The Crimean War

Grigory Shukaev painted the fighting on the Malakhov at Sevastopol in 1856, a year after the battery in the picture. Guns, smoke, a redoubt: this is a near-contemporary canvas of the siege, not Aivazovsky’s 1852 harbour from the chapter on Catherine’s Crimea. Do not confuse the two. The last article closed on Nicholas’s freeze and a foreign policy that had isolated him. This page is the war that followed: October 1853 to February 1856, Russia against Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire, later joined by Sardinia-Piedmont. It arose from great-power conflict in the Middle East and, more directly, from Russian demands to exercise protection over the Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman sultan, and from a dispute with France over privileges of the Orthodox and Catholic churches in the holy places in Palestine.

Supported by Britain, the Turks took a firm stand. The Russians occupied the Danubian principalities — modern Romania — on the Russo-Turkish border in July 1853. The British fleet was ordered to Constantinople on 23 September. On 4 October the Turks declared war and opened an offensive in the principalities. After the Russian Black Sea fleet destroyed a Turkish squadron at Sinope, the British and French fleets entered the Black Sea on 3 January 1854 to protect Turkish transports. On 28 March Britain and France declared war on Russia. To satisfy Austria and avoid having that country also enter the war, Russia evacuated the Danubian principalities. Austria occupied them in August 1854. Nicholas, Britannica’s reign article says, found himself alone fighting the Crescent, supported by such countries of the Cross as France, Great Britain, and Sardinia — in part because of his own miscalculations, rigidity, and bluntness.

In September 1854 the allies landed troops in Russian Crimea and began a yearlong siege of the Russian fortress of Sevastopol. Major engagements were fought at the Alma River on 20 September, at Balaklava on 25 October — commemorated in “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson — and at Inkerman on 5 November. On 26 January 1855 Sardinia-Piedmont entered the war and sent 10,000 troops. Nicholas died in February 1855, of pneumonia after an ordinary cold, while the siege still held. His last words, already reported, told the heir to serve Russia. The heir was Alexander II. The fortress did not fall until September. This page will not steal the next chapter’s reforms. It will record the war the son inherited and the treaty he had to accept.

Roger Fenton photographed a ravine road scattered with cannonballs in 1855: Valley of the Shadow of Death, under the siege. A camera, not a studio. Use it as the ground of the war, then return to the Malakhov. Cannonballs on a track are not the treaty of March 1856.

Finally, on 11 September 1855, three days after a successful French assault on the Malakhov, a major strongpoint in the Russian defences, the Russians blew up the forts, sank the ships, and evacuated Sevastopol. Secondary operations were conducted in the Caucasus and in the Baltic. After Austria threatened to join the allies, Russia accepted preliminary peace terms on 1 February 1856. The Congress of Paris worked out the final settlement from 25 February to 30 March. The Treaty of Paris, signed on 30 March 1856, guaranteed the integrity of Ottoman Turkey and obliged Russia to surrender southern Bessarabia at the mouth of the Danube. The Black Sea was neutralized, and the Danube was opened to the shipping of all nations. The Épinal print of the congress is a popular group of sovereigns, not the treaty text. Use it as the peace as a picture-shop imagined it.

The war was managed and commanded very poorly on both sides. Disease accounted for a disproportionate number of the approximately 250,000 casualties lost by each side. When news of deplorable conditions reached the British public, Mary Seacole financed her own passage to Balaklava and established the British Hotel as a base to treat the sick and wounded. Improvements at the field hospital at Üsküdar by Florence Nightingale revolutionized the treatment of wounded soldiers. Those names are Britannica’s medical sequel, not this site’s invention. They belong here as a reminder that the war’s dead were not only men under the Malakhov. They were men in hospitals. The Russian side of that medical story is not given in the same paragraph. This article will not invent it.

The war did not settle the relations of the powers in eastern Europe. It did awaken the new Russian emperor Alexander II, who succeeded Nicholas I in March 1855, to the need to overcome Russia’s backwardness in order to compete successfully with the other European powers. A further result was that Austria, having sided with Britain and France, lost the support of Russia in central European affairs. The previous chapter’s Sevastopol was a harbour begun in 1784. This chapter’s Sevastopol is a fortress evacuated in 1855. The same name, two centuries of use, two pictures that must not be swapped. Aivazovsky’s roads under cloud stay in Catherine’s Crimea. Shukaev’s battery stays here. Fenton’s ravine stays here. The neutralized Black Sea is the strategic insult. Southern Bessarabia is the territorial one. Backwardness is the lesson the next chapter will try to answer.

Keep Pugachev out of this page. Keep the Nakaz out of it. Keep 1812’s Moscow fire out of it except as a different fire in a different war. The Crimean War is 1853–56: principalities, Sinope, allied declaration in March 1854, Alma, Balaklava, Inkerman, a siege, Nicholas’s death, the Malakhov, evacuation, a congress, a treaty. Readers who want Alexander II, emancipation, and revolutionaries will find them in Chapter XII. This article’s last job is to hand them a defeated empire that still has serfs, a neutralized sea, and a young emperor who has been told, by events, that the freeze did not work. Do not write 1861 here. Write 30 March 1856, and stop.

The harbour Catherine had opened was surrendered after a siege. The peace told the son that the father’s freeze had left the empire behind.

Nicholas had wished to be a policeman of Europe. He ended isolated, fighting Ottomans backed by Britain and France, with Austria threatening to join. The prestige of 1814 lasted, Britannica said, until mid-century. Mid-century arrived as a siege. The Holy Alliance had not bound London or Paris to his reading of Orthodox protection. Official Nationality had not produced rifled guns enough. Gendarmes could not garrison the Malakhov. Those sentences are the moral the sources allow. They are not a lecture from 1917. They are why the next chapter is called Russia changes. This chapter is still Napoleon and the large nineteenth-century empire, ending when that empire has to sign a peace that strips the Black Sea of its war fleet.

Do not invent a casualty table beyond Britannica’s about 250,000 on each side, disease disproportionate. Do not invent a Russian nurse to match Nightingale. Do not invent the wording of the treaty beyond integrity of Ottoman Turkey, southern Bessarabia, neutralized Black Sea, Danube opened. Do not invent Alexander II’s first speech. The awakening to backwardness is the sourced hinge. The next book of this history may open it. This page should leave it closed, with a print of a congress and a photograph of a road. Shukaev’s battery is the fight. Fenton’s balls are the siege as a camera saw it. Pellerin’s sovereigns are the peace as a shop sold it.

Paul, Alexander, Napoleon, 1812, Paris, the Decembrists, Nicholas: seven articles led here. The eighth is a war that undoes the rank won in the fifth. Europe’s greatest land power of 1814 is, in 1856, a power told to keep its warships out of the Black Sea. The large Russia of the nineteenth century remains large on the map. It is no longer, in its own eyes, sufficient. That is enough for an ending. The next emperor will try to make it sufficient by freeing serfs and reforming courts. Those acts have other titles. This title remains the Crimean War, with Sevastopol as the word and 30 March 1856 as the date.

Imagerie Pellerin at Épinal printed the Congress of Paris in 1856 as a family of sovereigns. Popular wood, not a protocol. Use it for the peace as an image, then put it aside.

Stop this page before emancipation. The next chapter begins with Alexander II. The Crimean War here is causes, principalities, Sinope, allied war, a siege, a death in February 1855, the Malakhov, a treaty in March 1856, and an awakening to backwardness. Shukaev’s redoubt is the fight. Fenton’s ravine is the ground. The Épinal table is the close. Catherine’s harbour had become a fortress and then a wreck. The son who inherited the wreck would be told to change Russia. That telling is the end of Chapter XI and the start of Chapter XII.

The procession into Paris in 1814 and the print of a congress in 1856 are the two Paris pictures of this chapter, forty-two years apart. Do not confuse them. One is a victory. One is a settlement after a defeat. Between them sit a raft, a fire, a square, and a freeze. That is the nineteenth century this book needed to tell before it can say that Russia changes. The serfs are still serfs. The Black Sea is neutralized. The emperor is new. The next page may move. This one should remain a siege and a treaty, honestly dated, with no invented glory on the Malakhov and no invented speech in the Winter Palace.