The Crimean War

1853-1856

Winfried Baumgart

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350083462
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

Winfried Baumgart's masterful history of the Crimean War has been expanded and fully updated to reflect advances made in the field since the book's first publication. It convincingly argues that if the war had continued after 1856, the First World War would have taken place 60 years earlier, but that fighting ultimately ceased because diplomacy never lost its control over the use of war as an instrument in power politics. With 19 images, 13 maps and additional tables as well as a brand new chapters on 'the medical services', this expanded and fully-updated 2nd edition explores * The origins and diplomacy of the Crimean War
* The war aims and general attitudes of the belligerent powers (Russia, France, and Britain), non-belligerent German powers (Austria and Prussia) and a selected number of neutral powers, including the United States
* The characteristics and capabilities of the armies involved
* The nature of the fighting itself The Crimean War: 1853-1856 examines the conflict in both its Europe-wide and global contexts, moving beyond the five great European powers to consider the role and importance of smaller states and theatres of war that have otherwise been under-served. To this end, it looks at fighting on the Danube front, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Caucasian battlefield, as well as the White Sea and the Pacific, with final chapters devoted to the Paris peace congress of 1856, the end of the war and its legacy. This book remains the definitive study of one of the most important wars in modern history.

PART ONE

Origins and
Diplomacy of
the War

1

The real cause of the war – the Eastern Question

The Crimean War is a direct outgrowth of the so-called Eastern Question. This international issue preoccupied the chancelleries of the European great powers for fully a century – from the Greek struggle for independence in the 1820s until the aftermath of the First World War. Although, as far as Turkey is concerned, it could be regarded as formally closed after that war, it survives until the present day in a number of related international problems in the Near East, for example in the struggle about Palestine and in today’s Arab–Israeli and Syrian conflicts; in the tensions between Greece and Turkey about territorial waters and offshore islands; in the related conflict about Cyprus; in the various tensions in the Balkans, amongst them the break-up of Yugoslavia; in the Kurdish problem; and in the manifold disputes in the Caucasus. No other diplomatic question occupied international relations in the nineteenth century with such constancy and with so much inextricable tension as the Eastern Question. In terms of statistics it produced a Russo-Turkish war every twenty or twenty-five years in the period between Peter the Great and the Eastern crisis of 1875–8. In the nineteenth century there were such wars in 1806, 1828, 1853 and 1877. Almost twenty years later a war did not break out, in spite of the Armenian massacres of 1895–6, because Russia’s attention was at that time focused on the Far East. Twenty years after that the two Balkan wars which led directly to the First World War broke out, pointing once more to the highly explosive character of the Eastern Question.

Each of these Russo-Turkish wars ended, with the exception of the Crimean War, with victory for Russia and a corresponding loss of territory by Turkey. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Black Sea was a Turkish inland sea surrounded on all sides by Turkish-held territory. Turkey had to give up this area bit by bit until 200 years later she only retained the southern shores of the Black Sea, including, however, the strategic Straits – Russia’s old dream.

What does the Eastern Question mean? Put in a nutshell, it is the aggregate of all the problems connected with the withdrawal and the rollback of the Ottoman Empire from the areas which it had conquered since 1354 in Europe, Africa and Asia. In terms of geography it was a huge and imposing empire that the Ottoman sultans had hammered together on these three continents through war and conquest. The climax of their external power was reached in the seventeenth century. Their gradual retreat began with the defeat in 1683 at the siege of Vienna and with the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699, which for the first time forced the Turks to give up territory (Hungary and Transylvania) which they had conquered. During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and as a consequence of the First World War the Ottoman Empire gave up the whole Balkan peninsula except a small stretch round Adrianople, the territories on the northern shore of the Black Sea with the Crimea in the centre, the Caucasus region, North Africa from Algeria to Egypt, the whole Arab peninsula and Mesopotamia up to the Persian Gulf.

The Eastern Question only became an international problem in the 1820s when all of the five European great powers became interested in it. In the preceding decades only the two neighbouring powers, Russia and Austria, profited from the withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire.

Looking into the causes of the Eastern Question, three main layers can be discerned: the internal decay of the Ottoman Empire; its weakening through the explosive nationalism which the Balkan peoples developed in the nineteenth century – followed by the peoples in the Near East and North Africa in the twentieth century – all of whom struggled to free themselves from Turkish dominion; and finally the intervention of the European great powers in this process of disintegration.

For the first two causes a few remarks must suffice. There is first of all the geographical overstraining which resulted from the Ottoman conquests: in the end it became more and more difficult to control the periphery from the centre. Next there is the heterogeneous ethnic and religious composition of the conquered peoples. Eventually the Turks as the master race made up only a third of the whole population. The economic structure of the empire was weak, the administration became more and more inefficient and venality and corruption were widespread at all levels. The system of collecting taxes was harsh and arbitrary and constantly led to unrest. At the top of the empire’s administration the system of succession degenerated when the eldest member of the Sultan’s family succeeded to the throne having waded through a welter of blood and murder. The army became increasingly unruly and unwieldy. The crack unit of janissaries developed as a state within the state. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Sultan and his government started reforms. In 1826 the rebellious janissaries, amounting to several thousands, were literally wiped out in one night. British and Prussian officers were engaged to reform the army. In 1839 the Sultan issued a firman decreeing legal equality of Muslims and non-Muslims (rayahs), but in practice this important edict existed only on paper and the other reforms did not go beneath the surface of the problems.

In addition to these symptoms of internal decay there was the disrupting force of nationalism, which permeated the Balkan peoples from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Serbs were the first to wrest one piece of autonomy after another from the Turks until in 1878 they obtained their independence under the guarantee of Europe. The Greeks followed suit, and, after a prolonged war in which the European powers intervened, became independent in 1830 under the protection of Russia, France and Britain. The Rumanians, first with the help of the Russians, then after the Crimean War aided by France and exploiting dissension among the great powers, obtained self-government step by step until they, too, became independent in 1878.

The third main cause of the disruption of the Ottoman Empire, probably the decisive one, was the intervention of the European great powers. As already mentioned, the destiny of the Ottoman Empire, which was spread over three continents and held, along with the Turkish Straits, the strategic routes to Asia, possessing the isthmus of Suez, Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf, became an object of general European interest in the 1820s. In those years the term ‘Eastern Question’ was coined, as was the phrase ‘the sick man on the Bosphorus’ who would not survive long and for whose death all should take precautions, in view of his huge inheritance.

FIGURE 1 ‘Consultation about the State of Turkey’. Napoleon III and an English Minister brooding over the fate of ‘the sick man’. Punch 25 (1853), p. 118. University Library of Heidelberg, CC-BY-SA 3.0.

The interests of Russia as Turkey’s direct neighbour consisted of a mixture of territorial, strategic, economic and religious motives. The Russians had tried to gain access to the ‘warm seas’ (the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean) since the time of Peter the Great. After each war with the Turks they made progress, until in 1783 they obtained the Crimea as a springboard to Constantinople and founded Sevastopol as the finest harbour in the world; in 1829, by virtue of the Peace of Adrianople, they occupied the mouths of the Danube and various positions on the eastern shores of the Black Sea. Odessa was founded as a commercial harbour for the exportation of grain from southern Russia and the Russian government became interested in untrammelled transit through the Straits. In the 1830s, during Mehemet Ali’s struggle with the Sultan, the Holy Places in Palestine were opened up to Christians for the first time for centuries. Russia, her Orthodox Church and the Tsar as its head developed a special interest in the Holy Places, beginning with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. From the 1830s onward, Russian Orthodox pilgrims were foremost among the Europeans to visit Jerusalem and Bethlehem. A rivalry of all Christian churches developed in Palestine. This religious fervour caused the respective governments of the European powers to gain a political foothold in this area. Great Britain especially grew suspicious of Russia’s religious activities, since they were harbingers of future political influence in an area that lay across one of the lifelines to Britain’s Indian Empire.

Since the eighteenth century, Austria had watched Russia’s forward push south into the Balkans with mounting apprehension. Under Metternich she pursued a policy of preserving the weak Ottoman Empire since it granted as much security as a sea, whereas the rising power of Russia would dwarf her own position in the area. Territorial gains in the Balkans would benefit Russia but not Austria, and nationalism spreading among the Turkish-held Balkan peoples might endanger peace and tranquillity in Austria’s own multinational empire. Metternich’s maxim of upholding the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was maintained by his successors in Vienna.

Great Britain had developed a massive interest in the destiny of the Ottoman Empire during the Greeks’ struggle for independence in the 1820s. In the 1830s – since 1833, to be more precise, that is, after the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi which gave Russia a protectorate over Turkey, then threatened by Mehemet Ali – Britain proclaimed the integrity of the Ottoman Empire to be of vital interest to her. This became a fundamental principle of British foreign policy for the rest of the century. The main reasons for this were strategic, political and commercial.

With the advent of steam shipping and railways, from the 1820s the old routes through the Levant to the Far East, and to India especially, which had fallen into disuse, were rediscovered because they saved time and money compared with the route around the Cape of Good Hope. In the 1830s, land-surveying companies bustled in Syria and Mesopotamia and bandied about proposals for building railways. Russia’s forward thrust south to the Turkish Straits was felt to be dangerous to the security of these lines of communication. In these years British public opinion, whipped up by the rabidly Russophobe David Urquhart, developed strong anti-Russian feelings.

Finally, the Ottoman Empire became important by leaps and bounds as a market for British industrial products, especially textiles, and also as a source of raw materials and foodstuffs, foremost among them grain from the Danubian Principalities. Freedom of passage on the lower Danube, the mouths of which – the arm of St Kilia – the Russians deliberately failed to dredge in order to favour the development of their own harbour of Odessa, became a capital British interest. Through the commercial Treaty of Balta Liman of 1838, the Turkish market was thrown open to British commercial enterprise. It has been calculated that British exports to Turkey rose by 800 per cent between 1825 and 1852, and British imports from Turkey rose almost twofold. Thus from the 1830s a deep-seated antagonism developed between Britain and Russia in the Levant and in the Balkans and lasted until the First World War. Further to the east it became simultaneously intertwined with the ‘Great Game for Asia’.

France’s interest in the Ottoman Empire is the oldest among the European great powers. It dates back to the sixteenth century when Francis I, ‘the most Christian king’, allied himself with the head of Islam against the Catholic Habsburgs. The Franco-Turkish treaty of 1535, renewed in 1740, formed the basis of close relations. It granted consular jurisdiction (extraterritoriality) to France over her nationals in the Ottoman Empire – a privilege which was eventually extended to other European countries. During Napoleon I’s expedition to Egypt in 1798, which was directed against Britain’s position in India, French interest in the Ottoman Empire was upgraded politically and strategically. After Nelson’s victory at Abukir a strong rivalry developed in the Levant between France and Britain, but it was not as deep-seated as the corresponding Anglo-Russian competition and was interrupted by periods of cooperation. Still, it remained alive below the surface throughout the nineteenth century. After Napoleon III came to power, France’s interest in the Ottoman Empire was once more outspoken. In his domestic policy the Prince President and Emperor chose to lean on the Catholic Church and therefore turned his attention to the Holy Places in Palestine which had, since the eighteenth century, fallen more and more under the influence of the Orthodox Church, the protector and head of which was the Russian Tsar.

The interest that Prussia took in the fate of the Ottoman Empire was marginal, but by no means negligible. In 1829 she mediated the Russo-Turkish Peace of Adrianople. In the 1840s the romantic and flamboyant Kin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Part One Origins and Diplomacy of the War
• 1 The real cause of the war – the Eastern Question
• 2 Diplomacy during the war, 1853–6
• Part Two The Belligerents and the Non-Belligerents
• 3 The war aims of the belligerents
• 4 The non-belligerent German powers: Austria and Prussia
• 5 The neutral powers
• Part Three The Armies of the Belligerents
• 6 Russia
• 7 France
• 8 Great Britain
• 9 Turkey
• 10 Sardinia
• Part Four The War
• 11 The Danube front, 1853–4
• 12 The Black Sea theatre
• 13 The campaigns in the Baltic, 1854 and 1855
• 14 The Caucasian battlefield, 1853–5
• 15 The minor theatres of war: the White Sea and the Pacific
• 16 Allied war preparations for 1856 and the war council in Paris, January 1856
• Part Five The End of the War
• 17 The Paris peace congress, February–April 1856
• 18 The consequences of the war for international relations
• 19 The medical services
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Copyright