15,000; that siege was also lifted on the 23rd of June 1854 under Austrian diplomatic pressure. The Caucasus front was a separate conflict altogether. In the campaign of 1853, a combined Ottoman force of about 30,000 moved east toward the main Russian concentration at Gyumri. At the Battle of Basgedikler, the Ottomans lost 6,000 men, half their artillery, and their entire supply train. In 1855, the most consequential action in the Caucasus was the Siege of Kars. Russian General Nikolay Muravyov, judging that the Ottoman garrison there had about five months of supplies, chose to encircle the town with cavalry and starve it out rather than risk a direct assault. A late attempt at a direct assault on the 29th of September 1855 failed, with Russians losing 8,000 men and the Ottomans 1,500. Kars surrendered on the 28th of November. In the Baltic Sea, an Anglo-French fleet destroyed the Russian Bomarsund fortress on Aland Islands in August 1854. The blockade of the Gulf of Finland denied Russia its import trade and forced more expensive overland shipments, helping shorten the war. In September 1855, the allies attacked Kinburn in the Dnieper estuary, marking the first use of ironclad ships in naval warfare.

• 6. The Charge and the Siege

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  On the 25th of October 1854, a large Russian assault on the allied supply base at Balaclava met the 93rd Highlanders under Sir Colin Campbell. Rather than forming the traditional defensive square, Campbell had his men stand in a line just two ranks deep, trusting in the accuracy of their new Minie rifles. The Times correspondent William Howard Russell watched from the ridge and described what he saw as a thin red streak topped with steel, a phrase that became known as the Thin Red Line. The engagement became notorious for a different reason: a series of misunderstood orders led Captain Louis Nolan to point toward the nearest Russian guns in the wrong direction, and the Earl of Cardigan formed up the Light Brigade and led it the full length of the Valley of Balaclava under Russian fire. The charge caused 278 casualties among the 700-man unit and was later memorialized in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem. The Siege of Sevastopol that followed lasted 337 days. During that time, garrison commander Admiral Pavel Nakhimov fell on the 30th of June 1855, and British commander Lord Raglan died on the 28th of June. The conditions were brutal enough that opposing commanders signed short-term truces to remove corpses from the battlefield, truces described by Leo Tolstoy in his Sevastopol Sketches. The city finally fell on the 9th of September 1855, after French forces captured the Malakoff fort in an assault that the Russians could not reverse. Rather than surrender the docks intact, the Russians blew up their powder magazines and retreated north. On the 28th of February, multiple mines destroyed five docks, a canal, and three locks.

• 7. Aftermath and Reform

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  Florence Nightingale's work in the military hospitals during the war gave her worldwide attention and launched the professionalization of modern nursing. The war's logistical disasters drove that demand: on the 14th of November 1854, the Balaklava Storm sank 30 allied transport ships, including one carrying winter clothing. The road from the coast to the front collapsed into a quagmire. A tramway was ordered and arrived in January but did not become useful until March. A telegraph cable was ordered as well, and 21 miles of cable were eventually laid across frozen ground. For Russia, the defeat struck far deeper than logistics. The war drained the treasury, weakened the Imperial Russian Army, and undermined Russia's standing across Europe. Tsar Nicholas, full of remorse for the disasters he had caused, caught pneumonia and died on the 2nd of March 1855, before the war was over. His successor faced what Russia's educated elites now recognized as the country's fundamental structural problems. The defeat became a catalyst for the emancipation reform of 1861, which abolished serfdom, and for overhauls in the justice system, local self-government, education, and military service. The Treaty of Paris, signed on the 30th of March 1856, forbade Russia from basing warships in the Black Sea. The Ottoman vassal states of Wallachia and Moldavia became largely independent. Christians in the Ottoman Empire gained a degree of official equality, and the Orthodox Church regained control of the Christian churches that had been at the centre of the original dispute. The war also left a practical military legacy: it was one of the first conflicts in which explosive naval shells, railways, and telegraphs played a decisive role, and it was among the first to be documented extensively in photographs.