What Was the Crimean War?
The Crimean War, fought from October 1853 to February 1856, set the Russian Empire against a coalition of the Ottoman Empire, France, the British Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. Although the fighting spread to the Caucasus, the Baltic, and even the Pacific, the decisive theater was the Crimean peninsula, where the allies besieged the Russian naval base of Sevastopol. Russia lost, and lost badly: the defeat laid bare how far its military, economy, and administration had fallen behind, and it pushed Tsar Alexander II into a sweeping program of military and social reform whose centerpiece was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.
Historians often describe the conflict as the first “modern war” of the industrial age, because new technologies — railways, the telegraph, rifled firearms, ironclad warships, photography — all played significant roles in it. It was also covered intensively by foreign correspondents, and it left enduring images in the popular imagination, from the doomed “Charge of the Light Brigade” to Florence Nightingale’s transformation of military nursing.
Causes of the war
The quarrel that started the war concerned the Christian holy places in Palestine, then under Ottoman rule: Russia asserted a right to protect the Ottoman Empire’s Orthodox Christians, while France claimed the same role for its Catholics. Behind this religious dispute lay larger forces — the weakening of Ottoman power, which was leaving a vacuum in the Middle East, and the competing ambitions of Russia, France, and Britain in the region.
Events escalated in July 1853, when Russian troops occupied Moldavia and Wallachia (modern Romania), two Ottoman principalities, after the Ottomans refused the Menshikov mission’s demand for a Russian protectorate over the empire’s Orthodox Christians. The Ottoman declaration of war followed in October 1853, and in November the Russian navy annihilated the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Sinop. That victory proved costly for Russia: alarmed at the prospect of Russian power reaching into the Mediterranean, Britain and France entered the war on the Ottoman side in March 1854.
London and Paris had several motives for intervening. They were anxious about Russian expansion toward the Mediterranean and the Middle East and suspected the occupation of the principalities would never be reversed; the British also worried about a Russian threat to India, and both powers valued the Ottoman Empire as a barrier holding Russia back.
The Crimean campaign
The heart of the war was the campaign in Crimea itself. British, French, and Ottoman forces came ashore on the peninsula’s western coast in September 1854 and laid siege to Sevastopol, Russia’s principal naval base on the Black Sea. What followed was grim: savage fighting, appalling conditions, and heavy losses on both sides.
The allies had counted on taking Sevastopol quickly and then moving against other Russian targets, but formidable Russian defenses, difficult terrain, and mounting casualties wrecked that timetable. Instead the siege dragged on for nearly a year, from September 1854 to September 1855, becoming the defining struggle of the war.
Other theaters saw action too. Anglo-French squadrons raided Russian naval bases and shipping in the Baltic, though with little to show for it, and an attack on the Russian base at Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, on the Pacific, was beaten off. Russia’s one clear success came in the Caucasus, where its forces took the Ottoman fortress of Kars in November 1855.
The Battle of the Alma and the Charge of the Light Brigade
Two episodes from the war became especially famous. The first was the Battle of the Alma on 20 September 1854 — the war’s opening major engagement — in which the allies beat the Russian army and pushed it back toward Sevastopol. Despite the victory, the city did not fall, and the campaign hardened into a long siege.
The second came on 25 October 1854, at the close of the Battle of Balaclava, when the British light cavalry brigade under Lord Cardigan was sent charging against Russian artillery positions. The result was carnage: the brigade suffered massive casualties, and the episode came to symbolize the incompetence of the British military command. Alfred, Lord Tennyson fixed it in cultural memory with his poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
The impact of the war
For Russia, the war was a shattering self-revelation. Defeat showed that the army was backward, the economy inadequate, and the administration riddled with corruption and incompetence. It also brought home to Russian society the wretched conditions of the ordinary soldier and the suffering endured by the people.
A change of ruler opened the door to reform. Nicholas I died in March 1855, shortly before Sevastopol fell, and his son and successor Alexander II came to the throne determined to overhaul the Russian state and modernize its military. His greatest measure was the emancipation of the serfs, which released millions of private serfs from personal bondage.
Military reform followed under the new minister of war, Dmitry Milyutin, whose wide-ranging program brought in the Berdan breech-loading rifle, created a system of military districts, extended the railway network, and restructured the officer corps.
Internationally, the consequences were equally significant. The war left the Ottoman Empire weaker, increasingly unable to hold its territories or fend off European encroachment. Over the longer run it also reshuffled Europe’s alliances: France ultimately aligned with Russia through the Franco-Russian alliance of 1891-1894, while Britain, alarmed by the rise of Germany, reached its own rapprochement with Russia in 1907.
The Treaty of Paris
The Treaty of Paris, signed in March 1856, ended the war on terms painful for Russia. The Black Sea was neutralized and closed to all warships, and Russia renounced its protectorate over the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire. Russians widely regarded the settlement as a humiliation, and it shaped the empire’s foreign policy for the following two decades.
The Crimean War reshaped European warfare and forced Russia onto a path of reform and modernisation — a path that closed one era of Russian history and would lead, in time, to the upheavals of the early twentieth century. The new technologies that the Crimean War brought into use — railways, the telegraph, rifled firearms, ironclad warships, and photography — would shape the wars of the next sixty years, from the American Civil War to the Russo-Japanese War to the First World War. The alliance system that emerged from the war, the Franco-Russian rapprochement of 1891-1894 and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, would in turn shape the diplomacy of the First World War.