1853 - 1856
Photo: Central Naval Museum, St. Petersburg/Wikipedia • Believed to be in the Public Domain
The Crimean War was a military conflict fought from October 1853 to February 1856 in which Russia lost to an alliance made up of the Ottoman Empire, the United Kingdom, Kingdom of Sardinia and France. The immediate cause of the war involved the rights of Christian minorities in the Holy Land, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. The French promoted the rights of Roman Catholics, while Russia promoted those of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Longer term causes involved the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the unwillingness of Britain and France to allow Russia to gain territory and power at the Ottoman Empire's expense. The war stood out for its "notoriously incompetent international butchery".
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While the churches worked out their differences with the Ottomans and came to an agreement, the French Emperor Napoleon III and the Russian Emperor Nicholas I refused to back down. Nicholas issued an ultimatum demanding that the Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire be placed under his protection. Britain attempted to mediate and arranged a compromise that Nicholas agreed to. When the Ottomans demanded changes to the agreement, Nicholas recanted and prepared for war. Having obtained promises of support from France and Britain, the Ottomans declared war on Russia in October 1853.
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In July 1853, Russian troops occupied the Danubian Principalities (now part of Romania, then under Ottoman suzerainty). In October 1853, the Ottomans responded by declaring war. Led by Omar Pasha, the Ottomans fought a strong defensive campaign and stopped the Russian advance at Silistra (in present-day Bulgaria). A separate action on the fort town of Kars in Western Armenia led to a siege, and a Turkish attempt to reinforce the garrison was destroyed by a Russian fleet at Sinop (November 1853). Fearing an Ottoman collapse, France and Britain rushed forces to Gallipoli. They then moved north to Varna in June 1854, arriving just in time for the Russians to abandon Silistra. Aside from a minor skirmish at Köstence (today Constanța), there was little for the Allies to do.
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Frustrated by the wasted effort, and with demands for action from their citizens, the allied commanders decided to attack Russia's main naval base in the Black Sea: Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula. After extended preparations, allied forces landed on the peninsula in September 1854 and marched their way to a point south of Sevastopol after winning the Battle of the Alma (20 September 1854). The Russians counter attacked on 25 October in what became the Battle of Balaclava and were repulsed, however the British Army forces were seriously depleted as a result. A second Russian counter attack, at Inkerman (November 1854), ended in stalemate. The front settled into a siege involving brutal conditions for troops on both sides. Smaller military actions took place in the Baltic (1854-1856; see Åland War), the Caucasus (1853-1855), the White Sea (July-August 1854), and the North Pacific (1854-1855).
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Sevastopol fell after eleven months. Isolated and facing a bleak prospect of invasion from the west if the war continued, Russia sued for peace in March 1856. France and Britain welcomed this development, as the conflict was growing unpopular at home. The Treaty of Paris, signed on 30 March 1856, ended the war. It forbade Russia from basing warships in the Black Sea. The Ottoman vassal states of Wallachia and Moldavia became largely independent. Christians there gained a degree of official equality, and the Orthodox Church regained control of the Christian churches in dispute.
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The Crimean War was one of the first conflicts in which the military used modern technologies such as explosive naval shells, railways, and telegraphs. The war was one of the first to be documented extensively in written reports and in photographs. As the legend of the "Charge of the Light Brigade" demonstrates, the war quickly became a symbol of logistical, medical, and tactical failures and mismanagement. The reaction in Britain led to a demand for professionalism, most famously achieved by Florence Nightingale and Mary Secole, who gained worldwide attention for pioneering modern nursing while treating the wounded.
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The Crimean War marked a turning point for the Russian Empire. The war weakened the Imperial Russian Army, drained the treasury and undermined Russia's influence in Europe. Russia would take decades to recover. The humiliation forced Russia's educated elites to identify the Empire's problems and to recognize the need for fundamental reforms. They saw rapid modernization of the country as its sole way to recover the status of a European power. The war thus became a catalyst for reforms of Russia's social institutions, including the abolition of serfdom and overhauls in the justice system, in local self-government, in education, and in military service
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Source: Wikipedia.
The Russian destruction of the Turkish fleet
at the Battle of Sinop sparked the war.
The French landing near Yevpatoria, in
Kalamita Bay. September 1854.
The Siege of Sevastopol.
British cavalry charging against Russian
forces at Balaclava.
The Treaty of Paris signed on 30 March 1856
at the Congress of Paris.
Did you know?
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The Allied forces didn't always get on!
The British and the French were ancient enemies and they spent most of the Crimean campaign quarreling over strategy and field tactics.
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Clonial prejudices ensured that both the French and the British mistreated their Ottoman allies, who were branded as unreliable and were often beaten, ridiculed or relegated to manual labour. According to one account some of the European troops even forced the Turks to carry them on their shoulders whenever they marched across muddy roads or streams.
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It was the first war to feature news correspondents and battlefield photographers
Thanks to new technologies such as the steamship and the electric telegraph, the Crimean War was the first major conflict where civilian journalists sent dispatches from the battlefield.
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The most notable war correspondent was William Howard Russell, a Times of London reporter who won legions of readers - and the hatred of many generals - for his descriptions of British military blunders and the appalling conditions of the army’s camps and hospitals. Russell’s reports helped convince the British government to allow nurses such as Florence Nightingale to join in the war effort, and his coverage of the disastrous “Charge of the Light Brigade” at the Battle of Balaclava inspired Alfred Tennyson to pen his poem of the same name.
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The war helped convince Russia to sell Alaska to the United States
Several factors were involved in Russia’s decision to sell Alaska, but the most pressing arose after its defeat in Crimea. The Russian government found itself in desperate need of gold to offset its crushing war debts, and there were concerns that Alaska might to be lost to the likes of Great Britain in a future war.
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The United States, which had been friendly with Russia during the Crimean War, eventually emerged as an obvious buyer for the territory. In 1867, after a delay caused by the Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward signed a deal to purchase Alaska for the cut-price rate of $7.2 million - the equivalent of just two cents an acre! The deal proved to be a remarkable investment, but it was initially unpopular among American politicians, some of whom took to calling Alaska “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Icebox.”
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Source: History.com.
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