The Crimean War: A Comprehensive Account

The Crimean War (1853–1856) was a major European war fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, Britain, and Sardinia. The war was fought primarily in the Black Sea region and on the Crimean Peninsula, and it is famous for the brutal siege of Sevastopol, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the work of Florence Nightingale, and the military reforms that followed. It was the only major European war of the mid-nineteenth century, and it ended a long period of British disengagement from continental affairs.

The war is, in the judgment of the historian Dominic Lieven, “the moment when the European state system tried to settle a question that it could not answer.” The Eastern Question — the long-running question of the fate of the Ottoman Empire — produced the war, and the war did not settle it. The settlement of 1856 was, in Lieven’s words, “a treaty in the form of a pause.”

The Eastern Question and the Causes of the War

The Crimean War is often called the last manifestation of the “Eastern Question” — the long-running question of what would happen to the declining Ottoman Empire as it contracted under pressure from Austria and Russia. The immediate dispute concerned the rights of Christian minorities in the Holy Land, then part of Ottoman Syria. France supported the claims of the Roman Catholic Church, which Napoleon III was using as a tool of French influence; Russia supported the rights of the Orthodox Church. When the Ottomans rejected the French claim, supported by Britain, Russia invaded the Danubian Principalities (modern Romania) in July 1853.

The diplomatic collapse was rapid. A British and French fleet entered the Black Sea in January 1854. An Anglo-French ultimatum to Russia was rejected, and Britain and France declared war on 27 and 28 March 1854. Sardinia-Piedmont joined in January 1855, hoping to gain a seat at the peace table for Italian unification.

The Outbreak of War in 1853–1854

The Ottomans declared war on Russia in October 1853 and tried to recross the Danube, but their main force was destroyed at Sinop on 30 November 1853, when the Russian Black Sea Fleet under Admiral Nakhimov destroyed an Ottoman squadron at anchor. The Sinop engagement, an act of war against an Ottoman fleet under cover of Russian land fortifications, was the proximate cause of the Anglo-French intervention. Both governments saw it as further evidence of Russian aggression. The Times of London, in a leading article of December 1853, called for “a vigorous prosecution of the war until Russia is effectually humbled.”

The War in the Black Sea and the Crimea

After inconclusive operations along the Danube, the Anglo-French expedition focused on the Russian naval base of Sevastopol. The British and French landed in the Crimea in September 1854 with the goal of destroying the Russian fleet and arsenal. The Battle of the Alma on 20 September 1854 was a clear allied victory but was not followed by a decisive exploitation. The allies marched around Sevastopol and began a siege from the south.

The Siege of Sevastopol

The siege of Sevastopol was the defining operation of the war. Conditions in the allied trenches were appalling, and the British expedition suffered from cholera, dysentery, and exposure on a scale that would not be matched in British campaigning until the Second Boer War. The city did not fall until September 1855, after repeated allied assaults on the Malakoff and Redan fortifications, the latter of which was the focus of British attacks. The fall of the Malakoff on 9 September 1855, the work of the French, forced the Russians to evacuate Sevastopol the following day.

Other Theatres and the End of the War

The war also included important operations in the Caucasus, where the Ottomans launched repeated unsuccessful offensives against Russian positions, and a small Anglo-French naval expedition in the Baltic and the White Sea. The war’s military stalemate was finally broken by Sevastopol’s fall, and peace negotiations opened in Vienna in February 1856.

The Treaty of Paris (1856)

The Treaty of Paris, signed on 30 March 1856, ended the war. The Black Sea was demilitarised; Russia gave up its protectorate over the Danubian Principalities and the Ottoman Christians; and the European powers guaranteed the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Russia ceded southern Bessarabia to the Principality of Moldavia, which was soon united with Wallachia to form Romania. The treaty did not address the underlying causes of the conflict, leaving the Eastern Question unresolved.

The Long-Term Consequences

The war ended the long period of British and French rivalry, and produced an entente that would shape European diplomacy through the Second Empire. The post-war reforms of the British military, and the expansion of British presence in Egypt that followed the war, marked the beginning of the most active phase of Victorian imperialism. As the historian D. A. Lane-Poole put it in his contemporary The Life of Sir Harry Parkes (1890), the Crimean War was “the last of the old wars and the first of the new.” It was, in the long run, the moment that the British began to look for the imperial glory that the post-1815 peace had denied them.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Crimean War was, for a long time, dominated by the British accounts — the work of the Royal Engineers’ historian Sir Edward Hamley and the more popular accounts of Alexander Kinglake. The post-Cold War revisionist literature, led by Orlando Figes, The Crimean War (2010), and the more recent work of Candan Badem and the contributors to the Oxford History of the Crimean War (2015), has produced a more international picture, in which the Ottoman, French, and Sardinian experiences are treated as serious subjects. The current debate, exemplified in the writing of the contributors to War in History, is over how far the Crimean War was the consequence of mid-Victorian British strategic miscalculation and how far it should be read as the inevitable result of the long Eastern Question.

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