Crimean War

The Crimean War was fought from 1853 to 1856 between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France and, from 1855, the Kingdom of Sardinia. Most of the fighting took place on the Crimean peninsula, around the Russian naval base of Sevastopol. Russia was defeated, and the war became notorious for military mismanagement and for deaths from disease, but also for the nursing reforms of Florence Nightingale and the first extensive newspaper reporting and photography of a war.

By the mid-nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire was widely seen as weakening, and the great powers competed for influence over its future, a problem known as the Eastern Question. Russia had expanded south at Ottoman expense and wanted access through the Turkish Straits to the Mediterranean. Britain and France wished to keep the Ottoman state intact as a barrier to Russian expansion. The immediate quarrel began in a dispute between France, backing Catholic clergy, and Russia, backing the Orthodox, over rights at Christian holy places in Palestine, then under Ottoman rule.

In 1853 Tsar Nicholas I demanded recognition as protector of the Sultan's Orthodox Christian subjects. When the Ottomans refused, Russian troops occupied the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in July. The Ottomans declared war in October. In November 1853 a Russian squadron destroyed an Ottoman flotilla at Sinop on the Black Sea coast, which was reported in the British press as a massacre and hardened public opinion. Britain and France declared war on Russia in March 1854. Under Austrian pressure, Russia withdrew from the principalities that summer.

To strike at Russian naval power, the allies landed in Crimea in September 1854 and defeated a Russian army at the River Alma on 20 September. Instead of pressing on to Sevastopol at once, they laid siege to it. The Russians tried to break the siege at Balaclava on 25 October, a battle remembered in Britain for the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade, caused by a confused order, and again at Inkerman on 5 November, where they were beaten off with heavy losses.

The allied armies then endured a harsh winter with inadequate clothing, shelter and supplies. Many more soldiers died of cholera, dysentery and exposure than of wounds. Reports by the Times correspondent William Howard Russell caused a public outcry in Britain and contributed to the fall of Lord Aberdeen's government in early 1855. Florence Nightingale and her team of nurses worked to improve conditions at the army hospital at Scutari, near Constantinople, and other nurses, including Mary Seacole, cared for soldiers nearer the front.

Nicholas I died in March 1855 and was succeeded by Alexander II. The siege continued for nearly a year, with fighting also in the Baltic, the Caucasus and even the Pacific. On 8 September 1855 French troops stormed the Malakoff, a key fortification, and the Russians abandoned the southern part of Sevastopol. Facing Austrian threats to join the allies, Russia agreed to negotiate.

The Treaty of Paris, signed on 30 March 1856, neutralised the Black Sea, barring Russian and Ottoman warships and naval arsenals there, and placed the Danubian principalities under the collective guarantee of the powers. Russia returned the fortress of Kars in the Caucasus, which it had captured in 1855, and gave up a strip of southern Bessarabia.

Casualty estimates vary widely, but the war killed several hundred thousand soldiers, most of them from disease. France lost roughly 95,000 men and Britain about 22,000; Russian and Ottoman losses were much heavier, though figures differ greatly between sources. Defeat convinced Alexander II that Russia needed modernisation, and he abolished serfdom in 1861. Sardinia's participation helped it win French support for the unification of Italy. The Concert of Europe was weakened, and Russia repudiated the Black Sea clauses in 1870.

Our 1815 map shows the Russian and Ottoman Empires before the war, and the 1878 map shows the region after a further Russo-Turkish war had redrawn the Balkans.