| Crimean War | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Ottoman wars in Europe and the Russo-Turkish Wars | |||||||||
 Attack on the Malakoff, by William Simpson | |||||||||
| |||||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Ottoman Empire France[a] United Kingdom[a] Sardinia[b] |
 Russia Greece[c] | ||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
| Strength | |||||||||
|
Total: 673,900 235,568[1] 309,268[2] 97,864[2] 21,000[2] |
Total: 889,000[2]–1,774,872[3] 888,000 mobilised 324,478 deployed | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
|
Total: 165,363–223,000[4] dead |
Total: 450,015 dead[5][2][6] 73,125 combat deaths 376,890 non-combat deaths | ||||||||
| Casualties include death by disease. In all cases, death by disease exceeded the sum of "killed in action" or "died of wounds". | |||||||||
The Crimean War[d] was fought from October 1853 to February 1856[7] between the Russian Empire and an ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom, and Sardinia-Piedmont.
Geopolitical causes of the war included the decline of the Ottoman Empire (the "Eastern Question"), the expansion of Russia in the preceding Russo-Turkish Wars, and the British and French preference to preserve the Ottoman Empire to maintain the balance of power in the Concert of Europe. The flashpoint was a disagreement over the rights of Christian minorities in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, with the French promoting the rights of Roman Catholics, and Russia promoting those of the Eastern Orthodox Church.[8]
The churches worked out their differences with the Ottomans and came to an agreement, but both the French Emperor Napoleon III and the Russian tsar Nicholas I refused to back down. Nicholas issued an ultimatum that demanded the Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire be placed under his protection. Britain attempted to mediate and arranged a compromise to which Nicholas agreed. When the Ottomans demanded changes to the agreement, Nicholas recanted and prepared for war.
In July 1853, Russian troops occupied the Danubian Principalities[7] (now part of Romania but then under Ottoman suzerainty). On 16 October [O.S. 4 October] 1853,[9] having obtained promises of support from France and Britain, the Ottomans declared war on Russia.[10] Led by Omar Pasha, the Ottomans fought a strong defensive campaign and stopped the Russian advance at Silistra (now in Bulgaria). A separate action on the fort town of Kars, in the Ottoman Empire, led to a siege, and an Ottoman attempt to reinforce the garrison was destroyed by a Russian fleet at the Battle of Sinop in November 1853.
Fearing the growth of influence of the Russian Empire, the British and French fleets entered the Black Sea in January 1854.[7] They moved north to Varna in June 1854 and arrived just in time for the Russians to abandon Silistra. In the Baltic, near the Russian capital of Saint Petersburg, an Anglo-French fleet instituted a naval blockade and bottled up the outnumbered Russian Baltic Fleet, causing economic damage to Russia by blockading trade while also forcing the Russians to keep a large army guarding St. Petersburg from a potential allied attack.
After a minor skirmish at Köstence (now Constanța), the allied commanders decided to attack Russia's main naval base in the Black Sea, Sevastopol, in Crimea. After extended preparations, allied forces landed on the peninsula in September 1854 and marched their way to a point south of Sevastopol after they had won the Battle of the Alma on 20 September 1854. The Russians counterattacked on 25 October in what became the Battle of Balaclava and were repulsed, but the British Army's forces were seriously depleted as a result. A second Russian counterattack at Inkerman ended in a stalemate.
By 1855, the Italian Kingdom of Sardinia sent an expeditionary force to Crimea, siding with France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire. The front settled into the Siege of Sevastopol, involving brutal conditions for troops on both sides. Smaller military actions took place in the Caucasus (1853–1855), the White Sea (July–August 1854) and the North Pacific (1854–1855).
Sevastopol finally fell after eleven months, after the French assaulted Fort Malakoff. Isolated and facing a bleak prospect of invasion by the West if the war continued, Russia sued for peace in March 1856. France and Britain welcomed the development, owing to the conflict's domestic unpopularity. The Treaty of Paris, signed on 30 March 1856, ended the war. It forbade Russia to base 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 in dispute.[11]
The Crimean War was one of the first conflicts in which military forces used modern technologies such as explosive naval shells, railways and telegraphs.[12] The war was also one of the first to be documented extensively in written reports and in photographs. The war quickly became a symbol of logistical, medical and tactical failures and of mismanagement. The reaction in Britain led to a demand for the professionalisation of medicine, most famously achieved by Florence Nightingale, who gained worldwide attention for pioneering modern nursing while she treated the wounded.
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. The empire would take decades to recover. Russia's humiliation forced its educated elites to identify its problems and recognise the need for fundamental reforms. They saw rapid modernisation as the sole way to recover the empire's status as 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, local self-government, education and military service.
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).
- ^ Badem 2010, p. 280.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Clodfelter 2017, p. 180.
- ^ Brooks, E. Willis (1984). "Reform in the Russian Army, 1856-1861". Slavic Review. 43 (1): 63–82. JSTOR 2498735.
- ^ Зайончковский А. М. Восточная война 1853–1856. – СПб.: Полигон, 2002. ISBN 5-89173-159-2
- ^ Figes 2010, p. 489.
- ^ Mara Kozelsky, "The Crimean War, 1853–56." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13.4 (2012): 903–917 online.
- ^ a b c "Crimean War". Encyclopedia Britannica. 27 September 2020. Retrieved 28 January 2022.
- ^ "The Crimean War". historytoday.com. Retrieved 3 June 2024.
- ^ "Crimea war of 1853–1856 began – 16 October 1853". Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library.
- ^ Kerr, Paul (2000). The Crimean War. Mcmillan. p. 17. ISBN 978-0752272481.
- ^ Figes 2010, p. 415.
- ^ Royle 2000, Preface.