More than any other power, the Russian Empire had religion at its heart. The tsarist system organized its subjects through their confessional status; it understood its boundaries and international commitments almost entirely in terms of faith.

In the founding ideology of the tsarist state, which gained new force through Russian nationalism in the nineteeth century, Moscow was the last remaining capital of Othodoxy, the ‘Third Rome’, following the fall of Constantinople, the centre of Byzantium, to the Turks in 1453. According to this ideology, it was part of Russia’s divine mission in the world to liberate the Orthodox from the Islamic empire of the Ottomans and restore Constantinople as the seat of Eastern Christianity. The Russian Empire was conceived as an Orthodox crusade. From the defeat of the Mongol khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the sixteenth century to the conquest of the Crimea, the Caucasus and Siberia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia’s imperial identity was practically defined by the conflict between Christian settlers and Tatar nomads on the Eurasian steppe. This religious boundary was always more important than any ethnic one in the definition of the Russian national consciousness: the Russian was Orthodox and the foreigner was of a different faith.

Religion was at the heart of Russia’s wars against the Turks, who by the middle of the nineteenth century had 10 million Orthodox subjects (Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Moldavians, Wallachians and Serbs) in their European territories and something in the region of another 3 to 4 million Christians (Armenians, Georgians and a small number of Abkhazians) in the Caucasus and Anatolia.¹³

On the northern borders of the Ottoman Empire a defensive line of fortresses stretched from Belgrade in the Balkans to Kars in the Caucasus. This was the line along which all of Turkey’s wars with Russia had been fought since the latter half of the seventeenth century (in 1686–99, 1710–11, 1735–9, 1768–74, 1787–92, 1806–12 and 1828–9). The Crimean War and the later Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8 were no exceptions to the rule. The borderlands defended by these fortresses were religious battlegrounds, the fault-line between Orthodoxy and Islam.

Two regions, in particular, were vital in these Russo-Turkish wars: the Danube delta (encompassing the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia) and the Black Sea northern coast (including the Crimean peninsula). They were to become the two main theatres of the Crimean War.

With its wide rivers and pestilent marshes, the Danube delta was a crucial buffer zone protecting Constantinople from a land attack by the Russians. Danubian food supplies were essential for the Turkish fortresses, as they were for any Russian army attacking the Ottoman capital, so the allegiance of the peasant population was a vital factor in these wars. The Russians appealed to the Orthodox religion of the peasantry in an attempt to get them on their side for a war of liberation against Muslim rule, while the Turks themselves adopted scorched-earth policies. Hunger and disease repeatedly defeated the advancing Russians, as they marched into the Danubian lands whose crops had been destroyed by the retreating Turks. Any attack on the Turkish capital would thus depend on the Russians setting up a sea route – through the Black Sea – to bring supplies to the attacking troops.

But the Black Sea northern coast and the Crimea were also used by the Ottomans as a buffer zone against Russia. Rather than colonize the area, the Ottomans relied on their vassals there, the Turkic-speaking Tatar tribes of the Crimean khanate, to protect the borders of Islam against Christian invaders. Ruled by the Giray dynasty, the direct descendants of Genghiz Khan himself, the Crimean khanate was the last surviving outpost of the Golden Horde. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century its army of horsemen had the run of the southern steppes between Russia and the Black Sea coast. Raiding into Muscovy, the Tatars provided a regular supply of Slavic slaves for sale in the sex-markets and rowing-galleys of Constantinople. The tsars of Russia and the kings of Poland paid tribute to the khan to keep his men away.¹⁴

From the end of the seventeenth century, when it gained possession of Ukraine, Russia began a century-long struggle to wrench these buffer zones from Ottoman control. The warm-water ports of the Black Sea, so essential for the development of Russian trade and naval power, were the strategic objects in this war, but religious interests were never far behind. Thus, after the defeat of the Ottomans by Russia and its allies in 1699, Peter the Great demanded from the Turks a guarantee of the Greek rights at the Holy Sepulchre and free access for all Russians to the Holy Lands. The struggle for the Danubian principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia) was also in part a religious war. In the Russo-Turkish conflict of 1710–11 Peter ordered Russian troops to cross the River Pruth and invade the principalities in the hope of provoking an uprising by their Christian population against the Turks. The uprising did not materialize. But the idea that Russia could appeal to its co-religionists in the Ottoman Empire to undermine the Turks remained at the centre of tsarist policy for the next two hundred years.

The policy took formal shape in the reign of Catherine the Great (1762–96). After their decisive defeat of the Ottomans in the war of 1768–74, during which they had reoccupied the principalities, the Russians demanded relatively little from the Turks in terms of territory, before withdrawing from the principalities. The resulting Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji granted them only a small stretch of the Black Sea coastline between the Dnieper and Bug rivers (including the port of Kherson), the Kabarda region of the Causasus, and the Crimean ports of Kerch and Enikale, where the Sea of Azov joins the Black Sea, although the treaty forced the Ottomans to surrender their sovereignty over the Crimean khanate and give independence to the Tatars. The treaty also gave Russian shipping free passage through the Dardanelles, the narrow Turkish Straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. But if the Russians did not gain a lot of territory, they gained substantial rights to interfere in Ottoman affairs for the protection of the Orthodox. Kuchuk Kainarji restored the principalities to their former status under Ottoman sovereignty, but the Russians assumed the right of protection over the Orthodox population. The treaty also granted Russia permission to build an Orthodox church in Constantinople – a treaty right the Russians took to mean a broader right to represent the sultan’s Orthodox subjects. It allowed the Christian merchants of the Ottoman Empire (Greeks, Armenians, Moldavians and Wallachians) to sail their ships in Turkish waters with a Russian flag, an important concession that allowed the Russians to advance their commercial and religious interests at the same time. These religious claims had some interesting pragmatic ramifications. Since the Russians could not annex the Danubian principalities without incurring the opposition of the great powers, they looked instead to win concessions from the Porte that would turn the principalities into semi-autonomous regions under Russian influence. Shared religious loyalties would, in time, they hoped, lead to alliances with the Moldavians and Wallachians which would weaken Ottoman authority and ensure Russian domination over south-east Europe should the Ottoman Empire collapse.

Encouraged by victory against Turkey, Catherine also pursued a policy of collaboration with the Greeks, whose religious interests she claimed Russia had a treaty right and obligation to protect. Catherine sent military agents into Greece, trained Greek officers in her military schools, invited Greek traders and seamen to settle in her new towns on the Black Sea coast, and encouraged Greeks in their belief that Russia would support their movement for national liberation from the Turks. More than any other Russian ruler, Catherine identified with the Greek cause. Under the growing influence of her most senior military commander, statesman and court favourite Prince Grigory Potemkin, Catherine even dreamed of re-creating the old Byzantine Empire on the ruins of the Ottoman. The French philosopher Voltaire, with whom the Empress corresponded, addressed her as ‘votre majesté impériale de l’église grecque’, while Baron Friedrich Grimm, her favourite German correspondent, referred to her as ‘l’Impératrice des Grecs’. Catherine conceived this Hellenic empire as a vast Orthodox imperium protected by Russia, whose Slavonic tongue had once been the lingua franca of the Byzantine Empire, according (erroneously) to the first great historian of Russia, Vasily Tatishchev. The Empress gave the name of Constantine – after both the first and the final emperor of Byzantium – to her second grandson. To commemorate his birth in 1779, she had minted special silver coins with the image of the great St Sophia church (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, cruelly converted into a mosque since the Ottoman conquest. Instead of a minaret, the coin showed an Orthodox cross on the cupola of the former Byzantine basilica. To educate her grandson to become the ruler of this resurrected Eastern Empire, the Russian Empress brought nurses from Naxos to teach him Greek, a language which he spoke with great facility as an adult.¹⁵

It was always unclear how serious she was about this ‘Greek Project’. In the form that it was drawn up by Count Bezborodko, her private secretary and virtual Foreign Minister, in 1780, the project involved nothing less than the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, the division of their Balkan territories between Russia and Austria, and the ‘re-establishment of the ancient Greek empire’ with Constantinople as its capital. Catherine discussed the project with the Austrian Emperor Joseph II in 1781. They agreed on its desirability in an exchange of letters over the next year. But whether they intended to carry out the plan remains uncertain. Some historians have concluded that the Greek project was no more than a piece of neoclassical iconography, or political theatre, like the ‘Potemkin villages’, which played no real part in Russia’s foreign policy. But even if there was no concrete plan for immediate action, it does at least seem fairly clear that the project formed a part of Catherine’s general aims for the Russian Empire as a Black Sea power linked through trade and religion to the Orthodox world of the eastern Mediterranean, including Jerusalem. In the words of Catherine’s favourite poet, Gavril Derzhavin, who was also one of Russia’s most important statesmen in her reign, the aim of the Greek project was

It was certainly more than political theatre when Catherine and Joseph, accompanied by a large international entourage, toured the Black Sea ports. The Empress visited the building sites of new Russian towns and military bases, passing under archways erected by Potemkin in her honour and inscribed with the words ‘The Road to Byzantium’.¹⁶ Her journey was a statement of intent.

Catherine believed that Russia had to turn towards the south if it was to be a great power. It was not enough for it to export furs and timber through the Baltic ports, as in the days of medieval Muscovy. To compete with the European powers it had to develop trading outlets for the agricultural produce of its fertile southern lands and build up a naval presence in the warm-water ports of the Black Sea from which its ships could gain entry to the Mediterranean. Because of the odd geography of Russia, the Black Sea was crucial, not just to the military defence of the Russian Empire on its southern frontier with the Muslim world, but also to its viability as a power on the European continent. Without the Black Sea, Russia had no access to Europe by the sea, except via the Baltic, which could easily be blocked by the other northern powers in the event of a European conflict (as indeed it would be by the British during the Crimean War).

The plan to develop Russia as a southern power had begun in earnest in 1776, when Catherine placed Potemkin in charge of New Russia (Novorossiia), the sparsely populated territories newly conquered from the Ottomans on the Black Sea’s northern coastline, and ordered him to colonize the area. She granted enormous tracts of land to her nobility and invited European colonists (Germans, Poles, Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs) to settle on the steppelands as agriculturalists. New cities were established there – Ekaterinoslav, Kherson, Nikolaev and Odessa – many of them built in the French and Italian rococo style. Potemkin personally oversaw the construction of Ekaterinoslav (meaning ‘Catherine’s Glory’) as a Graeco-Roman fantasy to symbolize the classical inheritance that he and the supporters of the Greek project had envisaged for Russia. He dreamed up grandiose neoclassical structures, most of which were never built, such as shops ‘built in a semicircle like the Propylaeum or threshold of Athens’, a governor’s house in the ‘Greek and Roman style’, law courts in the shape of ‘ancient basilicas’, and a cathedral, ‘a kind of imitation of St Paul’s outside the walls of Rome’, as he explained in a letter to Catherine. It was, he said, ‘a sign of the transformation of this land by your care, from a barren steppe to an ample garden, and from the wilderness of animals to a home welcoming people from all lands’.¹⁷

Odessa was the jewel in Russia’s southern crown. Its architectural beauty owed a great deal to the Duc de Richelieu, a refugee from the French Revolution, who for many years served as the city’s governor. But its importance as a port was the work of the Greeks, who were first encouraged to settle in the town by Catherine. Thanks to the freedom of movement afforded Russian shipping by the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, Odessa soon became a major player in the Black Sea and Mediterranean trade, to a large degree supplanting the domination of the French.

Russia’s incorporation of the Crimea followed a different course. As part of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, the Crimean khanate had been made independent of the Ottomans, although the Sultan had retained a nominal religious authority in his role as caliph. Despite their signature on the treaty, the Ottomans had been reluctant to accept the independence of the Crimea, fearing it would soon be swallowed up by the Russians, like the rest of the Black Sea coast. They held on to the powerful fortress of Ochakov at the mouth of the Dnieper river from which to attack the Russians if they intervened in the peninsula. But they had little defence against Russia’s policy of political and religious infiltration.

Three years after the signing of the treaty, Şagin Giray was elected khan. Educated in Venice and semi-Westernized, he was Russia’s preferred candidate (as the head of a Crimean delegation to St Petersburg, he had impressed Catherine with his ‘sweet character’ and handsome looks). Şagin was supported by the Crimea’s sizeable Christian population (Greek, Georgian and Armenian traders) and by many of the Nogai nomads on the mainland steppe, who had always been fiercely independent of the Ottoman khanate and owed their allegiance to Şagin as Commander of the Nogai Horde. Şagin, however, was unacceptable to the Ottomans, who sent a fleet with their own khan to replace him and encouraged the Crimean Tatars to rise up against Şagin as an ‘infidel’. Şagin fled, but soon returned to carry out a slaughter of the rebellious Tatars that appalled even the Russians. In response, and encouraged by the Ottomans, the Tatars began a religious war of retribution against the Christians of the Crimea, prompting Russia to organize the latter’s hurried exodus (30,000 Christians were moved to Taganrog, Mariupol and other towns on the Black Sea coast, where most of them became homeless).

The departure of the Christians seriously weakened the Crimean economy. Şagin became even more dependent on the Russians, who began to pressure him to accept annexation. Anxious to secure the Crimea before the rest of Europe could react, Potemkin prepared for a quick war against the Turks, while procuring Şagin’s abdication in return for a magnificent pension. With the Khan removed to St Petersburg, the Tatars were persuaded to submit to Catherine. Throughout the Crimea there were stage-managed ceremonies where the Tatars gathered with their mullahs to swear an oath on the Koran to the Orthodox Empress a thousand kilometres away. Potemkin was determined that the annexation should at least appear to be the will of the people.

The Russian annexation of the Crimea, in 1783, was a bitter humiliation for the Turks. It was the first Muslim territory to be lost to Christians by the Ottoman Empire. The Grand Vizier of the Porte reluctantly accepted it. But other politicians at the Sultan’s court saw the loss of the Crimea as a mortal danger to the Ottoman Empire, arguing that the Russians would use it as a military base against Constantinople and Ottoman control of the Balkans, and they pressed for war against Russia. But it was unrealistic for the Turks to fight the Russians on their own, and Turkish hopes of Western intervention were not great: Austria had aligned itself with Russia in anticipation of a future Russian-Austrian partition of the Ottoman Empire; France was too exhausted by its involvement in the American War of Independence to send a fleet to the Black Sea; while the British, deeply wounded by their losses in America, were essentially indifferent (if ‘France means to be quiet about the Turks’, noted Lord Grantham, the Foreign Secretary, ‘why should we meddle? Not time to begin a fresh broil’).¹⁸

Ottoman forbearance broke four years later, in 1787, shortly after Catherine’s provocative procession through her newly conquered Black Sea coastal towns, which came just as the Turks were facing further losses to the Russians in the Caucasus.[2] Hopeful of a Prussian alliance, the pro-war party at the Porte prevailed, and the Ottomans declared war on Russia, which was then supported by its ally Austria with its own declaration of war against Turkey. At first the Ottomans had some success. On the Danube front, they pushed back the Austrian forces into the Banat. But military help from Prussia never came, and after a long siege the Turks lost their strategic fortress at Ochakov to the Russians, followed by Belgrade and the Danubian principalities to an Austrian counter-offensive, before the Russians took the important Turkish forts in the Danube estuary. The Turks were forced to sue for peace. By the Treaty of Iaşi, in 1792, they regained a nominal control of the Danubian principalities, but ceded the area of Ochakov to Russia, thereby making the Dniester river the new Russo-Turkish boundary. They also declared their formal recognition of the Russian annexation of the Crimea. But in reality they never fully accepted its loss and waited for revenge.

Long before the Tsar described the Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe’, on the eve of the Crimean War, the idea that it was about to crumble had become a commonplace. ‘Turkey cannot stand, she is falling of herself,’ the Prince of Serbia told the British consul in Belgrade in 1838; ‘the revolt of her misgoverned provinces will destroy her.’⁸

That misgovernment was rooted in the empire’s failure to adapt to the modern world. The domination of the Muslim clergy (the mufti and the ulema) acted as a powerful brake on reform. ‘Meddle not with things established, borrow nothing from the infidels, for the law forbids it’ was the motto of the Muslim Institution, which made sure that the sultan’s laws conformed to the Koran. Western ideas and technologies were slow to penetrate the Islamic parts of the empire: trades and commerce were dominated by the non-Muslims (the Christians and Jews); there was no Turkish printing press until the 1720s; and as late as 1853 there were five times as many boys studying traditional Islamic law and theology in Constantinople as there were in the city’s modern schools with a secular curriculum.⁹

The stagnation of the economy was matched by the proliferation of corrupt bureaucracy. The purchasing of offices for the lucrative business of tax-farming was almost universal in the provinces. Powerful pashas and military governors ruled whole regions as their personal fiefdoms, squeezing from them as many taxes as they could. As long as they passed on a share of their revenues to the Porte, and paid off their own financial backers, no one questioned or cared much about the arbitrary violence they employed. The lion’s share of the empire’s taxes was extracted from the non-Muslims, who had no legal protection or means of redress in the Muslim courts, where the testimony of a Christian counted for nothing. It is estimated that by the early nineteenth century the average Christian farmer and trader in the Ottoman Empire was paying half his earnings in taxes.¹⁰

But the key to the decline of the Ottoman Empire was its military backwardness. Turkey had a large army in the early nineteenth century, and it accounted for as much as 70 per cent of treasury expenditure, but it was technically inferior to the modern conscript armies of Europe. It lacked their centralized administration, command structures and military schools, was poorly trained and was still dependent on the recruitment of mercenaries, irregulars and tribal forces from the periphery of the empire. Military reform was essential, and recognized as such by reformist sultans and their ministers, particularly after the repeated defeats by Russia, followed by the loss of Egypt to Napoleon. But to build a modern conscript army was impossible without a fundamental transformation of the empire to centralize control of the provinces and overcome the vested interests of the 40,000 janizaries, the sultan’s salaried household infantry, who represented the outmoded traditions of the military establishment and resisted all reforms.¹¹

Selim III (1789–1807) was the first sultan to recognize the need to Westernize the Ottoman army and navy. His military reforms were guided by the French, the major foreign influence on the Ottomans in the final decades of the eighteenth century, mainly because their enemies (Austria and Russia) were also the enemies of the Ottoman Empire. Selim’s concept of Westernization was similar to the Westernization of Russia’s institutions carried out by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, and the Turks were conscious of this parallel. It involved little more than the borrowing of new technologies and practices from foreigners, and certainly not the adoption of Western cultural principles that might challenge the dominant position of Islam in the empire. The Turks had invited the French to advise them, partly because they assumed they were the least religious of the European nations and therefore the least likely to threaten Islam – an impression gained from the anti-clerical policies of the Jacobins.

Selim’s reforms were defeated by the janizaries and the Muslim clergy, who were opposed to any change. But they were continued by Mahmud II (1808–39), who built up the military schools established by Selim to undermine the janizaries’ domination of the army by promoting officers on a meritocratic basis. He pushed through reforms of military dress, introduced Western equipment, and abolished the janizaries’ fiefdoms in an effort to create a centralized European-style army into which the Sultan’s household guards would eventually be merged. When the janizaries rebelled against the reforms, in 1826, they were put down, with several thousand killed by the Sultan’s new army, and then liquidated by imperial decree.

As the Sultan’s empire weakened to the point where it seemed in danger of imminent collapse, the great powers intervened increasingly in its affairs – ostensibly to protect the Christian minorities but in reality to advance their own ambitions in the area. European embassies were no longer content to limit their contacts to the Ottoman administration, as they had done previously, but took a hand directly in the empire’s politics, supporting nationalities, religious groups, political parties and factions, and even interfering in the Sultan’s appointment of individual ministers to promote their own imperial interests. To advance their country’s trade they developed direct links with merchants and financiers and established consuls in the major trading towns. They also began to issue passports to Ottoman subjects. By the middle of the nineteenth century as many as one million inhabitants of the Sultan’s empire were using the protective powers of the European legations to escape the jurisdiction and taxes of the Turkish authorities. Russia was the most active in this respect, developing its Black Sea commerce by granting passports to large numbers of the Sultan’s Greeks and allowing them to sail under the Russian flag.¹²

For the Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire, Russia was their protector against the Turks. Russian troops had helped the Serbs to gain autonomy. They had brought Moldavia and Wallachia under Russian protection, and liberated the Moldavians from Turkish rule in Bessarabia. But the Russians’ part in the Greek independence movement showed how far they were prepared to go in their support of their co-religionists to exert their hold over Turkey’s European territories.

The Greek revolution really began in Russia. In its early stages it was led by Greek-born Russian politicians who had never even been to mainland Greece (a ‘geographical expression’ if ever there was one) but who dreamed of uniting all the Greeks through a series of uprisings against the Turks, which they planned to begin in the Danubian principalities. In 1814 a Society of Friends (Philiki Etaireia) was set up by Greek nationalists and students in Odessa, with affiliated branches established soon thereafter in all the major areas where the Greeks lived – Moldavia, Wallachia, the Ionian islands, Constantinople, the Peloponnese – as well as in other Russian cities where the Greeks were strong. It was the Society that organized the Greek uprising in Moldavia in 1821 – an uprising led by Alexander Ypsilantis, a senior officer in the Russian cavalry and the son of a prominent Phanariot family in Moldavia that had fled to St Petersburg on the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war in 1806. Ypsilantis had close connections to the Russian court, where he had received the patronage of the Empress Maria Fedorovna (the widow of Paul I) from the age of 15. Tsar Alexander I had appointed him his aide-de-camp in 1816.

There was a powerful Greek lobby in the ruling circles of St Petersburg. The Foreign Ministry contained a number of Greek-born diplomats and activists of the Greek cause. None was more important than Alexandru Sturdza from Moldavia, a Phanariot on his mother’s side, who became the first Russian governor of Bessarabia, or Ioannis Kapodistrias, a Corfu nobleman who was appointed Russia’s Foreign Minister jointly with Karl Nesselrode in 1815. The Greek Gymnasium in St Petersburg had been training Greek-born youths for military and diplomatic service since the 1770s, and many of its graduates had fought in the Russian army against the Turks in the war of 1806–12 (as did thousands of Greek volunteers from the Ottoman Empire, who fled to Russia at the war’s end). By the time Ypsilantis planned his uprising in Moldavia, there was a large cohort of Russian-trained, experienced Greek fighters on which he could count.

The plan was to start the uprising in Moldavia and then move to Wallachia. The insurgents would combine their attacks with the pandur (guerrilla) militia led by the Wallachian revolutionary Tudor Vladimirescu, another veteran of the Tsar’s army in the Russo-Turkish war of 1806–12, whose peasant followers were in practice more opposed to their Phanariot rulers and landlords than they were to the distant Ottomans. The Treaty of Bucharest had placed the principalities under the joint sovereignty of Russia and the Ottoman Empire. They did not have any Turkish garrisons but the local hospodars were allowed to maintain small armies, which Ypsilantis expected to join the uprising as soon as his army of Greek volunteers from Russia crossed the River Pruth. Ypsilantis hoped that the revolt would spark a Russian intervention to defend the Greeks once the Turks took repressive measures against them. In the Moldavian capital of Iaşi he appeared in a Russian uniform and announced to the local boyars that he had ‘the support of a great power’. There was certainly a great deal of support in the élite circles of St Petersburg, where philhellenic sentiment ran high, as well as among military and Church leaders. The Russian consulates in the principalities even became recruiting centres for the revolt. But neither Kapodistrias nor the Tsar knew anything about the preparations for the uprising, and both men denounced it as soon as it began. However much they might have sympathized with the Greek cause, Russia was the founder of the Holy Alliance, the conservative union formed with the Austrians and Prussians in 1815, whose raison d’être was to combat revolutionary and nationalist movements on the European continent.

Without Russian support, the Greek uprising in the principalities was soon crushed by 30,000 Turkish troops. The Wallachian peasant army retreated to the mountains, and Ypsilantis fled to Transylvania, where he was arrested by the Austrian authorities. The Turks occupied Moldavia and Wallachia, and carried out reprisals against the Christian population there. Turkish soldiers looted churches, murdered priests, men, women and children and mutilated their bodies, cutting off their noses, ears and heads, while their officers looked on. Thousands of terrified civilians fled into neighbouring Bessarabia, presenting the Russian authorities with a massive refugee problem. The violence even spread to Constantinople, where the patriarch and several bishops were publicly hanged by a group of janizaries on Easter Sunday 1821.

As news spread of the atrocities, causing ever-stronger Russian sympathy for the Greek cause, the Tsar felt increasingly obliged to intervene, despite his commitment to the principles of the Holy Alliance. As Alexander saw it, the actions of the Turks had gone well beyond the legitimate defence of Ottoman sovereignty; they were in a religious war against the Greeks, whose religious rights the Russians had a duty to protect, according to their interpretation of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji. The Tsar issued an ultimatum calling on the Turks to evacuate the principalities, restore the damaged churches, and acknowledge Russia’s treaty rights to protect the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects. This was the first time any of the powers had spoken out on behalf of the Greeks. The Turks responded by seizing Russian ships, confiscating their grain, and imprisoning their sailors in Constantinople.

Russia broke off diplomatic relations. Many of the Tsar’s advisers favoured war. The Greek revolt had spread to central Greece, the Peloponnese, Macedonia and Crete. Unless the Russians intervened, they feared that in these regions it would be repressed with similar atrocities to those in the principalities. In 1822 Ottoman troops brutally crushed a Greek uprising on the island of Chios, hanging 20,000 islanders and deporting into slavery almost all the surviving population of 70,000 Greeks. Europe was outraged by the massacre, whose horrors were depicted by the French painter Eugène Delacroix in his great masterpiece The Massacre of Chios (1824). In the Russian Foreign Ministry, Kapodistrias and Sturdza argued for military intervention on religious grounds. In a rehearsal of the arguments employed in 1853 for Russia’s invasion of the principalities, they reasoned that the defence of Christians against Muslim violence should outweigh any considerations about the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. To support revolts in, say, Spain or Austria, they maintained, would be a betrayal of the principles of the Holy Alliance, because these two nations were both ruled by lawful Christian sovereigns; but no Muslim power could be recognized as lawful or legitimate, so the same principles did not apply to the Greek uprising against the Ottomans. The rhetoric of Holy Russia’s duty to its co-religionists was also employed by Pozzo di Borgo, the Tsar’s ambassador to France, though he was more interested in promoting Russia’s strategic ambitions, calling for a war to expel the Turks from Europe and establish a new Byzantine Empire under Russian protection.

Such ideas were widely shared by high officials, army officers and intellectuals, who were increasingly united in the early 1820s by their Russian nationalism and at times by an almost messianic commitment to the Orthodox cause. There was talk of ‘crossing the Danube and delivering the Greeks from the cruelties of Muslim rule’. One leader in the southern army called for a war against the Turks to unite the Balkan Christians in a ‘Greek Kingdom’. The pro-war lobby also had supporters at the court, where the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance were more strictly recognized. The most enthusiastic was Baroness von Krüdener, a religious mystic who encouraged Tsar Alexander to believe in his messianic role and campaigned for an Orthodox crusade to drive the Muslims out of Europe and raise the cross in Constantinople and Jerusalem. She was dismissed from the court and ordered by the Tsar to leave St Petersburg.¹³

Alexander was far too committed to the Concert of Europe to give serious consideration to the idea of unilateral Russian intervention to liberate the Greeks. He stood firmly by the Congress System established at Vienna by which the great powers had agreed to resolve major crises through international negotiation, and realized that any action in the Greek crisis was bound to be opposed. By October 1821 a European policy of international mediation over Greece had already been coordinated by Prince Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister and chief conductor of the Concert of Europe, together with the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh. So when the Tsar appealed to them for support against Turkey, in February 1822, it was agreed to convene an international congress to resolve the crisis.

Alexander called for the creation of a large autonomous Greek state under Russian protection, much like Moldavia and Wallachia. However, Britain feared that this would be a means for Russia to advance its own interests and intervene in Ottoman affairs on the pretext of protecting its co-religionists. Austria was equally afraid that a successful Greek revolt would set off uprisings in parts of central Europe under its control. Since Alexander prized the Austrian alliance above all, he held back assistance to the Greeks, while continuing to urge collective European action to help them. None of the powers would support the Greeks. But two things happened in 1825 to change their minds: first, the Sultan called in Mehmet Ali, his powerful vassal in Egypt, to put down the Greeks, which the Egyptians did with new atrocities, giving rise to an ever-growing wave of pro-Greek sympathy and ever-louder calls for intervention in liberal Europe; and then Alexander died.

The Tsar’s visit to London did nothing to dispel the British mistrust of Russia that had been building for decades. Despite the fact that the threat of Russia to British interests was minimal, and trade and diplomatic relations between the two countries were not bad at all in the years leading up to the Crimean War, Russophobia (even more than Francophobia) was arguably the most important element in Britain’s outlook on the world abroad. Throughout Europe, attitudes to Russia were mostly formed by fears and fantasies, and Britain in this sense was no exception to the rule. The rapid territorial expansion of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century and the demonstration of its military might against Napoleon had left a deep impression on the European mind. In the early nineteenth century there was a frenzy of European publications – pamphlets, travelogues and political treatises – on ‘the Russian menace’ to the Continent. They had as much to do with the imagination of an Asiatic ‘other’ threatening the liberties and civilization of Europe as with any real or perceived threat. The stereotype of Russia that emerged from these fanciful writings was that of a savage power, aggressive and expansionist by nature, yet also sufficiently cunning and deceptive to plot with ‘unseen forces’ against the West and infiltrate societies.[5]

The documentary basis of this ‘Russian menace’ was the so-called ‘Testament of Peter the Great’, which was widely cited by Russophobic writers, politicians, diplomats and military men as prima facie evidence of Russia’s ambitions to dominate the world. Peter’s aims for Russia in this document were megalomaniac: to expand on the Baltic and Black seas, to ally with the Austrians to expel the Turks from Europe, to ‘conquer the Levant’ and control the trade of the Indies, to sow dissent and confusion in Europe and become the master of the European continent.

The ‘Testament’ was a forgery. It was created sometime in the early eighteenth century by various Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian figures connected to France and the Ottomans, and it went through several drafts before the finished version ended up in the French Foreign Ministry archives during the 1760s. For reasons of foreign policy, the French were disposed to believe in the authenticity of the ‘Testament’: their main allies in Eastern Europe (Sweden, Poland and Turkey) had all been weakened by Russia. The belief that the ‘Testament’ reflected Russia’s aims formed the basis of France’s foreign policy throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹²

Napoleon I was particularly influenced by the ‘Testament’. His senior foreign policy advisers freely cited its ideas and phraseology, claiming, in the words of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, the Foreign Minister of the Directory and the Consulate (1795–1804), that ‘the entire system [of the Russian Empire] constantly followed since Peter I… tends to crush Europe anew under a flood of barbarians’. Such ideas were expressed even more explictly by Alexandre d’Hauterive, an influential figure in the Foreign Ministry who had the confidence of Bonaparte:

The ‘Testament’ was published by the French in 1812, the year of their invasion of Russia, and from that point on was widely reproduced and cited throughout Europe as conclusive evidence of Russia’s expansionist foreign policy. It was republished on the eve of every war involving Russia on the European continent – in 1854, 1878, 1914 and 1941 – and was cited during the Cold War to explain the aggressive intentions of the Soviet Union. On the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 it was cited in the Christian Science Monitor, Time magazine and the British House of Commons as an explanation of the origins of Moscow’s aims.¹⁴

Nowhere was its influence more evident than in Britain, where fantastic fears of the Russian threat – and not just to India – were a journalistic staple. ‘A very general persuasion has long been entertained by the Russians that they are destined to be the rulers of the world, and this idea has been more than once stated in publications in the Russian language,’ declared the Morning Chronicle in 1817. Even serious periodicals succumbed to the view that Russia’s defeat of Napoleon had set it on a course to dominate the world. Looking back on the events of recent years, the Edinburgh Review thought in 1817 that it ‘would have seemed far less extravagant to predict the entry of a Russian army into Delhi, or even Calcutta, than its entry into Paris’.¹⁵ British fears were supported by the amateur opinions and impressions of travel writers on Russia and the East, a literary genre that enjoyed something of a boom in the early nineteenth century. These travel books not only dominated public perceptions of Russia but also provided a good deal of the working knowledge on which Whitehall shaped its policies towards that country.

One of the earliest and most controversial of such travelogues was A Sketch of the Military and Political Power of Russia in the Year 1817 by Sir Robert Wilson, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who had served briefly as a commissioner in the Russian army. Wilson made a number of extravagant claims – incapable of demonstration or disproof – which he presented as the fruit of his inside knowledge of the tsarist government: that Russia was determined to drive the Turks from Europe, conquer Persia, advance on India, and dominate the world. Wilson’s speculations were so wild that in some quarters they were ridiculed (The Times suggested that Russia might advance to the Cape of Good Hope, the South Pole and the Moon) but the extremity of his argument guaranteed attention for his pamphlet, and it was widely debated and reviewed. The Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review – the most read and respected journals in government circles – agreed that Wilson had overestimated the immediate threat of Russia but nonetheless praised him for raising the issue and thought that the conduct of that country henceforth merited the ‘careful scrutiny of distrust’.¹⁶ In other words, the general premise of Wilson’s extreme views – that Russian expansionism was a danger to the world – was now to be accepted.

From this point on the phantom threat of Russia entered into the political discourse of Britain as a reality. The idea that Russia had a plan for the domination of the Near East and potentially the conquest of the British Empire began to appear with regularity in pamphlets, which in turn were later cited as objective evidence by Russophobic propagandists in the 1830s and 1840s.

The most influential of these pamphlets was On the Designs of Russia, previously discussed, by the future Crimean War commander George de Lacy Evans, which first laid out the danger posed by Russia’s activities in Asia Minor. But this pamphlet was notable for another reason as well: it was here that de Lacy Evans advanced the earliest detailed plan for the dismemberment of the Russian Empire, a programme that would be taken up again by the cabinet during the Crimean War. He advocated a preventive war against Russia to block its aggressive intentions. He proposed attacking Russia in Poland, Finland, the Black Sea and the Caucasus, where it was most vulnerable. His eight-point plan reads almost like a blueprint of the larger British aims against Russia during the Crimean War:

David Urquhart, the famous Turcophile, also advocated a preventive war against Russia. No writer did more to prepare the British public for the Crimean War. A Scotsman educated at Oxford in Classics, Urquhart first encountered the Eastern Question in 1827, when, at the age of 22, he enrolled in a group of volunteers to fight for the Greek cause. He travelled widely in European Turkey, became enamoured of the virtues of the Turks, learned Turkish and modern Greek, adopted Turkish dress, and quickly gained a reputation as something of an expert on Turkey through his reports on that country which were published in the Morning Courier during 1831. Making use of a family friendship with Sir Herbert Taylor, private secretary to King William IV, Urquhart got himself attached to Stratford Canning’s mission to Constantinople to negotiate a final settlement of the Greek boundary in November 1831. During his time there he became convinced of the threat posed by Russian intervention in Turkey. Encouraged by his patrons at the court, he wrote Turkey and Its Resources (1833), in which he denied that the Ottoman Empire was about to collapse and highlighted the commercial opportunities awaiting Britain if it gave aid to Turkey and protected it from Russian aggression. The success of the book earned Urquhart the favour of Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary in Lord Grey’s government (1830–34), and a new appointment to the Turkish capital as part of a secret mission to examine the possibilities for British trade in the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, southern Russia and Afghanistan.

In Constantinople, Urquhart became a close political ally of the British ambassador, Lord John Ponsonby, an ardent Russophobe who was unshakeable in his conviction that Russia’s aim was the subjugation of Turkey. Ponsonby urged the British government to send warships into the Black Sea and to aid the Muslim tribes of the Caucasus in their fight against Russia (in 1834 he even won from Palmerston a ‘discretionary order’ granting him authority to summon British warships into the Black Sea if he deemed it necessary but this was soon cancelled by the Duke of Wellington, who thought better of giving so much power to make war to such a notorious Russophobe). Under the influence of Ponsonby, Urquhart became increasingly political in his activities. He did not stop at writing but actually did things to make war against the Russians more likely. In 1834 he visited the Circassian tribes, pledging British support for their war against the Russian occupation, an act of provocation against Russia that obliged Palmerston to recall him to London.

There, Urquhart stepped up his campaign for British military intervention against Russia in Turkey. A pamphlet he had written with Ponsonby, England, France, Russia and Turkey, was published in December 1834. It went through five editions within a year and received very positive reviews. Encouraged by this success, in November 1835 Urquhart launched a periodical, The Portfolio, in which he aired his Russophobic views, of which the following is typical: ‘The ignorance of the Russian people separates them from all community with the feelings of other nations, and prepares them to regard every denunciation of the injustice of their rulers as an attack upon themselves, and the Government has already announced by its Acts a determination to submit to no moral influences which may reach it from without.’¹⁸

In another act of provocation Urquhart published in The Portfolio what purported to be copies of Russian diplomatic documents captured from the palace of Grand Duke Constantine, the governor of Poland, during the Warsaw insurrection in November 1830 and passed on by Polish émigrés to Palmerston. Most, if not all, of these documents were fabricated by Urquhart, including a ‘suppressed passage of a speech’ in which Tsar Nicholas was said to have declared that Russia would not stop its repressive measures until it had achieved the complete subjugation of Poland, and a ‘Declaration of Independence’ supposedly proclaimed by the Circassian tribes. But such was the climate of Russophobia that they were widely accepted as authentic documents by the British press.¹⁹

In 1836 Urquhart returned to Constantinople as secretary of the embassy. His growing fame and influence in British diplomatic and political circles had forced Palmerston to bring him back into office, although his role in the Turkish capital was rather limited. Once again, Urquhart took up the Circassian cause and attempted to stir up a conflict between Russia and Britain. In his most brazen act yet, Urquhart conspired to send a British schooner, the Vixen, to Circassia in deliberate contravention of the Russian embargo against foreign shipping on the eastern Black Sea coast imposed as part of the Treaty of Adrianople. The Vixen belonged to a shipping company, George and James Bell of Glasgow and London, that had already clashed with the Russians over their obstructive quarantine regulations on the Danube. Officially, the Vixen was transporting salt, but in fact it was loaded with a large supply of weapons for the Circassians. Ponsonby in Constantinople had been informed of the ship’s intended journey and did nothing to discourage it; nor did he reply to the Bells’ enquiries about whether the Foreign Office recognized the embargo and whether Britain would defend their shipping rights, as Urquhart had assured them that it would. The Russians were aware of Urquhart’s plans: in the summer of 1836 the Tsar had already complained to the British ambassador in St Petersburg after one of Urquhart’s followers had travelled to Circassia and promised British support for their war against Russia. The Vixen sailed in October. As Urquhart had anticipated, a Russian warship seized the Vixen on the Caucasian coast, at Soujouk Kalé, prompting loud denunciations of the Russian action and calls for war in The Times and other newspapers. Ponsonby urged Palmerston to send a fleet into the Black Sea. Although he was reluctant to recognize Russia’s embargo or its claims to Circassia, Palmerston was nevertheless not ready to be pushed into a war by Urquhart, Ponsonby and the British press. He acknowledged that the Vixen had contravened Russian regulations, which Britain recognized, but only in so far as these related to Soujouk Kalé, not to the whole Caucasian coastline.

Recalled once again from Constantinople, Urquhart was dismissed from the foreign service and charged with a breach of official secrecy by Palmerston in 1837. Urquhart always claimed that Palmerston had known about the Vixen plan. For years he harboured a deep grudge against the Foreign Secretary for supposedly betraying him. As Britain moved towards entente with Russia, Urquhart became increasingly frustrated and extreme in his Russophobia, calling for an even stronger anti-Russian line – not discounting war – to defend Britain’s trade and its interests in India. He even accused Palmerston of being in the pay of the Russian government, a charge taken up by his supporters in the press, including in The Times, a major influence on middle-class opinion, which joined the Urquhart camp in opposition to the ‘pro-Russian’ foreign policy of Palmerston. In 1839 a long series of letters to The Times by ‘Anglicus’ – a pseudonym of Henry Parish, one of Urquhart’s acolytes – almost took on the status of editorials, warning of the dangers of any compromise with an empire bent on the domination of Europe and Asia.

Urquhart continued his attacks on Russia in the House of Commons, to which he was elected in 1847 as an independent candidate (taking as his colours the green and yellow of Circassia). By this time Palmerston was the Foreign Secretary in Lord John Russell’s Whig administration, which took office in 1846, following the split of the Conservatives over the repeal of import tariffs on cereal products (the Corn Laws). Urquhart renewed his charges against him. In 1848 he even led a campaign to impeach Palmerston for his failure to pursue a more aggressive policy against Russia. In a five-hour speech in the House of Commons, Urquhart’s main ally, the MP Thomas Anstey, accused him of a shameful foreign policy that had endangered Britain’s national security by failing to defend the liberty of Europe against Russian aggression – in particular, the constitutional liberties of Poland, whose maintenance had been made a condition for the transfer of the Polish kingdom to the Tsar’s protection by the other powers at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Russia’s brutal crushing of the Warsaw uprising in 1831 had obliged Britain to intervene in Poland in support of the rebels, even at the risk of a European war against Russia, Anstey maintained. In self-defence, Palmerston explained why it had been unrealistic to take up arms in favour of the Poles, while laying out the general principles of liberal interventionism which he would call on again when Britain entered the Crimean War:

Urquhart’s Russophobia may have been at odds with Britain’s foreign policy in the 1840s but it had considerable support in Parliament, where there was a powerful lobby of politicians who backed his calls for a tougher line against Russia, including Lord Stanley and Stratford Canning, who replaced Ponsonby as ambassador to Constantinople in 1842. Outside Parliament, Urquhart’s backing for free trade (the major reform issue of the 1840s) won him a broad following among Midlands and northern businessmen, who were persuaded by his frequent public speeches that Russian tariffs were a major cause of Britain’s economic depression. He also had the support of influential diplomats and men of letters, including Henry Bulwer, Sir James Hudson and Thomas Wentworth Beaumont, co-founder of the British and Foreign Review, which became increasingly hostile to Russia under Urquhart’s influence.

As the decade wore on, a mood of growing Russophobia was to be found in even the most moderate intellectual circles. Highbrow periodicals like the Foreign Quarterly Review, which had previously discounted the ‘alarmist’ warnings of a Russian threat to the liberty of Europe and British interests in the East, succumbed to the anti-Russian atmosphere. Meanwhile, among the broader public – in churches, taverns, lecture halls and Chartist conventions – hostility to Russia was rapidly becoming a central reference point in a political discourse about liberty, civilization and progress that helped shape the national identity.

The failure of the Menshikov mission convinced the Tsar that he needed to resort to military means. On 29 May he wrote to Field Marshal Paskevich that if he had been more aggressive from the start he might have been successful in extracting concessions from the Turks. He did not want a war – he feared the intervention of the Western powers – but he was now prepared to use the threat of war, to shake the Turkish Empire to its foundations, to get his way and enforce what he saw as Russia’s treaty rights to protect the Orthodox. He revealed his thinking (and state of mind) to Paskevich:

The Tsar’s plan was the result of a compromise between his own initial inclination to seize Constantinople in a surprise attack (before the Western powers could react) and the more cautious thinking of Paskevich. Paskevich had commanded the punitive campaign against the Hungarians and the Poles and was the Tsar’s most trusted military adviser. He was sceptical about such an offensive and fearful that it would entangle Russia in a European-wide war. The key difference between the two centred on their views of Austria. Nicholas put excessive faith in his personal link to Franz Joseph. He was convinced that the Austrians – whom he had saved from the Hungarians in 1849 – would join him in his threats against the Turks and, if necessary, in the partition of the Ottoman Empire. That is what had made him so aggressive in his foreign policy: the belief that with Austria on his side there could be no European war and the Turks would be forced to capitulate. Paskevich, by contrast, was doubtful about Austrian support. As he correctly understood, the Austrians could hardly be expected to welcome Russian troops in the principalities and the Balkans, where they already feared uprisings against them by the Serbs and other Slavs; they might even join the Western powers against Russia if these revolts materialized, if and when the Tsar’s troops crossed the Danube.

Determined to limit the Tsar’s offensive plans, Paskevich played to his pan-Slav fantasies. He persuaded Nicholas that it would be enough for Russian troops to occupy the principalities in a defensive war for the Balkan Slavs to rise up and force the Turks to give in to the Tsar’s demands. He spoke of occupying the principalities for several years, if necessary, and claimed that Russian propaganda would raise as many as 50,000 Christian soldiers for the Tsar’s army in the Balkans – enough to deter the intervention of the Western powers and at least neutralize the Austrians. In a memorandum to the Tsar in early April, Paskevich outlined his vision of the religious war that would unfold in the Balkans as the Russian troops advanced:

Towards the end of June the Tsar ordered his two armies in Bessarabia to cross the River Pruth and occupy Moldavia and Wallachia. Paskevich still hoped that the invasion of the principalities would not lead to a European war, but feared that the Tsar would not pull back from it if that should be the case, as he explained to General Gorchakov, the commander of the Russian forces, on 24 June. The Tsar’s troops advanced to Bucharest, where their command established headquarters. In every town, they posted copies of a manifesto from the Tsar in which it was stated that Russia did not want to make territorial gains and was only occupying the principalities as a ‘guarantee’ for the satisfaction of its religious grievances by the Ottoman government. ‘We are ready to stop our troops if the Porte guarantees the inviolable rights of the Orthodox Church. But if it continues to resist, then, with God on our side, we shall advance and fight for our true faith.’²²

The occupying troops had little understanding of the dispute in the Holy Lands. ‘We did not think of anything, we knew nothing. We let our commanders think for us and did what they told us,’ recalled Teofil Klemm, a veteran of the Danubian campaign. Klemm was just 18, a literate serf who had been chosen for training as an officer in Kremenchug in the Ukraine, when he was called up by the infantry in 1853. Klemm was unimpressed by the pan-Slav pamphlets that circulated widely among the troops and officers of the 5th Army Corps. ‘None of us were interested in such ideas,’ he wrote. But like every soldier in the Russian army, Klemm went off to battle with a cross around his neck and with an understanding of his calling as a fight for God.²³

The Russian army was a peasant army – serfs and state peasants were the main groups subject to the military draft – and that was its main problem. It was by far the biggest army in the world, with over a million infantry, a quarter of a million irregulars (mainly Cossack cavalry) and three-quarters of a million reservists in special military settlements. But even this was not enough to defend the enormous borders of Russia, where there were so many vulnerable points, such as the Baltic coast, or Poland, or the Caucasus, and the army could not recruit more without running down the serf economy and sparking peasant uprisings. The weakness of the population base in European Russia – a territory the size of the rest of Europe but with less than a fifth of its population – was compounded by the concentration of the serf population in the central agricultural zone of Russia, a long way from the Empire’s borders where the army would be needed at short notice in the event of war. Without railways it took months for serfs to be recruited and sent by foot or cart to their regiments. Even before the Crimean War, the Russian army was already overstretched. Virtually all the serfs eligible for conscription had been mobilized, and the quality of the recruits had declined significantly, as landowners and villages, desperate to hold on to their last able farmers, sent inferior men to the army. A report of 1848 showed that during recent levies one-third of the conscripts had been rejected because they had failed to meet the necessary height requirement (a mere 160 centimetres); and another half had been rejected because of chronic illness or other physical deficiencies. The only way to solve the army’s shortages of manpower would have been to widen its social base of conscription and move towards a European system of universal military service, but this would have spelled the end of serfdom, the foundation of the social system, to which the aristocracy was firmly committed.²⁴

Despite two decades of reform, the Russian military remained far behind the armies of the other European states. The officer corps was poorly educated and almost all the troops illiterate: official figures of the 1850s showed that in a group of six divisions, numbering approximately 120,000 men, only 264 (0.2 per cent) were able to read or write. The ethos of the army was dominated by the eighteenth-century parade-ground culture of the tsarist court, in which promotion, to quote Karl Marx, was limited to ‘martinets, whose principal merit consists of stolid obedience and ready servility added to accuracy of eyesight in detecting a fault in the buttons and buttonholes of the uniform’. There was more emphasis on the drilling and appearance of the troops than on their battleworthiness. Even during fighting there were elaborate rules for the posture, length of stride, line and movement of the troops, all set out in army manuals, which were quite irrelevant to the actual conditions of the battlefield:

The domination of this parade culture was connected to the backwardness of the army’s weaponry. The importance attached to keeping troops in tight columns was partly to maintain their discipline and prevent chaos when there were large formations on the move, as in other armies of the time. But it was also necessitated by the inefficiency of the Russian musket and the consequent reliance on the bayonet (justified by patriotic myths about the ‘bravery of the Russian soldier’, who was at his best with the bayonet). Such was the neglect of small-arms fire in the infantry that ‘very few men even knew how to use their muskets’, according to one officer. ‘With us, success in battle was entirely staked on the art of marching and the correct stretching of the toe.’²⁵

These outdated means of fighting had brought Russia victory in all the major wars of the early nineteenth century – against the Persians and the Turks, and of course in Russia’s most important war, against Napoleon (a triumph that convinced the Russians that their army was invincible). So there had been little pressure to update them for the needs of warfare in the new age of steam and the telegraph. Russia’s economic backwardness and financial weakness compared to the new industrial powers of the West also placed a severe brake on the modernization of its vast and expensive peacetime army. It was only during the Crimean War – when the musket was shown to be useless against the Minié rifle of the British and the French – that the Russians ordered rifles for their own army.

Of the 80,000 Russian troops who crossed the River Pruth, the border between Russia and Moldavia, less than half would survive for a year. The tsarist army lost men at a far higher rate than any of the other European armies. Soldiers were sacrificed in huge numbers for relatively minor gains by aristocratic senior officers, who cared little for the welfare of their peasant conscripts but a great deal for their own promotion if they could report a victory to their superiors. The vast majority of Russian soldiers were not killed in battle but died from wounds and diseases that might not have been fatal had there been a proper medical service. Every Russian offensive told the same sad tale: in 1828–9, half the army died from cholera and illnesses in the Danubian principalities; during the Polish campaign of 1830–31, 7,000 Russian soldiers were killed in combat but 85,000 were carried off by wounds and sickness; during the Hungarian campaign of 1849, only 708 men died in the fighting but 57,000 Russian soldiers were admitted to Austrian hospitals. Even in peacetime the average rate of sickness in the Russian army was 65 per cent.²⁶

The appalling treatment of the serf soldier lay behind this high rate of illness. Floggings were a daily aspect of the disciplinary system; beatings so common that entire regiments could be made up of men who carried wounds inflicted by their own officers. The supply system was riddled with corruption because officers were very badly paid – the whole army was chronically underfunded by the cashstrapped tsarist government – and by the time they had taken their profit from the sums they were allowed to buy provisions with, there was little money left for the rations of the troops. Without an effective system of supply, soldiers were expected to fend largely for themselves. Each regiment was responsible for the manufacturing of its uniforms and boots with materials provided by the state. Regiments not only had their own tailors and cobblers, but their own barbers, bakers, blacksmiths, carpenters and metal workers, joiners, painters, singers and bandsmen, all of them bringing their own village trades into the army. Without these peasant skills, a Russian army, let alone an army on the offensive, would not have been feasible. The Russian soldier on the march drew on all his peasant know-how and resourcefulness. He carried bandages in his knapsack so that he could treat himself for wounds. He was very good at improvising ways to sleep in the open – using leaves and branches, haystacks, crops, and even digging himself into a hole in the ground – a crucial skill that helped the army to go on long marches without the need to carry tents.²⁷

As the Russians crossed the Pruth, the Turkish government ordered Omer Pasha, the commander of the Rumelian army, to strengthen the Turkish forts along the Danube and prepare for their defence. The Porte also called for reinforcements from the Ottoman dominions of Egypt and Tunis. By mid-August there were 20,000 Egyptian troops and 8,000 Tunisians encamped around Constantinople and ready to depart for the Danubian forts. A British embassy official described them in a letter to Lady Stratford de Redcliffe:

The Turkish army was made up of many nationalities. It included Arabs, Kurds, Tatars, Egyptians, Tunisians, Albanians, Greeks, Armenians and other peoples, many of them hostile to the Turkish government or unable to understand the commands of their Turkish or European officers (Omer Pasha’s staff contained many Poles and Italians). The most colourful of the Turkish forces were the Bashi Bazouks, irregulars from North Africa, Central Asia and Anatolia, who left their tribes in bands of twenty or thirty at a time, a motley bunch of cavalrymen of all ages and appearances, and made their way to the Turkish capital to join the jihad against the Russian infidels. In his memoirs of the Crimean War, the British naval officer Adolphus Slade, who helped to train the Turkish navy, described a parade of the Bashi Bazouks in Constantinople before they were sent off to the Danubian front. They were mostly dressed in old tribal gear, ‘sashed and turbaned, and picturesquely armed with pistols, yataghan [Turkish sword] and sabre. Some carried pennoned lances. Each squadron had its colours and its kettle-drums of the fashion of those, if not the same, carried by their ancestors who had marched to the siege of Vienna.’ They spoke so many different languages that, even within small units, translators and criers had to be employed to shout out the orders of the officers.²⁹

Language was not the only problem of command. Many Muslim soldiers were unwilling to obey Christian officers, even Omer Pasha, a Croatian Serb and Orthodox by birth (his real name was Mihailo Latas) who had been educated in an Austrian military school before fleeing from corruption charges to the Ottoman province of Bosnia and converting to Islam. Jocular and talkative, Omer Pasha enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle that his command of the Rumelian army had afforded him. He dressed in a uniform decorated with gold braid and precious stones, kept a private harem, and employed an orchestra of Germans to accompany his troops (in the Crimea he had them play ‘Ah! Che la morte’ from Verdi’s recent opera Il Trovatore). Omer Pasha was not an outstanding commander. It was said that he had been promoted on the basis of his beautiful handwriting (he had been the writing-master of the young Abdülmecid and had been made a colonel when his pupil became Sultan in 1839). In this sense, despite his Christian birth, Omer Pasha was typical of the Ottoman officer class, which still depended on personal patronage for promotion rather than on military expertise. The military reforms of Mahmud’s reign and the Tanzimat had yet to create the foundations of a modern professional army, and the majority of Turkish officers were tactically weak on the battlefield. Many still adhered to the outmoded strategy of dispersing their troops to cover every bit of ground rather than deploying them in larger and more compact groups. The Ottoman army was good at ‘small-war’ ambushes and skirmishing, and excellent at siege warfare, but it had long lacked the discipline and training to master close-order formations using smooth-bore muskets, unlike the Russians.³⁰

In terms of pay and conditions there was a huge gulf between the officers and the soldiers, a divide even wider than in the Russian army, with many senior commanders living like pashas and their troops left unpaid for several months, sometimes even years, during a war. The Russian diplomat and geographer Pyotr Chikhachev reported on the problem when he worked at the Russian embassy in Constantinople in 1849. In his calculation, the annual cost of the Turkish infantry soldier (salary, rations and clothing) was 18 silver roubles; the equivalent costs for the Russian soldier were 32 roubles; for the Austrian, 53 roubles; for the Prussian, 60 roubles; for the French, 85 roubles; and for the British foot soldier, 134 roubles. European soldiers were shocked by the conditions of the Turkish troops on the Danubian front. ‘Poorly fed and dressed in rags, they were the most wretched specimens of humanity,’ according to one British officer. The Egyptian reinforcements were described by a Russian officer as ‘old men and country boys without any training for battle’.³¹

Afraid of losing all their Balkan territories, the Turks decided to hold a defensive line on the Danube and attack the Russians in the Caucasus, where they could draw on the support of the Muslim tribes, to force them to withdraw some of their troops from the Danubian front. They could count on the support of the Muslim rebels against Russian rule in the Caucasus. In March 1853, Shamil, the imam of the rebel tribesmen, had appealed to the Ottomans for help in his war against the Tsar. ‘We your subjects’, he had written to the Sultan, ‘have lost our strength, having fought the enemies of our Faith for a long time…. We have lost all our means and now stand in a disastrous position.’ Shamil’s army had been squeezed out of its guerrilla bases in Chechnya and Daghestan by the Russian forces, which had steadily increased their numbers since 1845, when Mikhail Vorontsov, the governor-general of New Russia and the Crimea, was appointed commander-in-chief and viceroy of the Caucasus.[15] Instead of attacking the rebel strongholds directly, Vorontsov had encircled them and starved them out of existence by burning crops and villages; his troops had cut down forests to flush the rebels out and built roads into the insurgent areas. By 1853, the strategy was showing signs of real success: hundreds of Chechen villages had gone over to the Russian side in the hope of being left alone to farm their land; and the rebels had become demoralized. Thinking they had contained the insurgency, the Russians started to reduce their forces in the Caucasus, transferring most of them to the Danubian front. They closed down many of their smaller forts along the Circassian coast.²⁰

This was the opportunity the Turks now decided to exploit. A successful war against the Russians in the Caucasus would encourage the Persians and Muslims throughout the Black Sea area, perhaps even leading to the downfall of the Russian Empire in the region. It was also bound to attract the support of the British, who for several years had secretly been running guns and money to the rebels in Circassia and Georgia, and had long been planning to link up with Shamil.²¹

Before 1853, the Turks had not dared support Shamil. By the Treaty of Adrianople (1829), the Porte had agreed to give up all its claims on Russian territories in the Caucasus; and since then the Russians had protected it from Mehmet Ali of Egypt (who had good relations with Shamil). But everything was changed by the Turkish declaration of war. On 9 October the Sultan answered Shamil’s appeal, calling on him to launch a ‘holy war’ for the defence of Islam and to attack the Russians in the Caucasus in collaboration with the Anatolian army under the command of Abdi Pasha. Anticipating this, Shamil had already marched with 10,000 men towards Tbilisi, and further volunteers were moved up from Circassia and Abkhazia for an assault on the Russian military capital. On 17 October the British consul in Erzurum told the Foreign Office in London that Shamil had placed 20,000 troops at the disposal of Abdi Pasha to fight against Russia. Eight days later the Turkish campaign in the Caucasus began when the Bashi Bazouks of Abdi Pasha’s army in Ardahan captured the important Russian fortress of St Nicholas (Shekvetili in Georgian), to the north of Batumi, killing up to a thousand Cossacks and, according to a report by Prince Menshikov, the commander-in-chief, torturing hundreds of civilians, raping women and taking shiploads of Georgian boys and girls to sell as slaves in Constantinople.²²

To support their land offensive in the Caucasus the Turks depended on their Black Sea fleet to bring in supplies. The Turkish fleet had never fully recovered from its crushing defeat at Navarino in 1827. According to the British naval adviser to the Porte, Adolphus Slade, the Turkish navy in 1851 had 15,000 sailors and 68 vessels in more or less seaworthy condition, but it lacked good officers and most of its sailors were untrained. Although no match for the Russian fleet, the Turkish navy grew in confidence in late October, when the French and British fleets dropped anchor in Beykoz, a suburb of Constantinople in the Bosporus: with five line-of-battle ships (two- or three-decked vessels with at least seventy guns each), eleven twin-deckers, four frigates and thirteen steamers, their combined power was more than enough to keep the Russian fleet at bay. The Russian Black Sea Fleet was divided into two squadrons: one under Admiral Vladimir Kornilov patrolled the western half of the Black Sea; the other under Vice-Admiral Pavel Nakhimov patrolled the eastern half. Both had orders from Menshikov to destroy any Turkish ships carrying supplies to the Caucasus. The Turkish ministers and senior commanders were aware of the enemy’s patrols but resolved nonetheless to send a small fleet into the Black Sea. The Russians had every reason to believe that the Turkish ships were carrying arms and men to the Caucasus, as indeed they were. But the Turks were confident that if their ships were attacked by the Russians, the British and the French would come to their rescue. Perhaps that was indeed their aim – to provoke an attack by the Russians and thereby force the Western powers to become involved in a naval war in the Black Sea. They certainly seemed indifferent to the precarious situation of their fleet, which lay anchored in Sinope on the Anatolian coast, within easy range of Nakhimov’s larger and more powerful squadron (six modern battleships, two frigates and three steamers).²³

On 30 November Nakhimov gave the order of attack. The heavy guns and explosive shells of his squadron obliterated the Turkish fleet. It was the first time explosive shells were used in a sea battle. The Russians had designed an advanced type of shell that penetrated into the wooden planking of the Turkish ships before releasing its explosive charge, ripping them apart from the inside. Slade was on the single Turkish ship that got away, a paddle steamer called Taif. He left this account:

According to Slade, the Russian attack killed 2,700 Turkish sailors, out of a total of 4,200 at Sinope. In the town there was chaos and destruction everywhere. Cafés became makeshift hospitals. There were hundreds of wounded civilians but just three doctors in the town. Six days passed before the Russians ceased their bombardment and the wounded could be taken off in ships to Constantinople.²⁴

A few days later Slade related the details of the battle to the Porte. He found the ministers strangely unaffected by the news – reinforcing the suspicion that the Turks had provoked the attack by the Russians to bring the Western powers into the war:

In fact, the defeat gave new life to diplomatic efforts from the Porte. It was a sign of Reshid’s influence and his determination to prevent an escalation of the war. In his view, one last effort to involve the Western powers in a settlement was needed if they were to be won over to the Turkish side in the event of a general war.

On 5 December, Count Buol, the Austrian Foreign Minister, presented to the Russians a set of peace terms from the Porte which had been agreed by the four powers (Austria, Prussia, Britain and France) at the Vienna Conference. If the Tsar agreed to the immediate evacuation of the Danubian principalities, the Turks would send representatives to negotiate a peace directly with the Russians under international supervision. They promised to renew their treaties with Russia and accept her proposals regarding the Holy Lands. On 18 December the Grand Council resolved to accept peace on these conditions.

In Constantinople, there were angry demonstrations by religious students against the decision of the Grand Council. ‘For the last three days the Turkish capital has been in a state of insurrection,’ reported Stratford Canning on the 23rd. The students gathered in illegal assemblies and threatened Reshid Pasha and the other ministers. There were rumours of a massacre of Christians in the European quarters of the city. Stratford invited diplomats and their families to take shelter in the British embassy. He wrote to Reshid Pasha urging him to stand firm against the students, but Reshid, who was not known for his personal courage, had resigned and was hiding from the mob in his son’s house at Besiktas. Stratford was unable to reach him. Fearing a religious revolution, he brought up several steamers from the British fleet at Beykoz to the centre of the capital, and went to the Sultan to demand firm measures against the potential insurrectionaries. The next day, 160 religious students were arrested by the police and brought before the Grand Council. Asked to account for their insurrection, their leaders replied ‘that the conditions prescribed by the Koran for peace after war had been disregarded’ by the Grand Council. After it was explained that the Porte had not made peace, only set the conditions for negotiations, the students were asked whether they would like to go to the battlefront, if they wanted war so much, but they replied that their duty was to preach and not to fight. They were sent into exile in Crete instead.²⁶

News of Sinope reached London on 11 December. The destruction of the Turkish fleet was a justified action by the Russians, who were after all at war with Turkey, but the British press immediately declared it a ‘violent outrage’ and a ‘massacre’, and made wildly exaggerated claims of 4,000 civilians killed by the Russians. ‘Sinope’, declared The Times, ‘dispels the hopes we have been led to entertain of pacification… We have thought it our duty to uphold and defend the cause of peace as long as peace was compatible with the honour and dignity of our country… but the Emperor of Russia has thrown down the gauntlet to the maritime Powers… and now war has begun in earnest.’ The Chronicle declared: ‘We shall draw the sword, if draw it we must, not only to preserve the independence of an ally, but to humble the ambitions and thwart the machinations of a despot whose intolerable pretensions have made him the enemy of all civilized nations.’ The provincial press followed the bellicose and Russophobic line of Fleet Street. ‘Mere talking to the Tsar will do nothing,’ argued an editorial in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent. ‘The time appears to be at hand when we must act so as to dissipate the evil designs and efforts of Russia.’ In London, Manchester, Rochdale, Sheffield, Newcastle and many other towns, there were public meetings in defence of Turkey. In Paisley, the anti-Russian propagandist David Urquhart addressed a crowd for two hours, ending with a plea to ‘the people of England… to call on their Sovereign to require that either war shall be proclaimed against Russia, or the British squadron withdrawn from the Turkish waters’. Newspapers published petitions to the Queen demanding a more active stand against Russia.²⁷

The position of the British government – a fragile coalition of Liberals and free-trade Conservatives weakly held together by Lord Aberdeen – was dramatically altered by the public reaction to Sinope. At first the government reacted calmly to the news. Most of the cabinet took the view of the Prime Minister that more time should be given to the peace initiatives promoted by the Austrians. It was agreed that the British and French fleets would have to make their presence felt in the Black Sea, but that this show of naval strength should be used to force the Russians to accept peace talks rather than provoke a war. There was a general feeling that Britain should not be dragged into a war by the Turks, who had brought the disaster on themselves. As Queen Victoria herself had warned:

At this stage the Queen agreed with Aberdeen that the invasion of the principalities should not be taken as a cause of war against Russia. Like him, she was still inclined to trust the Tsar, whom she had met and come to like ten years before, and thought that his aggressive actions might be curbed. Her private views were anti-Turk, which also had a bearing on her attitude to the Russian invasion. Before Sinope, Victoria had written in her journal that it ‘would be in the interest of peace, and a great advantage generally, were the Turks to be well beaten’. Afterwards she took a different view of the invasion, hoping that a Russian beating of the Turks would make both sides more amenable to European peace initiatives. ‘A decided victory of the Russians by land, may, and I trust will have a pacifying effect by rendering the Emperor magnanimous and the Turks amenable to reason,’ she noted in her journal on 15 December.²⁹

Standing up to the Turkish war mood was one thing; it was quite another to resist the war cries of the British press, especially when Palmerston, who had resigned from the cabinet on 14 December, ostensibly over parliamentary reform, was adding his own voice to the chorus of demands for military action – his aim being to challenge the peace-loving Aberdeen from outside the government by rallying public opinion behind his own campaign for a more aggressive foreign policy. Palmerston maintained that the action at Sinope was an indirect attack upon the Western powers, which had sent their warships into the Bosporus as a warning to Russia. ‘The sultan’s squadron was destroyed in a Turkish harbour where the English and French fleets, if they had been present, would have protected it,’ he explained to Seymour. Sinope was proof of Russian aggression – it was the moral pretext Britain needed (and Palmerston had been looking for) to destroy the Russian menace in the East – and continuing with the peace talks in Vienna would only make it harder for the Western powers to fight this ‘just and necessary war’. In the cabinet, Palmerston was supported by Russell, the Leader of the Commons, and crucially by Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary, who swung round to Palmerston’s position when he sensed the public reaction to the destruction of the Turkish fleet (the Queen noted in her journal on 15 December that he had become ‘more warlike than he was, from fear of the newspapers’). ‘You think I care too much for public opinion,’ he wrote to Aberdeen on 18 December, ‘but really when the frightful carnage at Sinope comes to be known we shall be utterly disgraced if upon the mere score of humanity we don’t take active measures to prevent any more such outrages.’³⁰

With Palmerston out of the cabinet, it fell to Clarendon to make the running for the war party. Sinope had demonstrated that the Russians had ‘no real intention of making peace even if the Turks propose reasonable terms’, Clarendon told Aberdeen, so there was no point in talking to them any more. He urged the Prime Minister to use Sinope as a ‘moral argument’ to reject the Austrian peace initiative and take strong measures against Russia. Determined to undermine the peace negotiations, he told Stratford to instruct the Turks to toughen their position, and warned Buol that Austria was too soft on Russia. It was too late for talks, he told Lord Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris; the time had come for the Western powers to ‘finish up Russia as a naval power in the East’.³¹

French support was crucial to Palmerston and the war party in the British cabinet. Napoleon was determined to use Sinope as a pretext to take strong action against Russia, partly from the calculation that it was an opportunity to cement an alliance with Britain, and partly from the belief that an emperor of France should not tolerate the humiliation of his fleet, should the Russian action go unpunished. On 19 December Napoleon proposed that the French and British fleets should enter the Black Sea and force all Russian warships to return to Sevastopol. He even threatened that the French would act alone, if Britain refused. This was enough to make Aberdeen reluctantly capitulate: fear of a resurgent France, if not fear of Russia, had forced his hand. On 22 December it was agreed that a combined fleet would protect Turkish shipping in the Black Sea. Palmerston returned to the cabinet, the undisputed leader of the war party, on Christmas Eve.³²

But the origins of the Crimean War cannot be understood by studying only the motives of statesmen and diplomats. This was a war – the first war in history – to be brought about by the pressure of the press and by public opinion. With the development of the railways enabling the emergence of a national press in the 1840s and 1850s, public opinion became a potent force in British politics, arguably overshadowing the influence of Parliament and the cabinet itself. The Times, the country’s leading newspaper, had long been closely associated with the Conservative Party; but increasingly it acted and perceived itself as nothing less than a national institution, a ‘Fourth Estate’, in the words of Henry Reeve, its chief for foreign affairs, who wrote of his profession in 1855: ‘Journalism is not the instrument by which the various divisions of the ruling class express themselves: it is rather the instrument by means of which the aggregate intelligence of the nation criticizes and controls them all. It is indeed the “Fourth Estate” of the Realm: not merely the written counterpart and voice of the speaking Third.’ The government had little choice but to recognize this new reality. ‘An English Minister must please the newspapers,’ lamented Aberdeen, a Conservative of the old school who moved between the palace and his Pall Mall club. ‘The newspapers are always bawling for interference. They are bullies, and they make the Government a bully.’³³

Palmerston

Palmerston was the first really modern politician in this sense. He understood the need to cultivate the press and appeal in simple terms to the public in order to create a mass-based political constituency. The issue that allowed him to achieve this was the war against Russia. His foreign policy captured the imagination of the British public as the embodiment of their own national character and popular ideals: it was Protestant and freedom-loving, energetic and adventurous, confident and bold, belligerent in its defence of the little man, proudly British, and contemptuous of foreigners, particularly those of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox religion, whom Palmerston associated with the worst vices and excesses of the Continent. The public loved his verbal commitment to liberal interventionism abroad: it reinforced their John Bull view that Britain was the greatest country in the world and that the task of government should be to export its way of life to those less fortunate who lived beyond its shores.

Palmerston became so popular, and his foreign policy became so closely linked to the defence of ‘British values’ in the public mind, that anyone who tried to halt the drift to war was likely to be vilified by the patriotic press. That was the fate of the pacifists, the radical free-traders Richard Cobden and John Bright, whose refusal to see Russia as a threat to British interests (which in their view were better served by trading with Russia) led to the press denouncing them as ‘pro-Russian’ and therefore ‘un-English’. Even Prince Albert, whose Continental habits were disliked, found himself attacked as a German or Russian (many people seemed incapable of distinguishing between the two). He was accused of treason by the press, notably by the Morning Advertiser (the ‘red top’ of its day), after it was rumoured that a court intrigue had been responsible for the resignation of Palmerston in December. When Palmerston returned to office it was widely reported by the more scurrilous end of the press that Albert had been sent as a traitor to the Tower of London, and crowds assembled there to catch a glimpse of the imprisoned Prince. The Morning Advertiser even called for his execution, adding for good measure: ‘Better that a few drops of guilty blood should be shed on a scaffold on Tower Hill than that a country should be baulked of its desire for war!’ Queen Victoria was so outraged that she threatened to abdicate. Aberdeen and Russell talked to the editors of all the major papers on the Queen’s behalf, but the answer they received held out little hope of an end to the campaign: the editors themselves had approved the stories, and in some cases had even written them, because they sold newspapers.³⁴

In the popular imagination the struggle against Russia involved ‘British principles’ – the defence of liberty, civilization and free trade. The protection of Turkey against Russia was associated with the gallant British virtue of championing the helpless and the weak against tyrants and bullies. Hatred of the Russians turned the Turks into paragons of virtue in the public estimation – a romantic view that had its origins in 1849 when the Turks had given refuge to the Hungarian and Polish freedom-fighters against tsarist oppression. When an Association for the Protection of Turkey and Other Countries from Partition was established by the Turcophile Urquhart at the start of 1854 it was quickly joined by several thousand radicals.

The issue of defending the Muslim Turks against the Christian Russians represented a major obstacle for Anglican Conservatives like Aberdeen and Gladstone and indeed the Queen, whose religious sympathies made her hostile to the Turks (privately, she wanted the establishment of a ‘Greek empire’ to replace the Ottomans in Europe and hoped the Turks in time ‘would all become Christians’).³⁵ The obstacle was brushed aside by Evangelical radicals who pointed to the Tanzimat reforms as evidence of Turkish liberalism and religious tolerance. Some Church leaders even argued that the Turks had contributed to the spread of Protestantism in the Near East – an idea largely based on the missionary work of the Protestants in the Ottoman Empire. Forbidden by the Porte to convert Muslims, Anglican missionaries had concentrated instead on the Orthodox and Catholics, and every convert came with tales of the evil conduct of their priests. The issue was addressed by Lord Shaftesbury in a debate in the House of Lords on the Ottoman suppression of the Greek revolts in Thessaly and Epirus. In a speech inspired by Evangelical missionary zeal, Shaftesbury argued that the Balkan Christians were as much the victims of the Greek Orthodox priesthood and their Russian backers as they were of the Turkish authorities. From the viewpoint of converting Christians to the Protestant religion, Shaftesbury concluded, Turkish rule was preferable to the increased influence of the Tsar, who did not even allow the circulation of the Bible in Russian in his own lands.[16] Should the Russians conquer the Balkans, the same darkness would descend and all hopes for the Protestant religion would be lost in the region. The Porte, by contrast, Shaftesbury maintained, was not hostile to the missionary work of the Anglicans: it had intervened to protect Protestant converts from persecution by other Christians, and had even granted millet status to the Protestant religion in 1850 (he failed to mention that converts from Islam were put to death under Ottoman law). Like many Anglicans, Shaftesbury drew a sympathetic picture of Islam, whose quiet rituals seemed more in keeping with their own forms of contemplative prayer than the loud and semi-pagan rituals of the Orthodox. Such ideas were commonplace in the Evangelical community. At a public meeting to discuss the Russo-Turkish conflict in December, for example, one speaker insisted that ‘The Turk was not infidel. He was Unitarian.’ ‘As to the Russian Greeks or Greek Christians,’ it was reported by the Newcastle Guardian, ‘he said nothing against their creed, but they were a besotted, dancing, fiddling race. He spoke from personal observation.’³⁶

The mere mention of the Sultan’s name was enough to evoke tumultuous applause. At one meeting in a theatre in Chester, for example, two thousand people passed by acclamation a resolution calling on the government to assist the Sultan ‘by the strongest warlike measures’, on the grounds that

there is no sovereign in Europe who has higher claims than the Sultan to the support of this country: no sovereign who has done more for religious toleration; for he has established religious equality in his dominions. It would be no dishonour to Englishmen if they were to rank him with the Alfreds and Edwards; and if properly supported at the present crisis by the nations of West Europe, he will make his dominions happy and prosperous and establish commercial relations of mutual advantage between them and Great Britain.

When The Times suggested that the Balkan Christians might prefer the protection of the Tsar to the continued rule of the Sultan, it was rounded on with vehement nationalistic overtones by the Morning Herald and the Morning Advertiser, which accused it of being un-English: ‘It is printed in the English language, but that is the only thing English about it. It is, where Russia is concerned, Russian all over.’³⁷

In France, too, the press was an active influence on Napoleon’s foreign policy. The greatest pressure came from the Catholic provincial press, which had been calling for war against Russia since the beginning of the Holy Lands dispute. Their calls became ever louder after the news of Sinope. ‘A war with Russia is regrettable but necessary and unavoidable,’ argued an editorial in the Union franc-comtoise on 1 January 1854, because ‘if France and Britain fail to stop the Russian menace in Turkey, they too will be enslaved to the Russians like the Turks’.

The leitmotif of this anti-Russian propaganda was ‘the crusade of civilization against barbarism’ – a theme that also dominates the Russophobic best-seller of 1854, Gustave Doré’s Histoire pittoresque, dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie. The main idea of Doré’s prototype cartoon – that Russia’s barbarism was the source of her aggression – was a commonplace of the pro-war lobby on both sides of the Channel. In Britain, it was used to counteract the argument of Cobden and Bright that Russia was too backward to invade England: a campaign of publicity was launched to document the case that because Russia was so backward it needed to increase its resources through territorial expansion. In France the argument had stronger cultural overtones, inviting comparison between the Russians and the Huns. ‘The Emperor Nicholas is rather like Attila,’ claimed an editorial in the newspaper the Impartial in late January 1854.

To pretend otherwise is to overturn all notions of order and justice. Falsity in politics and falsity in religion – that is what Russia represents. Its barbarity, which tries to ape our civilization, inspires our mistrust; its despotism fills us with horror… Its despotism is suitable perhaps for a population that crawls on the boundary of animality like a herd of fanatical beasts; but it is not suitable for a civilized people…. The policies of Nicholas have raised a storm of indignation in all the civilized states of Europe; these are the policies of rape and pillage; they are brigandage on a vast scale.³⁸

For the Ultramontane press, the greatest threat to Western civilization was Russia’s religion. If the westward march of the Tsar’s armies was not stopped, it was argued, Christendom would be taken over by the Orthodox and a new age of religious persecution would enslave the Catholics. ‘If we allow the Russians to take over Turkey,’ wrote the editor of the Union franc-comtoise, ‘we will soon see the Greek heresy imposed by Cossack arms on all of us; Europe will lose not just its liberty but its religion… We will be forced to watch our children become educated in the Greek schism and the Catholic religion will perish in the frozen deserts of Siberia where those who raise their voices to defend it will be sent.’ Echoing the words of the Cardinal of Paris, the Spectateur de Dijon called on the Catholics of France to fight a ‘holy war’ against the Russians and the Greeks in defence of their religious heritage:

Russia represents a special menace to all Catholics and none of us should misunderstand it. The Emperor Nicholas talks of privileges for the Greeks at the Holy Sepulchre, privileges bought with Russian blood. Centuries will pass before the Russians shed a fraction of the blood that the French spilled in the crusades for the Holy Places… We have a heritage to conserve there, an interest to defend. But that is not all. We are directly threatened by the proselytism of the Greek-Russian Church. We know that in St Petersburg they harbour dreams of imposing a religious autocracy on the West. They hope to convert us to their heresy by the limitless expansion of their military power. If Russia is installed in the Bosporus, it will conquer Rome as quickly as Marseilles. A swift attack would be enough to remove the Pope and cardinals before anyone could intervene.

For the Catholic provincial press, this holy war would also be a chance to reinforce religious discipline at home – to counteract the Revolution’s secularizing influence and restore the Church to the centre of national life. Frenchmen who had been divided by the barricades in 1848 would now be reunited through the defence of their faith.³⁹

Napoleon seized on this idea. No doubt he imagined that a glorious war would reconcile the nation to the repressive army of his coup d’état. But his enthusiasm was never really shared by the French people, who remained on the whole indifferent to the Holy Lands dispute and the Eastern Question, even after news had reached them of the battle of Sinope. It was Napoleon who talked of following the ‘path of honour’ and fighting against Russian aggression; it was the press that voiced the ‘outrage of the French public’; but according to the reports of the local prefects and procurators, the ordinary people were unmoved. Although the French would fight – and die – in the Crimea in far greater numbers than the British, they were never as excited by the causes of the war as their allies were. If anything, the French were hostile to the idea of a war in which they would be allied with the English, their traditional enemy. It was widely felt that France was being dragged into a war that would be fought for British imperial interests – a theme constantly invoked by the opposition to Napoleon – and that France would pay the price for it. The business world was especially opposed to the idea of war, fearing higher taxes and a drain on the economy. There were predictions that before a year was out any war would become so unpopular that France would be forced to sue for peace.

By the end of January, anti-war feelings had spread to the Emperor’s entourage. At a council of senior officials assembled by Napoleon to discuss Russia’s protest against the arrival of the French and British fleets in the Black Sea on 4 January, two of the Emperor’s closest political allies, Jean Bineau, the Minister of Finance, and Achille Fould, a councillor of state, argued for an accommodation with Russia to avoid sliding into war. They were concerned by the lack of military preparations: the army was not mobilized or ready for a war in the early months of 1854, having been reduced to calm British fears of a French invasion after the coup d’état of December 1851. Bineau even threatened to resign if war broke out, on the grounds that it would become impossible to raise the necessary taxes without major social upheavals (a threat he did not carry out). Napoleon was sufficiently sobered by these dissenting voices to think again about his plans for war and renew the search for a diplomatic resolution of the crisis. On 29 January he wrote directly to the Tsar, offering to negotiate a settlement with the mediation of the Austrians and suggesting as the basis of negotiations that the French and British might withdraw their fleets from the Black Sea if the Tsar withdrew his troops from the Danubian principalities. Napoleon’s letter was publicized at once – a move designed to prove to the anxious French public that he was doing everything he could for peace, as he himself confided to Baron Hübner, the Austrian ambassador in Paris.⁴⁰

Palmerston and his war party kept a close eye on the French. They were worried that Napoleon would try to back out of a military showdown with Russia at the last minute, and used every means at their disposal to stiffen his resolve and undermine his efforts at a diplomatic settlement. It was the British, not the French, who wanted war and pushed hardest for it in the early months of 1854.

Their task was made easier by the Tsar’s intransigence. On 16 February Russia broke off relations with Britain and France, withdrawing its ambassadors from London and Paris. Five days later the Tsar rejected Napoleon’s proposal for a quid pro quo on the Black Sea and the principalities. He proposed instead that the Western fleets should stop the Turks from carrying weapons to Russia’s Black Sea coasts – a clear allusion to the causes of Sinope. On this condition, and on it alone, he offered to negotiate with the Porte’s envoy in St Petersburg. Realizing that his defiant stand invited war, he warned Napoleon that Russia would be the same in 1854 as it had been in 1812.

It was an astonishingly blunt rebuff for the Tsar to make towards the French, who had offered him his best way to escape a showdown with the British and the Turks. The French approach was his last chance to avoid total isolation on the Continent. He had tried to build ties with the Austrians and Prussians at the end of January, sending Count Orlov to Vienna with a proposal that Russia would defend Austria against the Western powers (an obvious reference to Franz Joseph’s fears that Napoleon would stir up trouble for the Habsburgs in Italy) if they signed a declaration of neutrality together with Prussia and the other German states. But the Austrians were alarmed by the Russian offensive in the Balkans – they would not listen to the Tsar’s suggestion that they join in the partition of the Ottoman Empire – and made it clear that they would not cooperate with the Russians unless the Turkish borders remained unchanged. They were so concerned by the threat of a Serb rising in support of the Russian offensive that they placed 25,000 additional troops on their frontier with Serbia.⁴¹

By 9 February the Tsar knew that Orlov had failed in his mission. He had also learned that the Austrians were preparing to send their troops actually into Serbia to prevent its occupation by his troops. So it seems extraordinary that he should reject the one chance he had left – Napoleon’s overture – to avoid a war against the Western powers, a war he must have feared that he would lose, if Austria opposed Russia. It is tempting to believe, as some historians do, that Nicholas had finally lost all sense of proportion, that the tendency to mental disturbance with which he had been born – his impulsiveness and rash behaviour and melancholic irritability – had become mixed with the arrogance acquired by an autocratic ruler after almost thirty years of listening to sycophants.⁴² In the crisis of 1853–4 he behaved at times like a reckless gambler who overplays his hand: after years of patient play to build up Russia’s position in the Near East, he was risking everything on a war against the Turks, desperately staking his entire winnings on a single turn of the wheel.

But was this really gambling from his point of view? We know from Nicholas’s private writings that he took confidence from comparisons with 1812. He constantly referred to his older brother’s war against Napoleon as a reason why it was possible for Russia to fight alone against the world. ‘If Europe forces me to go to war,’ he wrote in February, ‘I will follow the example of my brother Alexander in 1812, I will venture into uncompromising war against it, I will retreat if necessary to behind the Urals, and will not put down arms as long as the feet of foreign forces trample anywhere on Russian land.’⁴³

This was not a reasoned argument. It was not based on any calculation of the armed forces at his disposal or any careful thought about the practical difficulties the Russians would face in fighting against the superior forces of the European powers, difficulties often pointed out by Menshikov and his other senior commanders, who had warned him several times not to provoke war with Turkey and the Western powers by invading the Danubian principalities. It was a purely emotional reaction, based on the Tsar’s pride and arrogance, on his inflated sense of Russian power and prestige, and perhaps above all on his deeply held belief that he was engaged in a religious war to complete Russia’s providential mission in the world. In all sincerity Nicholas believed that he had been called by God to wage a holy war for the liberation of the Orthodox from Muslim rule, and nothing would divert him from this ‘divine cause’. As he explained to Frederick William, the Prussian king, in March 1854, he was prepared to fight this war alone, against the Western powers, if they sided with the Turks:

Waging war neither for worldly advantages nor for conquests, but for a solely Christian purpose, must I be left alone to fight under the banner of the Holy Cross and to see the others, who call themselves Christians, all unite around the Crescent to combat Christendom?… Nothing is left to me but to fight, to win, or to perish with honour, as a martyr of our holy faith, and when I say this I declare it in the name of all Russia.⁴⁴

These were not the words of a reckless gambler; they were the calculations of a believer.

Rebuffed by the Tsar, Napoleon had no option but to add his signature to the British ultimatum to the Russians to withdraw from the principalities: for him it was an issue of national honour and prestige. Sent to the Tsar on 27 February, the ultimatum stated that, if he did not reply within six days, a state of war would automatically come into existence between the Western powers and Russia. There was no reference to peace talks any more – no opportunity was given to the Tsar to come back with terms – so the purpose of the ultimatum was clearly to precipitate a war. It was a foregone conclusion that the Tsar would reject the ultimatum – he considered it beneath his dignity even to make a reply – so as soon as they had sent their ultimatum the Western powers were in effect acting as if war had already been declared. By the end of February, troops were being mobilized.

Antoine Cetty, the quartermaster of the French army, wrote to Marshal de Castellane on 24 February:

The Tsar has replied negatively [to Napoleon’s letter]; it only now remains to prepare for war. The Emperor’s thinking was to do everything in his power not to send an expeditionary force to the East, but England carried us away in its headlong rush to war. It was impossible to permit an English flag to hang without our own on the walls of Constantinople. Wherever England treads alone, she rapidly becomes the sole mistress and does not let go of her prey.

This was about the sum of it. At the moment of decision, Napoleon had hesitated over war. But in the end he needed the alliance with the British, and feared losing out in the share-out of the spoils if he did not join them in a war for the defence of Western interests in the Near East. The French Emperor confessed as much in a speech to the Senate and Legislative Assembly on 2 March:

France has as great an interest as England – perhaps a greater interest – to ensure that the influence of Russia does not permanently extend to Constantinople; because to reign at Constantinople means to reign over the Mediterranean; and I think that none of you, gentlemen, will say that only England has vital interests in this sea, which washes three hundred leagues of our shores…. Why are we going to Constantinople? We are going there with England to defend the Sultan’s cause, and no less to protect the right of the Christians; we are going there to defend the freedom of the seas and our rightful influence in the Mediterranean.⁴⁵

In fact, it was far from clear what the allies would be fighting for. Like so many wars, the allied expedition to the East began with no one really knowing what it was about. The reasons for the war would take months for the Western powers to work out through long-drawn-out negotiations between themselves and the Austrians during 1854. Even after they had landed in the Crimea, in September, the allies were a long way from agreement about the objectives of the war.

The French and the British had different ideas from the start. During March there was a series of conferences in Paris to discuss their aims and strategy. The French argued for a Danubian campaign as well as a Crimean one. If Austria and Prussia could be persuaded to join the war on the allies’ side, the French favoured a large-scale land offensive in the principalities and southern Russia, combined with an Austrian-Prussian campaign in Poland. But the British mistrusted the Austrians – they thought they were too soft on Russia – and did not want to be committed to an alliance with them which might inhibit their own more ambitious plans against Russia.

The British cabinet was divided over its war aims and strategy. Aberdeen insisted on a limited campaign to restore the sovereignty of Turkey, while Palmerston and his war party argued for a more aggressive offensive to roll back Russian influence in the Near East and bring Russia to its knees. The two sides reached a sort of compromise through the naval strategy drawn up by Sir James Graham, the First Lord of the Admiralty, which had taken shape in reaction to Sinope in December 1853. Graham’s plan was to launch a swift attack on Sevastopol to destroy the Russian Black Sea Fleet and seize the Crimea before the opening of the more important spring campaign in the Baltic which would bring British forces to St Petersburg – a strategy developed from plans already made in the event of a war against France (for Sevastopol read Cherbourg).⁴⁶

As Britain moved onto a military footing in the early months of 1854, the idea of a limited campaign for the defence of Turkey became lost in the war fever that swept the country. Britain’s war aims escalated, not just from the bellicose chauvinism of the press but from the belief that the war’s immense potential costs demanded larger objectives, ‘worthy of Britain’s honour and greatness’. Palmerston was always returning to this theme. His war aims changed in detail but never in their anti-Russian character. In a memorandum to the cabinet on 19 March, he outlined an ambitious plan for the dismemberment of the Russian Empire and the redrawing of the European map: Finland and the Aaland Islands would be transferred from Russia to Sweden; the Tsar’s Baltic provinces would be given to Prussia; Poland would be enlarged as an independent kingdom and buffer state for Europe against Russia; Austria would gain the Danubian principalities and Bessarabia from the Russians (and be forced to give up northern Italy); the Crimea and Georgia would be given to Turkey; while Circassia would become independent under Turkish protection. The plan called for a major European war against Russia, one involving Austria and Prussia, and ideally Sweden, on the anti-Russian side. It was greeted with a good deal of scepticism in the cabinet. Aberdeen, who was hoping for a short campaign so that his government could ‘return zealously to the task of domestic reform’, objected that it would require another Thirty Years War. But Palmerston continued to promote his plans. Indeed, the longer the war went on, the more determined he became to advance it, on the grounds that anything less than ‘great territorial changes’ would not be enough to justify the war’s enormous loss of life.⁴⁷

By the end of March, the idea of expanding the defence of Turkey into a broader European war against Russia had gained much support in the British political establishment. Prince Albert was doubtful whether Turkey could be saved, but confident that Russia’s influence in Europe could be curbed by a war to deprive her of her western territories. He thought that Prussia could be drawn into this war by promises of ‘territory to guard against Russia’s pouncing upon her’, and advocated measures to get the German states on side as well as to tame the Russian bear, ‘whose teeth must be drawn and claws pared’. He wrote to Leopold, the Belgian king: ‘All Europe, Belgium and Germany included, have the greatest interest in the integrity and independence of the Porte being secured for the future, but a still greater interest in Russia being defeated and chastised.’ Sir Henry Layard, the famous Assyriologist and MP, who served as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, called for war until Russia had been ‘crippled’. Stratford Canning proposed a war to break up the Tsar’s empire ‘for the benefit of Poland and other spoliated neighbours to the lasting delivery of Europe from Russian dictation’. In a later letter to Clarendon, Stratford emphasized the need to curb the will of Russia, not just by checking its ‘present outbreak’ but ‘by bringing home to its inner sense a feeling of permanent restraint’. The aim of any war by the European powers should be to destroy the threat of Russia once and for all, argued Stratford, and they should go on fighting until Russia was surrounded by a buffer zone of independent states (the Danubian principalities, the Crimea, Circassia and Poland) to ensure that feeling of restraint. As the government prepared to declare war on Russia, Russell called on Clarendon not to include anything in the Queen’s message to Parliament that would commit the Western powers to the existing territorial boundaries of Europe.⁴⁸

Even at this stage Aberdeen was reluctant to declare war. On 26 March, the eve of the British declaration, he told the Queen and Prince Albert that he had been ‘dragged into a war’ by Palmerston, who had the support of the press and public opinion. Three months earlier, the Queen had shared Aberdeen’s reluctance to commit British troops to the defence of the Turks. But now she saw the necessity of war, as she and Albert both explained to the Prime Minister:

We both repeated our conviction that it was necessary now, which he could not deny, and I observed that I thought we could not have avoided it, even if there had been mistakes and misfortunes, that the power and encroachments of Russia must be resisted. He could not see this, and thought it was a ‘bugbear’ – that the only Power to be feared was France! – that the 3 Northern Powers ought to keep together, though he could not say on what basis. Of course we were unable to agree with him, and spoke of the state Germany had been placed in by the Empr Nicholas & the impossibility of looking upon the present times as the former ones. Everything has changed. Ld Aberdeen did not like to agree in this, saying that no doubt in a short time this country would have changed its feelings regarding the war, and would be all for Peace.⁴⁹

What she meant by ‘everything has changed’ is not entirely clear. Perhaps she was thinking of the fact that France had joined in Britain’s ultimatum to the Russians and that the first British and French troops had already set sail for Turkey. Or perhaps, like Albert, she thought the time had come to involve the German states in a European war against Russia, whose invasion of the principalities represented a new and present danger to the Continent. But it is also possible that she had in mind the xenophobic press campaign against the Prince Consort – a constant worry in her journal in these months – and had come to realize that a short victorious war would secure public support for the monarchy.

That evening the Queen gave a small family ball to celebrate the birthday of her cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, who was shortly to depart for Constantinople to take up the command of the British 1st Division. Count Vitzthum von Eckstadt, Saxon Minister to London, was invited to the ball:

The Queen took an active part in the dances, including a Scotch reel with the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Elgin, both of whom wore the national dress. As I had given up waltzing, the Queen danced a quadrille with me, and spoke to me with the most amiable unconstraint of the events of the day, telling me she would be compelled the next morning, to her great regret, to declare war against Russia.

The following morning – a day before the French made their own declaration of war on Russia – the Queen’s declaration was read out by Clarendon in Parliament. As the great historian of the Crimean War Alexander Kinglake wrote (and his words could be applied to any war):

The labour of putting into writing the grounds for a momentous course of action is a wholesome discipline for statesmen; and it would be well for mankind if, at a time when the question were really in suspense, the friends of a policy leading towards war were obliged to come out of the mist of oral intercourse and private notes, and to put their view into a firm piece of writing.

If such a document had been recorded by those responsible for the Crimean War, it would have disclosed that their real aim was to reduce the size and power of Russia for the benefit of ‘Europe’ and the Western powers in particular, but this could not be said in the Queen’s message, which spoke instead in the vaguest terms of defending Turkey, without any selfish interests, ‘for the cause of right against injustice’.⁵⁰

As soon as the declaration became public, Church leaders seized upon the war as a righteous struggle and crusade. On Sunday, 2 April pro-war sermons were preached from pulpits up and down the land. Many of them were published in pamphlet form, some even selling tens of thousands of copies, for this was an age when preachers had the status of celebrities in both the Anglican and Nonconformist Church.⁵¹ In Trinity Chapel in Conduit Street, Mayfair, in London, the Reverend Henry Beamish told his congregation that it was a ‘Christian duty’ for England

to interpose her power to maintain the independence of a weak ally against the unjustifiable aggression of an ambitious and perfidious despot, and to punish with the arm of her power an act of selfish and barbarous oppression – an oppression the more hateful and destructive, because it is attempted to be justified on the plea of promoting the cause of religious liberty and the highest interests of Christ’s kingdom.

On Wednesday, 26 April, a fast-day set aside for ‘national humiliation and prayer on the declaration of war’, the Reverend T. D. Harford Battersby preached a sermon in St John’s Church, Keswick, in which he declared that

the conduct of our ambassadors and statesmen has been so honourable and straightforward, so forbearing and moderate in the transactions which have led to this war that there is no cause for humiliation at this time, but rather of strengthening ourselves in our righteousness, and that we should rather present ourselves before God with words of self congratulation and say, ‘We thank thee, O God, that we are not as other nations are: unjust, covetous, oppressive, cruel; we are a religious people, we are a Bible-reading, church-going people, we send missionaries into all the earth.’

In Brunswick Chapel, Leeds, on the same day, the Reverend John James said that Russia’s offensive against Turkey was an attack ‘on the most sacred rights of our common humanity; an outrage standing in the same category as the slave trade, and scarcely inferior to it in crime’. The Balkan Christians, James maintained, had more religious freedom under the Sultan than they would ever have under the Tsar:

Leave Turkey to the Sultan and, aided by the good offices of France and England, these humble Christians will, by God’s blessing, enjoy perfect liberty of conscience…. Hand it over to Russia and their establishments will be broken up; the school-houses closed; and their places of prayer either demolished, or converted into temples of a faith as impure, demoralizing, and intolerant, as Popery itself. What British Christian can hesitate as to the course proper for such a country as ours, in such a case as this?… It is a Godly war to drive back at any hazard the hordes of the modern Attila, who threatens the liberty and Christianity, not of Turkey only, but of the civilized world.⁵²

To mark the embarkation of Britain’s ‘Christian soldiers’ for the East, the Reverend George Croly preached a sermon in St Stephen’s Church, Walbrook, in London, in which he maintained that England was engaging in a war for ‘the defence of mankind’ against the Russians, a ‘hopeless and degenerate people’ bent upon the conquest of the world. This was a ‘religious war’ for the defence of the true Western religion against the Greek faith; the ‘first Eastern war since the Crusades’. ‘If England in the last war [against Napoleon] was the refuge of the principles of freedom, in the next she may be appointed for the refuge of the principles of Religion. May it not be the Divine will that England, after having triumphed as the champion, shall be called to the still loftier distinction of the teacher of mankind?’ England’s destiny in the East, the Reverend Croly argued, might be advanced by the coming war: it was nothing less than to convert the Turks to Christianity: ‘The great work may be slow, difficult, and interrupted by the casualties of kingdoms, or the passions of men – but it will prosper. Why should not the Church of England aid this work? Why not offer up solemn and public prayer at once for the success of our righteous warfare, the return of peace, and the conversion of the infidel?’⁵³

To varying degrees, the major parties to the Crimean War – Russia, Turkey, France and Britain – all called religion to the battlefield. Yet by the time the war began, its origins in the Holy Lands had been forgotten and subsumed by the European war against Russia. The Easter celebrations in the Holy Sepulchre ‘passed off very quietly’ in 1854, according to James Finn, the British consul in Jerusalem. There were few Russian pilgrims because of the outbreak of the war and the Greek services were tightly managed by the Ottoman authorities to prevent a recurrence of the religious fighting that had become common in recent years. Within a few months, the world’s attention would be turned to the battlefields of the Crimea, and Jerusalem would disappear from Europe’s view, but from the Holy Lands these distant events appeared in a different light. As the British consul in Palestine put it:

In Jerusalem it was otherwise. These important transactions seemed but superstructures upon the original foundation; for although in diplomacy the matter (the Eastern question) had nominally shifted into a question of religious protection… still it had become a settled creed among us that the kernel of it all lay with us in the Holy Places; that the pretensions of St Petersburg to an ecclesiastical protection by virtue of treaty aimed still, as at the very first, at an actual possession of the sanctuaries at the local well-spring of Christianity – that these sanctuaries were in very truth the meed contended for by gigantic athletes at a distance.⁵⁴

By this time the British and the French were assembling their armies in the Varna area. They had begun to land their forces at Gallipoli at the beginning of April, their intention being to protect Constantinople from possible attack by the Russians. But it soon became apparent that the area was unable to support such a large army, so after a few weeks of foraging for scarce supplies, the allied troops moved on to set up other camps in the vicinity of the Turkish capital, before relocating well to the north at the port of Varna, where they could be supplied by the French and British fleets.

The two armies set up adjacent camps on the plains above the old fortified port – and eyed each other warily. They were uneasy allies. There was so much in their recent history to make them suspicious. Famously, Lord Raglan, the near-geriatric commander-in-chief of the British army, who had served as the Duke of Wellington’s military secretary during the Peninsular War of 1808–14 and had lost an arm at Waterloo,[19] would on occasion refer to the French rather than the Russians as the enemy.

From the start there had been disputes over strategy – the British favouring the landing at Gallipoli followed by a cautious advance into the interior, whereas the French had wanted a landing at Varna to forestall the Russian advance towards Constantinople. The French had also sensibly suggested that the British should control the sea campaign, where they were superior, while they should take command of the land campaign, where they could apply the lessons of their war of conquest in Algeria. But the British had shuddered at the thought of taking orders from the French. They mistrusted Marshal Saint-Arnaud, the Bonapartist commander of the French forces, whose notorious speculations on the Bourse had led many in Britain’s ruling circles to suppose that he would put his own selfish interests before the allied cause (Prince Albert thought that he was even capable of accepting bribes from the Russians). Such ideas filtered down to the officers and men. ‘I hate the French,’ wrote Captain Nigel Kingscote, who like most of Raglan’s aides-de-camp was also one of his nephews. ‘All Saint-Arnaud’s staff, with one or two exceptions, are just like monkeys, girthed up as tight as they can be and sticking out above and below like balloons.’¹⁵

The French took a dim view of their British allies. ‘Visiting the English camp makes me proud to be a Frenchman,’ wrote Captain Jean-Jules Herbé to his parents from Varna.

Louis Noir, a soldier in the first battalion of Zouaves, the élite infantry established during the Algerian War,[20] recalled his miserable impression of the British troops at Varna. He was particularly shocked by the floggings that were often given by their officers for indiscipline and drunkenness – both common problems among the British troops – which reminded him of the old feudal system that had disappeared in France:

The French army was superior to the British in many ways. Its schools for officers had produced a whole new class of military professionals, who were technically more advanced, tactically superior and socially far closer to their men than the aristocratic officers of the British army. Armed with the advanced Minié rifle, which could fire rapidly with lethal accuracy up to 1,600 metres, the French infantry was celebrated for its attacking élan. The Zouaves, in particular, were masters of the fast attack and tactical retreat, a type of fighting they had developed in Algeria, and their courage was an inspiration to the rest of the French infantry, who invariably followed them into battle. The Zouaves were seasoned campaigners, experienced in fighting in the most difficult and mountainous terrain, and united by strong bonds of comradeship, formed through years of fighting together in Algeria (and in many cases on the revolutionary barricades of Paris in 1848). Paul de Molènes, an officer in one of the Spahi cavalry regiments recruited by Saint-Arnaud in Algeria, thought the Zouaves exerted a ‘special power of seduction’ over the young men of Paris, who flocked to join their ranks in 1854. ‘The Zouaves’ poetic uniforms, their free and daring appearance, their legendary fame – all this gave them an image of popular chivalry unseen since the days of Napoleon.’ ¹⁸

The experience of fighting in Algeria was a decisive advantage for the French over the British army, which had not fought in a major battle since Waterloo, and in many ways remained half a century behind the times. At one point a third of the French army’s 350,000 men had been deployed in Algeria. From that experience, the French had learned the crucial importance of the small collective unit for maintaining discipline and order on the battlefield – a commonplace of twentieth-century military theorists that was first advanced by Ardant du Picq, a graduate of the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, the élite army school at Fontainebleau near Paris, who served as a captain in the Varna expedition and developed his ideas from observations of the French soldiers during the Crimean War. The French had also learned how to supply an army on the march efficiently – an area of expertise where their superiority over the British became apparent from the moment the two armies landed at Gallipoli. For two and a half days, the British troops were not allowed to disembark, ‘because nothing was ready for them’, reported William Russell of The Times, the pioneering correspondent who had joined the expedition to the East, whereas the French were admirably prepared with a huge flotilla of supply ships: ‘Hospitals for the sick, bread and biscuit bakeries, wagon trains for carrying stores and baggage – every necessary and every comfort, indeed, at hand, the moment their ship came in. On our side not a British pendant was afloat in the harbour! Our great naval state was represented by a single steamer belonging to a private company.’¹⁹

The outbreak of the Crimean War had caught the British army by surprise. The military budget had been in decline for many years, and it was only in the early weeks of 1852, following Napoleon’s coup d’état and the eruption of the French war scare in Britain, that the Russell government was able to obtain parliamentary approval for a modest increase in expenditure. Of the 153,000 enlisted men, two-thirds were serving overseas in various distant quarters of the Empire in the spring of 1854, so troops for the Black Sea expedition had to be recruited in a rush. Without the conscription system of the French, the British army relied entirely on the recruitment of volunteers with the inducement of a bounty. During the 1840s the pool of able-bodied men had been severely drained by great industrial building projects and by emigration to the United States and Canada, leaving the army to draw upon the unemployed and poorest sections of society, like the victims of the Irish famine, who took the bounty in a desperate attempt to clear their debts and save their families from the poorhouse. The main recruiting grounds for the British army were pubs and fairs and races, where the poor got drunk and fell into debt.²⁰

If the British trooper came from the poorest classes of society, the officer corps was drawn mostly from the aristocracy – a condition almost guaranteed by the purchasing of commissions. The senior command was dominated by old gentlemen with good connections to the court but little military experience or expertise; it was a world apart from the professionalism of the French army. Lord Raglan was 65; Sir John Burgoyne, the army’s chief engineer, 72. Five of the senior commanders at Raglan’s headquarters were relatives. The youngest, the Duke of Cambridge, was a cousin to the Queen. This was an army, rather like the Russian, whose military thinking and culture remained rooted in the eighteenth century.

Raglan insisted on sending British soldiers into battle in tight-fitting tunics and tall shakos that might have made them look spectacular when marched in strict formation on the parade ground but which in a battle were quite impractical. When Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War, wrote to him in May suggesting that the dress code ought to be relaxed and that perhaps the men might be excused from shaving every day, Raglan replied:

The sanction against beards did not last beyond the July heat, but the British soldier was still ridiculously overdressed compared to the light and simple uniforms of the Russians and the French, as Lieutenant Colonel George Bell of the 1st (Royal) Regiment complained:

Encamped on the plains around Varna, with nothing much to do but wait for news from the fighting at Silistria, the British and French troops sought out entertainments in the drinking-places and brothels of the town. The hot weather and warnings not to drink the local water resulted in a monstrous drinking binge, especially of the local raki, which was very cheap and strong. ‘Thousands of Englishmen and Frenchmen thronged together in the improvised taverns,’ wrote Paul de Molènes, ‘where all the wines and liquors of our countries poured out into noisy drunkenness… The Turks stood outside their doors and watched without emotion or surprise these strange defenders that Providence had sent to them.’ Drunken fighting between the men was a daily problem in the town. Hugh Fitzhardinge Drummond, an adjutant of the Scots Fusilier Guards, wrote to his father from Varna:

Complaints from the residents of Varna multiplied. The town was populated mainly by Bulgarians, but there was a sizeable Turkish minority. They were irritated by soldiers demanding alcohol from Muslim-owned cafés and becoming violent when they were told that it was not sold. They might have been excused for wondering whether their defenders were a greater danger to them than the menace of Russia, as British naval officer Adolphus Slade observed from his vantage point in Constantinople:

The British quickly formed an ill opinion of the Turkish soldiers, who set up camp beside them on the plains around Varna. ‘The little I have seen of the Turks makes me think they are very poor allies,’ Raglan’s aide-de-camp Kingscote wrote to his father. ‘I am certain they are the greatest liars on the face of the earth. If they say they have 150,000 men you will find that on enquiry there are only 30,000. Everything in the same proportion, and from all I hear, I cannot make out why the Russians have not walked over them.’ The French also did not think much of the Turkish troops, although the Zouaves, who contained a large contingent of Algerians, established good relations with the Turks. Louis Noir thought the British soldiers had a racist and imperial attitude towards the Turks that made them widely hated by the Sultan’s troops.

Colonial prejudice limited the use the Western powers were prepared to make of the Turkish troops. Napoleon III thought the Turks were lazy and corrupt while Lord Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris, advised Raglan that ‘no Turk was to be trusted’ with any military responsibility essential to national security. The Anglo-French commanders thought the Turks were only good at fighting behind fortifications. They were ready to use them for auxiliary tasks such as digging trenches, but assumed they lacked the discipline or courage to fight alongside European troops on the open battlefield.²⁵ The success of the Turks in holding off the Russians at Silistria (which was largely put down to the British officers) did not change these racist attitudes, which would become even more pronounced when the campaign shifted to the Crimea.

By mid-morning the allied armies were assembling on the plain, the British on the left of the Sevastopol Road, the French and Turks on the right, stretching out towards the coastal cliffs. It was a clear and sunny day, and the air was still. From Telegraph Hill, where Menshikov’s well-dressed spectators had arrived in carriages to watch the scene, the details of the French and British uniforms could be clearly seen; the sound of their drums, their bugles and bagpipes, even the clinking of metal and the neighing of the horses could be heard.¹⁸

The Russians opened fire when the allies came within 1,800 metres – a spot marked with poles to let their gunners know the advancing troops were within range – but the British and the French continued marching forward towards the river. According to the plan that the allies had agreed the day before, the two armies were to advance simultaneously on a broad front and try to turn the enemy’s flank on the left – the inland side. But at the final moment Raglan decided to delay the British advance until the French had broken through on the right; he made his troops lie on the ground, within range of the Russian guns, in a position from which they could scramble to the river when the time was right. There they lay for an hour and a half, from 1.15 to 2.45 p.m., losing men as the Russian gunners found their range. It was an astonishing example of Raglan’s indecisiveness.¹⁹

While the British were lying on the ground, Bosquet’s division arrived at the river near the sea, where the cliffs rose so steeply to the heights, almost 50 metres above the river, that Menshikov had thought it was unneccessary to defend the position with artillery. At the head of Bosquet’s division was a regiment of Zouaves, most of them North Africans, who had experience of mountain fighting in Algeria. Leaving their kitbags on the riverbank, they swam across the river and quickly climbed the cliffs under heavy cover of the trees. The Russians were amazed by the agility of the Zouaves, comparing them to monkeys in the way they used the trees to scale the cliffs. Once they had reached the plateau, the Zouaves hid behind rocks and bushes to pick off the defending forces of the Moscow Regiment one by one until reinforcements could arrive. ‘The Zouaves were so well hidden’, recalled Noir, who was among the first to reach the top, ‘that a well-trained officer arriving on the scene would hardly have been able to pick them out with his own eyes.’ Inspired by the Zouaves, more French soldiers climbed the cliffs. They hauled twelve guns up a ravine – the men hit their horses with their swords if they refused to climb the rocky path – arriving just in time to engage the extra soldiers and artillery that Menshikov had transferred from the centre in a desperate attempt to stop his left flank being turned.²⁰

The Russian position was more or less hopeless. By the time their artillery arrived, the whole of Bosquet’s division and many of the Turks had reached the plateau. The Russians had more guns – 28 to the French 12 – but the French guns were of larger calibre and longer range, and Bosquet’s riflemen kept the Russian gunners at a distance where only the heavier French guns could take effect. Sensing their advantage, some of the Zouaves, exalted by the fighting, danced a polka on the battlefield to taunt the enemy, knowing that the Russian guns could not reach them. Meanwhile, the guns of the allied fleet were pounding the Russian positions on the cliffs, undermining the morale of many of their troops and officers. When the first Russian battery of artillery arrived, it found the remnants of the Moscow Regiment already in retreat under heavy fire from the Zouaves, whose Minié rifles had a longer range and greater accuracy than the outdated muskets of the Russian infantry. The commanding officer on the left flank, Lieutenant General V. I. Kiriakov, was one of the most incompetent in the tsarist army, and was rarely in a sober state. Holding a bottle of champagne in his hand, Kiriakov ordered the Minsk Regiment to shoot at the French but misdirected them towards the Kiev Hussars, who fell back under the fire. Lacking confidence in their drunken commander, and unnerved by the lethal accuracy of the French rifles, the Minsk Regiment also began to retreat.²¹

Meanwhile, in the centre of the battlefield, the two other French divisions, led by Canrobert and Prince Napoleon, were unable to cross the Alma in the face of heavy Russian fire from Telegraph Hill directly opposite. Prince Napoleon sent word to General de Lacy Evans, on his left, calling on the British to advance and take some pressure off the French. Raglan was still waiting for the French attack to succeed before committing British troops, and at first told Evans not to take orders from the French, but under pressure from Evans he finally gave way. At 2.45 p.m., he ordered the infantry of the Light, 1st and 2nd Divisions to advance – though what else they should do he did not say. The order was typical of Raglan’s thinking, which remained rooted in the bygone age of Napoleonic battles, when the infantry was used for primitive direct attacks on prepared positions.

As soon as the men rose from their lying positions on the ground, the Russian Cossack skirmishers, who had been hiding in the vineyards, set alight the village of Burliuk to obstruct their advance – though in fact all this did was raise a cloud of smoke, which made it more difficult for the Russian gunners to hit them. The British advanced in thin lines to maximize their rifle power, although in this formation it was hard to keep the men together over rough terrain without effective commanders of the line. The Russians were amazed by the sight of the thin red line emerging from the smoke. ‘This was the most extraordinary thing to us,’ recalled Chodasiewicz; ‘we had never before seen troops fight in lines of two deep, nor did we think it possible for men to be found with sufficient firmness of morale to be able to attack in this apparently weak formation our massive columns.’

The advancing lines broke up as they passed through the burning village and vineyards. A greyhound ran around them chasing hares. Moving forward in small groups, the British cleared the village of the Russian skirmishers and drove them out of the vineyards. ‘We rushed on driving the enemy’s skirmishers before us,’ recalled Private Bloomfield of the Derbyshire Regiment. ‘Some of these skirmishers even got up trees, so they could get a good shot at us, but we saw them and brought them off their perch. Some of these when falling from the trees… would catch their feet or clothes in some parts of the tree and hang there for hours.’ As they neared the river, the British came within firing range of the Russian guns. Men fell silently as they were hit but the rest of the line kept moving forward. ‘The most striking thing to me’, recalled Lieutenant General Brown of the Light Division, ‘was the silent way in which death did its work. No sight or sound betrayed the cause; a man dropped, rolled over, or fell out of ranks to the dust. One knew the little bullet had found its destination, but it seemed to happen in mysterious silence – they disappeared, were left, as we went past them.’²²

Under heavy fire, the men reached the river, collecting in groups at the water’s edge to unload their equipment, unsure of the water’s depth. Holding their rifles and ammunition pouches above their heads, some men managed to wade across, but others had to swim, and some drowned in the fast current. All the time, the Russians fired at them with grape-shot and shell. There were 14 Russian guns in the earthworks and 24 on either side of the road bridge. By the time Private Bloomfield reached the Alma near the bridge, ‘the river was red with blood’. Many men were too frightened to get into the water, which was full of dead bodies. They hugged the ground on the riverbank while mounted officers galloped up and down, shouting at the men to swim across, and sometimes even threatening to cut them with their swords. Once they had crossed the river, all order was lost. Companies and regiments became jumbled together, and where there had been lines two men deep there was now just a crowd. The Russians began to advance down the hill from either side of the Great Redoubt, firing on the British down below, where mounted officers galloped round their men, urging them to reform lines; but it was impossible, the men were exhausted from crossing the river, and happy to be in the shelter of the riverbank where they could not be seen from the heights. Some sat down and took out their water cans; others got out bread and meat and began to eat.

Aware of the danger of the situation, Major-General Codrington, in command of the 1st Brigade of the Light Division, made a desperate effort to regroup his men. Spurring his white Arab charger up the hill, he bellowed at the crowd of infantry: ‘Fix bayonets! Get up the bank and advance to the attack!’ Soon the whole of Codrington’s brigade – the regiments all jumbled up – began scrambling up the Kurgan Hill in a thick crowd. Junior commanders gave up forming lines – there was no time – but urged their men to ‘Come on anyhow!’ Once they had climbed onto the open slopes, most of the men began to charge with yells and screams towards the Russian guns in the Great Redoubt, 500 metres up the slope. The Russian gunners were astonished by the sight of this British mob – 2,000 men running up the hill – and found easy targets. Some of the Light Division’s advance guard reached the entrenchments of the Great Redoubt. Soldiers clambered over the parapets and through the embrasures, only to be shot or cut down by the Russians, who hurriedly withdrew their guns. Within a few minutes, the Great Redoubt was a swarm of men, pockets of them fighting on the parapets, others cheering and waving their colours, as two Russian guns were captured in the confusion.

But suddenly the British were confronted by four battalions (some 3,000 men) of the Vladimirsky Regiment pouring into the Redoubt from the open higher ground, while more Russian guns were pitching shell at them from higher up the Kurgan Hill. With one loud ‘Ooorah!’ the Russian infantry began charging with their bayonets, driving out the British, and firing at them as they retreated down the hill. The Light Division ‘made a front’ to fire back, but suddenly and unexpectedly there was a bugle call to cease firing, copied by the buglers of every regiment. For a few fatal moments there was a confused pause in the firing on the British side: an unnamed officer had thought that the Russians were the French and had ordered his men to stop firing. By the time the mistake was corrected, the Vladimirsky soldiers had gained the upper hand; they were steadily advancing down the hill and British troops were lying dead and wounded everywhere. Now buglers truly did give the order to retreat, and the whole rabble of the Light Division, or what was left of it, was soon running down the hill towards the shelter of the riverbank.

The charge had partly failed because there had been no second wave, the Duke of Cambridge having stopped the Guards from advancing in support of the Light Division for lack of further orders from Raglan (another blunder on his part). Evans, on his right, got the Guards marching once again by giving the Duke an order to advance which he pretended had come from Raglan, who in fact was nowhere to be seen.[25]

The three regiments of the Guards Brigade (Grenadiers, Scots Fusiliers and Coldstream) waded across the river. In their red tunics and bearskins they were an imposing sight. On the other side of the river they took an age to reassemble into lines. Irritated by their dithering, Sir Colin Campbell, the commander of the Highland Brigade, ordered an immediate advance. A firm believer in the charge with bayonets, Campbell told his men not to fire their rifles until they were ‘within a yard of the Russians’. The Scots Fusiliers, who had crossed the river before the other Guards, at once began charging up the hill, repeating the mistake of the Light Division, which at that moment was running down the hill pursued by the Russian infantry. The two crowds of men ran straight through each other – the Scots Fusiliers bearing the main brunt of the collision, with men knocked over and bearskins flying everywhere, so that when they emerged on the other side and continued running towards the Great Redoubt they were only half their number and in a chaotic state. In the centre of this mob was Hugh Annesley, a 23-year-old ensign, who recalled what happened next:

Annesley had been badly wounded: the bullet that had entered his left cheek had come out at the right corner of his mouth, taking away twenty-three of his teeth and part of his tongue. Around him was the rest of his shattered regiment, which remained in the shelter of the riverbank for the rest of the battle, ignoring repeated orders to advance.²³

The other two regiments (the Grenadiers and Coldstream Guards) filled the gap left by the Scots Fusiliers, but refused orders to advance up the hill. Instead, on their own initiative, the 2,000 Guards formed into lines and fired fourteen volleys of Minié rifle shot into the Russian infantry. The volleys delivered an intensity of fire achieved by half a dozen machine guns. They stunned the Russian infantry, who fell in heaps upon the ground, and then withdrew up the hill. By disobeying their commanders, who had ordered them to charge with bayonets, the Guards had demonstrated a crucial innovation – the long-range firepower of the modern rifle – which would prove decisive in all the early battles of the Crimean War. The Minié was a new weapon. Most regiments had been issued with it only on their way to the Crimea, and had received a hurried training in how to use it. They had no idea of its tactical significance – its ability to fire with a lethal accuracy from well beyond the range of the Russian muskets and artillery – until the Guards discovered it for themselves on the Alma. Reflecting on the impact of the Minié rifle, the Russian military engineer Eduard Totleben wrote in his history of the Crimean War:

Without entrenchments to protect their infantry and artillery, the Russians were unable to defend their positions on the heights against the deadly Minié rifles. Soon the fire of the Guards was joined by that of the 2nd Division under Evans, on the British right, whose 30th Regiment could clearly see the gunners of three Russian batteries from the riverbank and take them out with their Minié rifles without the Russians even knowing where the firing was from. As the Russian infantry and artillery withdrew, the British slowly advanced up the hill, stepping over the dead and wounded bodies of the enemy. ‘Most of the wounded were crying out for water,’ Private Bloomfield wrote. ‘A man of my company gave a wounded Russian a drink of water, and as he left him, the Russian rose on his elbow, took his musket in his hand, and fired at the man that gave him the water. The bullet passed close by the man’s head. The man turned round immediately and ran his bayonet through the body of the Russian.’ By four o’clock in the afternoon, the British were converging on the Russian positions from all directions – the Guards on the left overcoming the last Russian reserves on the Kurgan Hill, Codrington’s men and the other Guards closing in on the Great Redoubt, and the 2nd Division pushing up the Sevastopol Road. With the French in command of the cliffs above the Alma, it was clear that the battle had been won.²⁴

By this stage, on the Russian side, there were signs of panic, as the enemy closed in and the devastating effect of their long-range rifle fire became apparent. Priests went round the lines to bless the troops, and soldiers prayed with growing fervency, while mounted officers used the knout to whip them forward into line. But otherwise there was a general absence of authority among the Russian commanders. ‘Nobody gave any direction what to do,’ recalled Chodasiewicz. ‘During the five hours that the battle went on we neither saw nor heard of our general of division, or brigadier, or colonel: we did not receive any orders from them either to advance or to retire; and when we retired, nobody knew whether we ought to go to the right or left.’ The drunken Kiriakov gave a general order to retreat from the left flank of the heights, but then lost his nerve and went missing for several hours (he was discovered later hiding in a hollow in the ground). It was left to the junior commanders to organize the retreat from the heights, but ‘we had the greatest difficulty to keep our men in order’, recalled Chodasiewicz, who had to threaten ‘to cut down the first man who should break out of the ranks’ – a threat he had to carry out more than once.

With no clear idea of where they were to go, the Russians fled in all directions, running down the hill into the valley, away from the enemy. Mounted officers tried in vain to stop the panic flight, riding round the men and whipping them, like cowboys rounding up cattle; but the men had lost all patience with their commanders. Chodasiewicz overheard a conversation between two soldiers:

Chodasiewicz spoke of chaos and confusion, of barely sober officers, ‘of the ten minutes of fear and trembling on the second line of heights, when we saw the enemy’s cavalry coming forward to cut down the retreating stragglers, for the most part wounded men’.²⁵

In the end the Russians were defeated, not just by the superior firepower of the Minié rifle, but by a loss of nerve among their men. For Ardant du Picq, who would develop his military theories from questionnaires he sent to the Frenchmen who had fought at the Alma, this moral factor was the decisive element in modern war. Large groups of men rarely engaged physically, he maintained, because at the final moment before the point of contact one side nearly always lost its nerve and ran away. The key thing on the battlefield was military discipline – the ability of officers to hold their men together and stop them fleeing out of fear – because it was when they turned their backs to the enemy that soldiers were most likely to be killed. The suppression of fear was thus the main task of the officer, something he could achieve only through his own authority and the unity he instilled in his men.

These ideas, which were to become central to the military theories of the twentieth century, first became apparent to du Picq in a letter written to him in 1869 by a veteran of the Alma. The soldier had recalled the crucial intervention of his company commander, who had halted the panic of his men after a senior commander had mistakenly assumed that the Russian cavalry was about to charge and had ordered the bugler to signal a retreat:

By half past four the battle was over. Most of the Russians had retreated towards the River Kacha in small groups, without leaders or any clear idea of what to do or where to go. Many men would not be reunited with their regiments for several days. At the top of Telegraph Hill the French captured the abandoned carriage of Prince Menshikov, which was being driven off by some Cossacks. In the carriage they found a field kitchen, letters from the Tsar, 50,000 francs, pornographic French novels, the general’s boots, and some ladies’ underwear. On the hill were abandoned picnics, parasols and field glasses left behind by parties of spectators from Sevastopol.²⁷

On the battlefield itself the ground was covered with the wounded and the dead – 2,000 British, 1,600 French and perhaps 5,000 Russians, though the exact numbers are impossible to calculate, since so many of them were abandoned there. It took the British two full days to clear the battlefield of the wounded. They had neglected to bring any medical supplies on the ships from Varna – the ambulance corps with its carts and wagons and stretchers was still in Bulgaria – so doctors had to plead with the commissariat for military carts to remove the wounded from the battlefield. Storekeeper John Rowe of the commissariat emptied his cart of its saddles to help with the wounded, and on his way back to collect his cargo came across a group of wounded officers, among them Hugh Annesley:

Annesley was left to find a doctor on his own. What treatment he received remains unknown, but it would not have involved more than cutting out the ball, probably without the use of proper dressings or any chloroform to dull the shock and pain. Treatments on the battle-field were rudimentary. The staff surgeon of the Light Division, George Lawson, carried out his operations on the ground, until an old door was discovered which he made into an improvised operating table.²⁸

Early the next morning, Somerset Calthorpe, a nephew of Lord Raglan and one of his aides-de-camp, filled his flask with brandy and ‘sallied out to walk over the field of battle’.

The Russians were unable to collect their wounded from the battle-field.[26] Those who could walk were left to look for treatment on their own, many of them staggering to the dressing stations set up on the River Kacha, 15 kilometres south of the Alma, or limping back to Sevastopol over the next days. A Russian orderly recalled the scene on the first evening, as he set off with his vehicles for the Kacha:

Those who could not walk, about 1,600 wounded Russian soldiers, were abandoned on the battlefield, where they lay for several days, until the British and the French, having cleared their own, took care of them, burying the dead and carting off the wounded to their hospitals in Scutari on the outskirts of Constantinople.³⁰

Three days after the battle, William Russell described the Russians ‘groaning and palpitating as they lay around’.

There had been incidents of wounded Russians shooting at the British and French soldiers who had given them water. There were also some reported cases of the Russians killing wounded soldiers on the battle-field. Fear and hatred of the enemy were behind these incidents. French interrogations of the Russian soldiers captured at the Alma revealed that the Russians had been ‘told the most fantastic stories by their priests – that we were monsters capable of the most ferocious savagery and even cannibals’. Reports of these ‘dishonourable’ killings outraged British soldiers and public opinion, reinforcing their belief that the Russians were ‘no better than savages’. But such outrage was hypocritical. There were many incidents of British soldiers killing wounded Russians, and disturbing cases of the British shooting Russian prisoners because they were ‘troublesome’. It should also be remembered that the British walked among the Russian wounded, not only to give them water, but sometimes to steal from them. They took silver crosses from their necks, rooted through their kitbags for souvenirs, and helped themselves to what they fancied from the living and the dead. ‘I have got a beautiful trophy for you from the Alma, just one to suit you,’ wrote Hugh Drummond of the Scots Guards to his mother, ‘a large silver Greek cross with engravings on it – our Saviour and some Russian words; it came off a Russian Colonel’s neck we killed, and, poor fellow, it was next to his skin.’³²

Having survived the first day’s bombardment, the Russians now resolved to break the siege by attacking Balaklava and cutting off the British from their main base of supplies. After Alma, Menshikov had set out towards Bakhchiserai. Now, with the change in strategy, he amassed his troops in the Chernaia valley on Sevastopol’s eastern side, where they were joined by the first reinforcements to arrive from the Danubian front, the 12th Infantry Division under the command of Lieutenant General Pavel Liprandi. On the evening of 24 October, a field army of 60,000 troops, 34 squadrons of cavalry and 78 artillery pieces camped around the village of Chorgun on Fediukhin Heights for an attack on the British defences of Balaklava the following morning.

The objective was well chosen. As the British were themselves aware, they were seriously overstretched and there was not much to protect their supply base from a swift attack by a large force of men. The British had constructed a total of six small redoubts along part of the Causeway Heights – the ridge-line of the Vorontsov Road separating the northern half of the Balaklava valley between the Fediukhin Heights and the road from the southern half between the road and the port itself – and placed in each of the four completed redoubts a Turkish guard (consisting mainly of raw recruits) with two or three 12-pounder guns of position. Behind the redoubts, in the southern half of the valley, the British had positioned the 93rd Highland Infantry Brigade, under the command of Sir Colin Campbell, to whom the defence of the port was entrusted, while encamped on their flank was the cavalry division of Lord Lucan, and on the heights above the gorge descending to the port 1,000 Royal Marines with some field artillery. In the event of an attack by the Russians, Campbell could also rely on the support of the British infantry as well as two divisions of French troops under General Bosquet encamped on the heights above Sevastopol, but until they arrived the defence of Balaklava would depend on 5,000 troops.²¹

At daybreak on 25 October the Russians commenced their attack. Establishing a field battery close to the village of Kamara, they began a heavy bombardment of the No. 1 Redoubt on Canrobert’s Hill (named by the British in honour of the French commander). During the night Raglan had been warned of the imminent attack by a deserter from the Russian camp, but, having sent 1,000 men to Balaklava in response to a false alarm only three days previously, he decided not to act (yet another blunder to put against his name), though he did reach the Sapoune Heights in time to get a grandstand view of the fighting in the valley below him after messages were sent to his headquarters at the start of the attack.

For more than an hour, the 500 Turkish troops defending the No. 1 Redoubt put up a stubborn resistance, as they had done against the Russians at Silistria, losing more than one-third of their men. But then 1,200 Russian troops stormed the redoubt at the point of the bayonet, forcing the exhausted defenders to abandon it to them, along with three of the seven British cannon which had been lent to the Turks. ‘To our disgust,’ recalled Calthorpe, who was watching from the Sapoune Heights with Raglan’s staff, ‘we saw a little stream of men issue from the rear of the redoubt and run down the hill-side towards our lines.’ Seeing their countrymen in full retreat, the Turkish garrisons in the neighbouring three redoubts (2, 3 and 4) followed their example and withdrew towards the port, many of them carrying their blankets, pots and pans and crying ‘Ship! Ship!’ as they passed the British lines. Calthorpe watched as 1,000 Turkish troops streamed down the hill pursued by large parties of Cossacks. ‘The yells of these wild horsemen could be heard from where we were as they galloped after these unhappy Muslims, numbers of whom were killed by their lances.’

As they ran through the settlement of Kadikoi, the Turkish soldiers were jeered at by a group of British army wives, including one, a massive washerwoman with brawny arms and ‘hands as hard as horn’, who seized hold of a Turk and gave him a good kicking for trampling on the washing she had laid out in the sun to dry. When she realized that the Turks had deserted her own husband’s regiment, the 93rd, she scolded them: ‘Ye cowardly misbelievers, to leave the brave Christian Highlanders to fecht when ye ran awa!’ The Turks tried to placate her, and some called her ‘Kokana’,[34] prompting her to become even more enraged. ‘Kokana, indeed! I’ll Kokana ye!’ she cried, and, brandishing a stick, chased them down the hill. Tired and downcast, the Turkish soldiers continued their retreat, until they reached the ravine leading to the port. Throwing their belongings on the ground, they lay down beside them to get some rest. Some spread out their prayer mats on the ground and said a prayer towards Mecca.²²

The British accused the Turkish troops of cowardice, but this was unfair. According to John Blunt, Lord Lucan’s Turkish interpreter, most of the troops were Tunisians without proper training or experience of war. They had only just arrived in the Crimea and were in a famished state: none of them had received any rations they could eat as Muslims since they had left Varna several days before and on their arrival they had disgraced themselves by attacking civilians. Blunt rode after the retreating troops and relayed to an officer Lucan’s command for them to regroup behind the 93rd, but he was accosted by the soldiers ‘who appeared parched with thirst and exhausted’. They asked him why no British troops had come to their support, complained that they had been left in the redoubts for several days without food or water, and declared that the ammunition they were supplied with did not fit the guns in the redoubts. One of the soldiers, his head in a bandage and smoking a long pipe, said to Blunt in Turkish: ‘What can we do sir? It is God’s will.’²³

The Russian infantry took redoubts 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the Causeway Heights, abandoning the fourth after they had destroyed the gun carriages. The Russian cavalry, under General Ryzhov, moved up behind them along the North Valley and turned to attack the 93rd, the only infantry force that now prevented them from breaking through to Balaklava, since the British cavalry had been withdrawn to await the arrival of the infantry from the plateau above Sevastopol. Descending from the Causeway Heights, four squadrons of Ryzhov’s cavalry, some 400 men, charged towards the Highlanders.[35] Watching the scene from a vineyard near the camp of the Light Brigade, Fanny Duberly was horrified. Shots ‘began to fly’ and ‘Presently came the Russian cavalry charging over the hill-side and across the valley, right against the little line of Highlanders. Ah, what a moment! Charging and surging onward, what could that little wall of men do against such numbers and such speed? There they stood.’ Forming his men into a line just two deep instead of the usual square employed by infantry against the cavalry, Campbell placed his trust in the deadly rifle power of the Minié whose effects he had seen at the Alma. As the cavalry approached, he rode along the line, calling on his men to stand firm and ‘die there’, according to Lieutenant Colonel Sterling of the 93rd, who thought ‘he looked as if he meant it’. To Russell of The Times, watching from the heights, they looked like ‘a thin red streak tipped with a line of steel’ (later and forever misquoted as a ‘thin red line’). The appearance of a steady line of redcoats caused the Russian cavalry to hesitate, and, as they did so, at a range of about 1,000 metres, Campbell gave the order for the first volley. When the smoke had cleared, Sergeant Munro of the 93rd ‘saw that the cavalry were still advancing straight for the line. A second volley rang forth, and then we observed that there was a little confusion in the enemy’s ranks and that they were swerving to our right.’ A third volley at much closer range caught the Russians in the flank, causing them to bend sharply to their left and ride back to their own army.²⁴

Ryzhov’s first four squadrons had been repulsed but the main body of the Russian cavalry, 2,000 hussars flanked by Cossack outriders, now descended from the Causeway Heights for a second charge against the Highlanders. This time the infantry was rescued just in time by the intervention of the British cavalry, eight squadrons of the Heavy Brigade, some 700 men, who had been ordered to return to the South Valley to support the 93rd by Raglan, who from his position on the Sapoune Heights had seen the danger the Highlanders were in. Riding slowly up the hill towards the enemy, the Heavy moved across their column, dressed their lines and then, from 100 metres, charged right into them, slashing wildly at them with their swords. The advance riders of the British cavalry, the Scots Greys and Inniskillings (6th Dragoons), were completely enveloped by the Russians, who had briefly halted to extend their flanks just before the charge, but the red jackets of the 4th and 5th Dragoons soon piled in to the mêlée, cutting at the Russian flanks and rear. The opposing horsemen were so tightly packed together that there was no room for swordsmanship, they could barely raise their swords or swing their sabres, and all they could do was hit or cut at anything within their reach, as if they were in a brawl. Sergeant Major Henry Franks of the 5th Dragoons saw Private Harry Herbert attacked by three Cossacks at the same time.

Major William Forrest of the 4th Dragoons recalled his frenzied fight with a

There were surprisingly few casualties, no more than a dozen killed on either side, and 300 or so wounded, mostly on the Russian side, though the combat lasted less than ten minutes. The Russians’ heavy greatcoats and thick shakos protected them from most sabre cuts, while their own swords were just as ineffective against the longer reach of the British cavalrymen, who sat on taller and heavier mounts.²⁵

In this sort of fighting one side must eventually give way. It was the Russians who lost their nerve first. Shaken by the fighting, the hussars turned away and galloped back to the North Valley pursued by the British cavalry, until they withdrew under fire from the Russian batteries on the Causeway and Fediukhin Heights.

While the Russian cavalry withdrew, the British infantry descended from the heights of Sevastopol and marched across the South Valley to support the 93rd. The 1st Division arrived first, followed by the 4th, and then French reinforcements too – the 1st Division and two squadrons of Chasseurs d’Afrique. With the arrival of the allied infantry, it was not likely that the Russian cavalry would attack again. Balaklava had been saved.

As the Russians cut their losses and moved back to their base, Raglan and his staff on the Sapoune Heights noticed them removing the British guns from the redoubts. The Duke of Wellington had never lost a gun, or so it was believed by the keepers of his cult in the British military establishment. The prospect of these guns being paraded as trophies in Sevastopol was unbearable for Raglan, who at once sent an order to Lord Lucan, the commander of the Cavalry Division, to recover the Causeway Heights, assuring him of the support of the infantry that had just arrived. Lucan could not see the infantry, and could not believe that he was meant to act alone, with just the cavalry, against infantry and artillery, so for three-quarters of an hour he did nothing, while Raglan on the hill became more alarmed about the fate of the captured British guns. Eventually he dictated a second order to Lucan: ‘Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. Immediate.’

The order was not just unclear, it was absurd, and Lucan was completely at a loss as to what to make of it. From where he was standing, at the western end of the Causeway Heights, he could see, to his right, the British guns in the redoubts captured by the Russians from the Turks; to his left, at the end of the North Valley, where he knew the bulk of the Russian forces were located, he could see a second set of guns; and further to the left, on the lower slopes of the Fediukhin Heights, he could see that the Russians also had a battery of artillery. If Raglan’s order had been clearer and specified that it was the British guns on the Causeway Heights that Lucan was to take, the Charge of the Light Brigade would have ended very differently, but as it was, the order left unclear which guns the cavalry was to recover.

The only man who could tell him what it meant was the aide-de-camp who delivered it, Captain Nolan of the King’s Hussars. Like many cavalrymen in the Light Brigade, Nolan had become increasingly frustrated by Lucan’s failure to employ the cavalry in the sort of bold attack for which it had earned its reputation as the greatest in the world. At the Bulganak and the Alma, the cavalry had been stopped from pursuing the Russians in retreat; on the Mackenzie Heights, during the march to Balaklava, Lucan had prevented an attack on the Russian army marching east across their path; and only that morning, when the Heavy Brigade was outnumbered by the Russian cavalry, only a few minutes’ ride away, Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade’s commander, declined to use them for a swift assault upon the routed enemy. The Light Brigade were made to watch while their comrades fought with the same Cossacks who had jeered at them at the Bulganak for refusing to fight. One of their officers had several times demanded of Lord Cardigan to send in the brigade, and, when Cardigan refused, slapped his saluting sword against his leg in a show of disrespect. There were signs of disobedience. Private John Doyle of the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars recalled:

So when Lucan asked Nolan what Raglan’s order meant, there was a threat of insubordination in the air. In the account he later gave in a letter to Raglan, Lucan asked the aide-de-camp where he should attack, and Nolan had replied ‘in a most disrespectful but significant manner’, pointing to the further end of the valley, ‘“There, my lord, is your enemy; there are your guns.”’ According to Lucan, Nolan had not pointed to the British guns on the Causeway Heights, but towards the battery of twelve Russian cannon and the main force of the Cossack cavalry at the far end of the North Valley, on either side of which, on the Causeway and Fediukhin Heights, the Russians had more cannon as well as riflemen. Lucan took the order to Cardigan, who pointed out the lunacy of charging down a valley against artillery and musket fire on three sides, but Lucan insisted that the order be obeyed. Cardigan and Lucan (who were brothers-in law) detested each other. This is usually the explanation given by historians as to why they failed to consult and find a way to circumvent the order they believed they had been given by Raglan (it would not be the first time that Raglan’s orders had been disobeyed). But there is also evidence that Lucan was afraid to disobey an order that was in fact welcomed by the men of the Light Brigade, eager for action against the Russian cavalry and in danger of losing discipline if they were prevented from attacking them. Lucan himself later wrote to Raglan that he had obeyed the order because not to do so would have ‘exposed me and the cavalry to aspersions against which we might have difficulty in defending ourselves’ – by which he surely meant aspersions from his men and the rest of the army.²⁷

The 661 men of the Light Brigade advanced at a walk down the gently sloping North Valley, the 13th Light Dragoons and 17th Lancers in the first line, led by Cardigan, the 11th Hussars immediately behind, followed by the 8th Hussars together with the 4th (Queen’s Own) Regiment of Light Dragoons. It was 2,000 metres to the enemy’s position at the end of the valley, and at regulation speeds it would take the Light Brigade about seven minutes to cover the distance – artillery and musket fire to the right of them, to the left of them and in front of them, along the way. As the first line broke into a trot, Nolan, who was riding with the 17th Lancers, galloped forward, waving his sword and, according to most versions, shouting to the men to hurry them along, although it has also been suggested that he realized the mistake and was attempting to redirect the Light Brigade towards the Causeway Heights and perhaps beyond to the South Valley, where they would be safe from the Russian guns. Either way, the first shell fired by the Russians exploded over Nolan and killed him. Whether it was Nolan’s example, their own eagerness, or because they wanted to get through the flanking fire as fast as possible, remains unclear, but the two regiments at the head of the charge broke into a gallop long before they were ordered to. ‘Come on,’ shouted one man from the 13th Light Dragoons, ‘don’t let those bastards [the 17th Lancers] get ahead of us.’²⁸

As they galloped through the crossfire from the hills, cannonballs tearing the earth up and musket fire raining in like hail, men were shot and horses fell. ‘The reports from the guns and the bursting of shells were deafening,’ recalled Sergeant Bond of the 11th Hussars.

Trooper Wightman of the 17th Lancers saw his sergeant hit: ‘He had his head clean carried off by a round shot, yet for about thirty yards further the headless body kept in the saddle, the lance at the charge, firmly gripped under the right arm.’ So many men and horses from the first line were shot down that the second line, 100 metres behind, had to swerve and slow down to avoid the wounded bodies on the ground and the bewildered, frightened horses that galloped without riders in every direction.²⁹

Within a few minutes, those that remained of the first line were in among the Russian gunners at the end of the valley. Cardigan, whose horse flinched from the guns’ last salvo at close range, was said to be the first man through. ‘The flame, the smoke, the roar were in our faces,’ recalled Corporal Thomas Morley of the 17th Lancers, who compared it to ‘riding into the mouth of a volcano’. Cutting down the gunners with their swords, the Light Brigade charged on with their sabres drawn to attack the Cossacks, who were ordered forward by Ryzhov to protect the guns, which some of the attackers were attempting to wheel away. Without time to form themselves before they were attacked, the Cossacks were ‘thrown into a panic by the disciplined order of the mass of cavalry bearing down on them’, recalled a Russian officer. They turned sharply to escape and, seeing that their way was blocked by the hussar regiments, began to fire their muskets point-blank at their own comrades, who fell back in panic, turned and charged into the other regiments behind. The whole of the Russian cavalry began a stampede towards Chorgun, some dragging the mounted guns behind them, while the advance riders of the Light Brigade, outnumbered five to one, pursued them all the way to the Chernaia river.

The panic flight of the Russian cavalry was watched from the heights above the river by Stepan Kozhukov, a junior artillery officer, who described the cavalry amassing in the area around the bridge, where the Ukrainsky Regiment and Kozhukov’s battery on the hill had been ordered to block off their retreat:

The Cossacks were the first to come to their senses, but they would not return to the battlefield. Instead they ‘set themselves to new tasks in hand – taking prisoners, killing the wounded as they lay on the ground, and rounding up the English horses to offer them for sale’.³⁰

As the Light Brigade rode back through the corridor of fire in the North Valley, Liprandi ordered the Polish Lancers on the Causeway Heights to cut off their retreat. But the Lancers had little stomach for a fight with the courageous Light Brigade, which they had just seen charge through the Russian guns and disperse the Cossacks in a panic flight, and the few attacks they made were against small groups of wounded men. Larger groups they left alone. When the retreating column of the 8th Hussars and 4th Regiment of Light Dragoons neared the Lancers, recalled Lord George Paget, the commander of the Light Dragoons, who had rallied them together before the retreat, ‘down [the Lancers] came upon us at a sort of trot’.

In fact, the English ladies were on the Sapoune Heights with all the other spectators who watched the remnants of the Light Brigade stagger back in ones and twos, many of them wounded, from the charge. Among them was Fanny Duberly, who not only watched the scene in horror but later on that afternoon rode out with her husband to get a closer look at the carnage on the battlefield:

Of the 661 men who set off on the charge, 113 were killed, 134 wounded, and 45 were taken prisoner; 362 horses were lost or killed. The casualties were not much higher than those suffered on the Russian side (180 killed and wounded – nearly all of them in the first two defensive lines) and far lower than the numbers reported in the British press. The Times reported that 800 cavalry had been engaged of whom only 200 had returned; the Illustrated London News that only 163 had returned safely from the charge. From such reports the story quickly spread of a tragic ‘blunder’ redeemed by heroic sacrifice – the myth set in stone by Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, published only two months after the event.

But contrary to the myth of a ‘glorious disaster’, the charge was in some ways a success, despite the heavy casualties. The objective of a cavalry charge was to scatter the enemy’s lines and frighten him off the battlefield, and in this respect, as the Russians acknowledged, the Light Brigade had achieved its aim. The real blunder of the British at Balaklava was not so much the Charge of the Light Brigade as their failure to pursue the Russian cavalry once the Heavy Brigade had routed them and the Light Brigade had got them on the run and then finish off the rest of Liprandi’s army.³³

The British blamed the Turks for their defeat at Balaklava, accusing them of cowardice for abandoning the redoubts. They also later claimed that they had looted property, not only from the British cavalry, but also from nearby settlements, where they were said to have ‘committed some cold-blooded cruelties upon the unfortunate villagers around Balaklava, cutting the throats of the men and stripping their cabins of everything’. Lucan’s Turkish interpreter, John Blunt, thought the accusations were unfair and that if any looting did take place, it was by the ‘nondescript crowds of camp followers who prowled about… the battlefield’. The Turks were treated appallingly for the rest of the campaign. They were routinely beaten, cursed, spat upon and jeered at by the British troops, who sometimes even used them ‘to carry them with their bundles on their backs across the pools and quagmires on the Balaklava road’, according to Blunt. Seen by the British as little more than slaves, the Turkish troops were used for digging trenches or transporting heavy loads between Balaklava and the Sevastopol heights. Because their religion forbade them from eating most of the available British army rations, they never received enough food; in desperation some of them began to steal, for which they were flogged by their British masters well beyond the maximum of forty-five lashes allowed for the Queen’s own troops. Of the 4,000 Turkish soldiers who fought at Balaklava on 25 October, half would die from malnutrition by the end of 1854, and many of the rest would become too weak for active service. Yet the Turks behaved with dignity, and Blunt, for one, was ‘much struck by the forbearing manner in which they endured their bad treatment and long suffering’. Rustem Pasha, the Egyptian officer in charge of the Turkish troops at Balaklava, urged them to be ‘patient and resigned, and not to forget that the English troops were the guests of their Sultan and were fighting in defence of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire’.³⁴

The Russians celebrated Balaklava as a victory. The capture of the redoubts on the Causeway Heights was certainly a tactical success. The next day in Sevastopol it was marked by an Orthodox service as the British guns were paraded through the town. The Russians now had a commanding position from which to attack the British supply lines between Balaklava and the Sevastopol heights; the British were confined to their inner defence line on the hills around Kadikoi. Russian soldiers paraded through Sevastopol with trophies from the battlefield – British overcoats, swords, tunics, shakos, boots and cavalry horses. The morale of the Sevastopol garrison was immediately lifted by the victory. For the first time since the defeat at the Alma, the Russians sensed they were a match for the allied armies on the open battlefield.

The Tsar learned about the claimed victory in his palace at Gatchina on 31 October, when the morning courier arrived from Sevastopol. Anna Tiutcheva, who was with the Empress in the Arsenal Halls listening to a Beethoven recital, wrote in her diary later on that day:

It was through a report in The Times that the British public first became aware of the terrible conditions suffered by the wounded and the sick. On 12 October readers were startled by the news they took in over breakfast from The Times correspondent in Constantinople, Thomas Chenery, ‘that no sufficient medical preparations have been made for the proper care of the wounded’ who had been evacuated from the Crimea to the military hospital at Scutari, 500 kilometres away. ‘Not only are there not sufficient surgeons – that, it might be urged, was unavoidable – not only are there no dressers and nurses – that might be a defect of system for which no one is to blame – but what will be said when it is known that there is not even linen to make bandages for the wounded?’ An angry leader in The Times by John Delane, the paper’s editor, the next day sparked a rush of letters and donations, leading to the establishment of a Times Crimean Fund for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded by Sir Robert Peel, the son of the former Prime Minister. Many letters focused on the scandal that the army had no nurses in the Crimea – a shortcoming which various well-meaning women now proposed to remedy. Among them was Florence Nightingale, the unsalaried superintendent of the Hospital for Invalid Gentlewomen in Harley Street, a family friend of Sidney Herbert, Secretary at War. She wrote to Mrs Herbert offering to recruit a team of nurses for the East on the same day as her husband wrote to Nightingale asking her to do precisely that: the letters crossed each other in the post.

The British were far behind the French in their medical arrangements for the sick and wounded. Visitors to the French military hospitals in the Crimea and Constantinople were impressed by their cleanliness and good order. There were teams of nurses, mostly nuns recruited from the Order of St Vincent de Paul, operating under instructions from the doctors. ‘We found things here in far better condition than at Scutari,’ wrote one English visitor of the hospital in Constantinople:

Captain Herbé was evacuated to the hospital later in the year. He described its regime in a letter to his family:

French death rates from wounds and diseases were considerably lower than British rates during the first winter of the war (but not the second, when French losses from disease were horrendous). Apart from the cleanliness of the French hospitals, the key factor was having treatment centres near the front and medical auxiliaries in every regiment, soldiers with first-aid training (soldats panseurs) who could help their wounded comrades in the field. The great mistake of the British was to transport most of their sick and wounded from the Crimea to Scutari – a long and uncomfortable journey on overcrowded transport ships that seldom had more than a couple of medical officers on board. Raglan had decided on this policy on purely military grounds (‘not to have the wounded in the way’) and would not listen to protests that the wounded and the sick were in no state to make such a long journey and needed treatment as soon as possible. On one ship, Arthur the Great, 384 wounded were laid out on the decks, packed as close as possible, much as it was on the slave ships, the dead and dying lying side by side with the wounded and the sick, without bedding, pillows or blankets, water bowls or bedpans, food or medicines, except those in the ship’s chest, which the captain would not allow to be used. Fearing the spread of cholera, the navy’s principal agent of transports, Captain Peter Christie, ordered all the stricken men to be put on board a single ship, the Kangaroo, which was able to accommodate, at best, 250 men, but by the time it was ready to sail for Scutari, perhaps 500 were packed on board. ‘A frightful scene presented itself, with the dead and dying, the sick and convalescent lying all together on the deck piled higgledy-piggledy,’ in the words of Henry Sylvester, a 23-year-old assistant surgeon and one of just two medical officers on the ship. The captain refused to put to sea with such an overcrowded ship, but eventually the Kangaroo sailed with almost 800 patients on board, though without Sylvester, who sailed for Scutari aboard the Dunbar. The death toll on these ships was appalling: on the Kangaroo and Arthur the Great, there were forty-five deaths on board on each ship; on the Caduceus, one-third of the passengers died before they reached the hospitals of Scutari.¹⁹

The Russians, too, understood the need to treat the wounded as soon as possible, although conditions in their hospitals were far worse than anything that Florence Nightingale would find in Scutari. Indeed, it was a Russian, Nikolai Pirogov, who pioneered the system of field surgery that other nations came to only in the First World War. Although little known outside Russia, where he is considered a national hero, Pirogov’s contribution to battlefield medicine is as significant as anything achieved by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, if not more so.

Born in Moscow in 1810, Pirogov began his medical studies at Moscow University at the age of just 14, and became a professor at the German University of Dorpat at the age of 25, before taking up the appointment of Professor of Surgery at the Academy of Military Medicine in St Petersburg. In 1847 he was with the Russian army in the Caucasus, where he pioneered the use of ether, becoming the first surgeon to employ anaesthesia in a field operation. Pirogov reported on the benefits of ether in several Russian-language publications between 1847 and 1852, though few doctors outside Russia were aware of his articles. Apart from the relief of pain and shock through anaesthesia, Pirogov emphasized that giving ether to the wounded on arrival at the hospital kept them calm and stopped them from collapsing so that the surgeon could make a better choice in selecting between those cases requiring urgent operation and those that could wait. It was this system of triage pioneered by Pirogov during the Crimean War that marked his greatest achievement.

Pirogov arrived in the Crimea in December 1854. He was outraged by the chaos and inhuman treatment of the sick and wounded. Thousands of injured soldiers had been evacuated to Perekop on open carts in freezing temperatures, many of them arriving frozen to death or with limbs so frostbitten that they had to be cut off. Others were abandoned in dirty barns or left by the roadside for lack of transport. There were chronic shortages of medical supplies, not least because of corruption. Doctors sold off medicines and gave their patients cheaper surrogates, exacting bribes for proper treatment. The hospitals struggled to cope with the enormous numbers of wounded. At the time of the allied landings, the Russians had hospital places for 2,000 soldiers in the Crimea, but after Alma they were overwhelmed by 6,000 wounded men, and twice that number after Inkerman.²⁰

Conditions in the Sevastopol hospitals were truly appalling. Two weeks after the battle of the Alma, the surgeon from Chodasiewicz’s regiment visited the naval hospital:

Most of the surgeons in these hospitals were poorly trained, more like ‘village craftsmen’ than doctors, in the estimation of one Russian officer. Practising a rough-and-ready surgery with dirty butcher’s knives, they had little understanding of the need for hygiene or the perils of infection. Pirogov discovered amputees who had been lying in their blood for weeks.²¹

As soon as he arrived in Sevastopol, Pirogov began to impose order on the hospitals, gradually implementing his system of triage. In his memoirs he recounts how he came to it. When he took charge of the main hospital in the Assembly of Nobles, the situation was chaotic. After a heavy bombardment, the wounded were brought in without any order, those who were dying mixed with those who needed urgent treatment and those with light wounds. At first, Pirogov dealt with the most seriously wounded as they came in, telling the nurses to transport them to the operating table directly; but even as he concentrated on one case, more and more seriously wounded men would arrive; he could not keep up. Too many people were dying needlessly before they could be treated, while he was operating on those patients too seriously wounded to be saved. ‘I came to see that this was senseless and decided to be more decisive and rational,’ he recalled. ‘Simple organization at the dressing station was far more important than medical activity in saving lives.’ His solution was a simple form of triage which he first put into practice during the bombardment of Sevastopol on 20 January. Brought into the Great Hall of the Assembly, the wounded were first sorted into groups to determine the order and priority of emergency treatment. There were three main groups: the seriously wounded who needed help and could be saved were operated on in a separate room as soon as possible; the lightly wounded were given a number and told to wait in the nearby barracks until the surgeons could treat them; and those who could not be saved were taken to a resting home, where they were cared for by medical attendants, nurses and priests until they died.²²

In his sketch ‘Sevastopol in December’, Tolstoy takes his readers into the Great Hall:

The use of anaesthetics enabled Pirogov and his team of surgeons to work extremely quickly, completing over a hundred amputations in a seven-hour day by operating simultaneously on three tables (critics said he ran a ‘factory system’). He developed a new type of foot amputation at the ankle, leaving part of the heel bone to give added support to the leg bone, and generally, in his amputations, cut much lower than most other doctors to minimize the trauma and loss of blood, which he understood posed the greatest threat. Above all, Pirogov was aware of the dangers of infection (which he thought came from contaminated vapours) and made a point of separating post-operative patients with clean wounds from those whose wounds were discharging pus and showing signs of developing gangrene. Through all these pioneering measures, Pirogov achieved much higher rates of survival than the British or the French – up to 65 per cent for amputations of the arm. For thigh amputations, the most dangerous and common in the armies of the Crimean War, Pirogov had survival rates of around 25 per cent, whereas only one in ten survived the operation in British and French hospitals.²⁴

The British were much less enthusiastic about the use of anaesthetic than the Russians or the French. Shortly before the British army left Varna for the Crimea, the principal medical officer, Dr John Hall, issued a memorandum in which he cautioned the army’s surgeons ‘against the use of chloroform in the severe shock of serious gunshot wounds… for however barbarous it may appear, the smart of the knife is a powerful stimulant; and it is much better to hear a man bawl lustily than to see him sink silently into the grave’. British medical opinion was divided on the new science of anaesthesia. Some feared the use of chloroform would weaken the patient’s ability to rally, and others thought it was impractical to use it in battefield surgery because of the shortage of qualified doctors to administer it. Such attitudes were closely linked to ideas about withstanding pain that were perhaps peculiar to the British sense of manliness (keeping ‘a stiff upper lip’). The notion that the British soldier was immune to pain was commonplace. As one doctor wrote from the Crimea:

Like the French, Pirogov attached great importance to the role of nurses in his hospitals. Nurses helped to sort the wounded and brought comfort to the men. They dispensed medicines, brought them tea or wine, wrote letters to their families, and gave spiritual support to the dying. The affection of the nurses won the hearts of many men, who often likened them to their mothers. ‘It is astonishing’, wrote Pirogov to his wife, ‘how the presence of a woman, nicely dressed, among the helpers in a hospital alleviates the distress of the men and relieves their suffering.’ Pirogov encouraged the initiatives of Russian noblewomen to recruit teams of nurses for the Crimea. The Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, the Tsar’s German-born sister-in-law,[41] founded the Community of the Holy Cross shortly after news of the defeat at Inkerman. Its first group of thirty-four nurses followed Pirogov to the Crimea, arriving in Simferopol on 1 December after a long and difficult journey over a thousand kilometres of dirt roads from St Petersburg. Most of them were the daughters, wives or widows of military men, with some from families of merchants, priests and state officials of the minor nobility, though they themselves of course had no experience of the harsh conditions of a battle zone and many of them soon fell ill with typhus and the other epidemics that raged among the men. Pirogov divided the nurses into three groups: those who were to attend to the wounded and help in operations; those who dispensed medicines; and those in charge of the general housekeeping in the hospital. For Alexandra Stakhovich, who was assigned to the operating room, the first amputation was a personal trial, but she got through it, as she wrote to tell her family:

In the Crimea itself, women from various communities had organized themselves into teams of nurses and made their way to the dressing stations and field hospitals of the battlefields around Sevastopol. Among them was Dasha Sevastopolskaia, the girl who had cared for the wounded at the Alma, who worked with Pirogov in the operating theatre at the Assembly of Nobles. Another was Elizaveta Khlopotina, the wife of a battery commander wounded in the head at the Alma, who had followed her husband into battle and worked as a nurse in the dressing station at Kacha. Pirogov was full of admiration for the courage of these women, and battled hard against the objections of the military establishment, which was opposed to a female presence among the troops, for more teams of nurses to be organized. The influence of the Grand Duchess eventually told, and the Tsar agreed to recognize the work of the Community of the Holy Cross. Much of its early medical work in the Crimea was financed by the Grand Duchess, who had purchased medical supplies, including precious quinine, through family contacts in England and stored them in the basement of her home in the Mikhailovsky Palace in St Petersburg. But once it had the blessing of the Tsar, donations poured in from the Russian aristocracy, merchants, state officials and the Church. In January two more contingents of nurses organized by the Community arrived in Sevastopol, the second of them led by Ekaterina Bakunina, the daughter of the governor of St Petersburg and a cousin of the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (at that time imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in the Russian capital). Like many of the Russian upper class, she had spent her childhood summers in the Crimea, and was horrified by the invasion of her favourite holiday resort. ‘I could not imagine that this beautiful little corner of our great empire could be turned into a brutal theatre of war.’²⁷

Florence Nightingale had a similar administrative drive to the Grand Duchess. Born into a family of successful industrialists in Derbyshire, she was better educated than most of the men in the British government, among whom her family had a number of connections, though because of her sex she was forced to limit her activities to the field of philanthropy. Inspired by her Christian faith, she entered nursing at the age of 25, much against the will of her family, working first as a social reformer among the poor and then in a Lutheran religious community at Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein near Düsseldorf in Germany, where she observed Pastor Theodor Fliedner and his deaconnesses care for the sick. Graduating from Kaiserswerth in 1851, Nightingale brought back its principles of nursing to the hospital in Harley Street, where she took over as superintendent in August 1853. It was these principles – basic cleanliness and good housekeeping on the wards – that Nightingale would take to the Crimea. There was nothing new in her ideas. The British medical officers in the Crimea were well aware of the benefits of hygiene and good order in the hospital. Their main problem in turning these commonsense ideals into active policies was a lack of manpower and resources – a problem Nightingale would only partly overcome.

In his capacity of Secretary at War, Herbert appointed Nightingale as superintendent of the Female Nursing Establishment of the English General Hospitals in Turkey, though not in the Crimea, where she had no authority until the spring of 1856, when the war was almost at an end. Nightingale’s position was precarious: officially she was subordinated to the military hierarchy, but Herbert gave her instructions to report to him on the failures of the Army Medical Department, and her whole career would depend on fighting tooth and nail against its bureaucracy, which was basically opposed to female nurses at or near the front. Nightingale was domineering by nature but she needed to assume a dictatorial control over her nurses if she was to implement her organizational changes and gain the respect of the military establishment. There was no recognized body of professional nurses from which she could draw her team in Turkey, so with the help of Mrs Herbert she had to establish one herself. Her selection criteria were ruthlessly functional: she favoured younger women from the lower classes, who she thought would buckle down to the hard work and conditions that lay ahead; and she took a group of nuns with experience of nursing to supervise their work, regarding them as a practical concession to the Irish Catholics who made up one-third of the army’s rank and file; but she rejected hundreds of applications from well-meaning middle-class women, whose sensitivities she feared would make them ‘less manageable’.

Nightingale and her team of thirty-eight nurses arrived in Scutari on 4 November 1854, just in time for the mass transport of the wounded from the battle of Balaklava. The French had already taken over the best buildings for their hospitals, and those left for the British were badly overcrowded and in a dreadful state. The wounded and the dying were lying all together with the sick and the diseased on beds and mattresses crammed together on the filthy floor. With so many men suffering from diarrhoea, the only toilet facilities were large wooden tubs standing in the wards and corridors. There was almost no water, the old pipes having broken down, and the heating system did not work. Within days of Nightingale’s arrival, the situation became much worse, as hundreds more wounded men from the battle of Inkerman flooded the hospital. The condition of these men was ‘truly deplorable’, as Walter Bellew, an assistant surgeon at the Hyder Pasha Hospital near Scutari, noted in his diary: ‘Many were landed dead, several died on the way to the hospitals, and the rest were all in a most pitiable condition; their clothes were begrimed with filth and alvine evacuations [from the abdomen], their hands and faces blackened with gunpowder & mud &c and their bodies literally alive with vermin.’ The men were dying at a rate of fifty to sixty every day: as soon as one man breathed his last he was sewn into his blanket and buried in a mass grave by the hospital while another patient took his bed. The nurses worked around the clock to feed and wash the men, give them medicines, and bring them comfort as they died. Many of the nurses were unable to cope with the strain and began drinking heavily, some of them complaining about the bossy manner of Miss Nightingale and about their menial work. They were sent home by Nightingale.²⁸

By the end of December Nightingale had a second team of nurses at her disposal, and control of the Times Crimean Fund, enabling her to purchase stores and medicines for all the British hospitals in Scutari. She was able to act on her own initiative, without obstruction from the military authorities, who relied on her financial and administrative power to rescue them from the medical disaster they were in. Nightingale was an able administrator. Although her impact has been overestimated (and the contribution of the British medical officers, dressers and dispensers almost totally ignored) by those who later made her cult, there is no doubt that she got things moving in the main hospital at Scutari. She reorganized the kitchens, purchased new boilers, hired Turkish laundresses and supervised their work, oversaw the cleaning of the wards, and after working twenty hours every day, would make her nightly rounds, bringing words of Christian comfort to the men, for which she became known as the Lady with the Lamp. Yet despite all her efforts, the death rate continued to escalate alarmingly. In the month of January, 10 per cent of the entire British army in the East died from disease. In February, the death rate of patients at Scutari was 52 per cent, having risen from 8 per cent when Nightingale arrived in November. In all, that winter, in the four months following the hurricane, 4,000 soldiers died in the hospitals of Scutari, the vast majority of them unwounded. The British public was appalled by the loss of life. The readers of The Times demanded explanations, and in early March a government-appointed sanitary commission arrived in Scutari to investigate. It found that the main Barrack Hospital was built on top of a cesspool, that the sewers were leaking, with sewage spilling into the drinking water. Nightingale was unaware of the danger, for she believed that infection came from contaminated vapours, but the sanitation in the hospital was clearly inadequate. The soldiers in her care would have had a better chance of survival in any Turkish village than in her hospitals in Scutari.

In Britain, France and Russia, the public followed these developments with increasing interest and concern. Through daily reports in the newspapers, photographs and drawings in periodicals, people had immediate access to the latest news about the war, and a clearer grasp of its realities, than during any previous conflict. Their reactions to the news became a major factor in the calculations of the military authorities, which were exposed to a degree of public criticism never seen before during wartime. This was the first war in history in which public opinion played so crucial a role.

Britain led the way in terms of its appetite for news. Reports of the suffering of the troops and the plight of the wounded and the sick had created a state of national anxiety about the situation of the allied armies camped above Sevastopol. The severe frost in Britain that winter served only to intensify these feelings of concern for the men out in Russia. There was a huge response to the Times Crimean Fund, as well as to the Royal Patriotic Fund for the relief of the soldiers’ wives and families, with people from all walks of life donating money, sending food parcels, and knitting warm clothing (including the ‘Balaklava Helmets’ that were invented at this time). The Queen herself informed the Duke of Cambridge that ‘the whole female part’ of Windsor Castle, including herself, was ‘busily knitting for the army’.²⁹

More than any other country on the Continent, Britain enjoyed a free press, and that freedom now showed its face. The abolition of the newspaper stamp duty in 1855 enabled the growth of a cheaper press, afforded even by the working man. As well as many letters from officers and soldiers, the Crimean War saw the emergence of a new breed of ‘war correspondent’, who brought the events of the battlefield to the breakfast tables of the middle class. During previous wars, newspapers had relied on amateur ‘agents’ – usually diplomats or approved officers in the armed forces – to send in reports (a tradition that lasted until the end of the nineteenth century when a young Winston Churchill reported on the Sudan as a serving army officer). These reports were normally drawn from military communiqués, and they were subject to the censorship of the authorities; it was rare for an agent to include a first-hand account of events he had himself witnessed. Things began to change in the 1840s and early 1850s, as newspapers started to employ foreign correspondents in important areas, such as Thomas Chenery, the Times correspondent in Constantinople since March 1854, who broke the news of the appalling conditions in the hospitals of Scutari.³⁰

The advent of steamships and the telegraph enabled newspapers to send their own reporters into a war zone and print their stories within days. News travelled faster during the Crimean War as telegraphs were built in stages to link the battle zone with the European capitals. At the start of the campaign in the Crimea the fastest news could get to London in five days: two by steamship from Balaklava to Varna, and three by horseback to Bucharest, the nearest link by telegraph. By the winter of 1854, with the French construction of a telegraph to Varna, news could be communicated in two days; and by the end of April 1855, when the British laid an underwater cable between Balaklava and Varna, it could get to London in a few hours.[42]

It was not just the speed of news that was important but the frank and detailed nature of the press reports that the public could read in the papers every day. Free from censorship, the Crimean correspondents wrote at length for a readership whose hunger for news about the war fuelled a boom in newspapers and periodicals. Through their vivid descriptions of the fighting, of the terrible conditions and suffering of the men, they brought the war into every home and allowed the public to be actively involved in the debate about how it should be fought. Never had so many readers written to The Times and other newspapers as they did in the Crimean War – nearly all of them with observations and opinions about how to improve the campaign.[43] Never had so many of the British middle classes been so politically mobilized. Even remote country areas were suddenly exposed to world events. In his winning memoirs, the poet Edmund Gosse recalls the impact of the war on his family, reclusive members of a small Christian sect in the Devon countryside: ‘The declaration of war with Russia brought the first breath of outside life into our Calvinist cloister. My parents took in a daily newspaper, which they had never done before, and events in picturesque places, which my Father and I looked out on the map, were eagerly discussed.’³¹

The public appetite for vivid descriptions of the Crimean campaign was insatiable. War tourists like Fanny Duberly had a ready readership for their eyewitness narratives. But the greatest interest was reserved for visual images. Lithographs were quick and cheap enough to reproduce in periodicals like the Illustrated London News, which enjoyed a huge boom in its weekly sales during the Crimean War. Photographs aroused the interest of the public more than anything – they seemed to give a ‘realistic’ image of the war – and there was a substantial market for the photographic albums of James Robertson and Roger Fenton, who both made their names in the Crimea. Photography was just entering the scene – the British public had been wowed by its presentation at the Great Exhibition of 1851 – and this was the first war to be photographed and ‘seen’ by the public at the time of its fighting. There had been daguerreotypes of the Mexican-American War of 1846–8 and calotypes of the Burmese War of 1852–3, but these were primitive and hazy images compared to the photographs of the Crimean War, which appeared so ‘accurate’ and ‘immediate’, a ‘direct window onto the realities of war’, as one newspaper remarked at the time. In fact they were far from that. The limitations of the wetplate process (which required the glass plate to be exposed for up to twenty seconds) made it virtually impossible to photograph movement (though techniques improved to make this possible by the time of the American Civil War in the early 1860s). Most of Robertson’s and Fenton’s photographs are posed portraits and landscapes, images derived from genres of painting appealing to the tastes and sensibilities of their middle-class market. Although both men had seen a lot of death, neither showed it in their photographs – though Fenton referred to it symbolically in his most famous picture, Valley of the Shadow of Death, a desolate landscape strewn with cannonballs (which he clustered together to intensify the image) – because their pictures needed to be reconciled with Victorian society’s prevailing notions of it as a just and righteous war. The sanitized depiction of war in Robertson’s work had more to do with commercial pressures than with any censorship, but in the case of Fenton, a royal photographer who was sent to the Crimea partly to counteract the negative depiction of the campaign in The Times and other newspapers, there was certainly an element of propaganda. To reassure the public that the British soldiers were warmly dressed, for example, Fenton took a portrait of some soldiers dressed in good boots and heavy sheepskin coats recently dispatched by the government. But Fenton did not arrive in the Crimea until March 1855, and that portrait was not taken until mid-April, by which time many lives had been lost to the freezing temperatures and the need for such warm clothing had long passed. With April temperatures of 26 degrees, Fenton’s soldiers must have been sweltering in the heat.³²

Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) Men of the 68th Regiment in Winter Dress (1855)

If Fenton’s camera lied, the same could not be said of William Russell’s reports in The Times, which did more than anything to inform the British public of the true conditions of the war. Russell was the most important and widely read reporter from the Crimea. Born in 1820 into an Anglo-Irish family near Dublin, Russell began working for The Times in 1841, during the general election in Ireland. He had covered only one small border war between Prussian and Danish troops in 1850, when he was sent by John Delane, the paper’s editor, with the Guards Brigade to Malta in February 1854. Delane promised the army’s commander-in-chief that Russell would return before Easter, but the journalist spent the next two years with the British army, reporting on an almost daily basis on the latest news from the Crimea, and exposing many of the failures of the military authorities. Russell’s Anglo-Irish background gave his writing a critical detachment from the English military establishment, whose incompetence he never hesitated to condemn. His sympathies were clearly with the ordinary troops, some one-third of them Irish, with whom he had a relaxed manner that encouraged them to talk. Henry Clifford described him as

a vulgar low Irishman, an Apostate Catholic… but he has the gift of the gab and uses his pen as well as his tongue, sings a good song, drinks anyone’s brandy and water, and smokes as many cigars as foolish young officers will let him, and he is looked upon by most in Camp as a ‘Jolly Good Fellow.’ He is just the sort of chap to get information, particularly out of youngsters.³³

The military establishment despised Russell. Raglan advised his officers not to speak to the reporter, claiming that he was a danger to security. He was particularly angered by the publication of letters in The Times by officers and soldiers highlighting the deplorable conditions of the troops. It was rumoured that the press was paying for such letters, some of which had not been meant for publication but had been passed on to the newspapers by relatives. The military authorities, who put more store on loyalty and obedience than on the welfare of the troops, were outraged by letter-writers who had broken ranks. ‘Officers write more absurd and rascally letters than ever or else The Times concocts them for them, anyhow it is very bad and unsoldier-like of them,’ fumed Major Kingscote of the Scots Guards and headquarters staff. ‘I still maintain that the soldier is very cheerful and they always seem in good spirit. The officers I do not see much, but I observe one thing, and that is that the more aristocratic blood there is in the veins the less they grumble, in spite of the assertions of The Times.’

Raglan went on the attack. On 13 November he wrote to the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for War, claiming that The Times had published information that could be useful to the enemy. There were certainly reports that the Russians had received a morale boost from Russell’s articles about supply shortages and the poor condition of the troops (the Tsar himself had read them in St Petersburg). In response to Raglan’s letter, the Deputy Judge Advocate William Romaine issued a warning to British reporters in the Crimea, while Newcastle wrote to their newspaper editors. But Delane resisted these attempts to curb the freedom of the press. Believing Raglan to be incompetent, he saw it as a matter of national interest to expose the poor administration of the army, and would not listen to the arguments about national security. On 23 December an editorial in The Times accused the high command of incompetence, official lethargy and, perhaps most damaging of all in a conflict that was fast becoming embroiled in a broader political struggle between the professional ideal of meritocracy and the old world of aristocratic privilege, obvious nepotism in the appointment of Raglan’s personal staff (no less than five of his ADCs were his nephews).

Raglan’s patience at last broke, and on 4 January he wrote again to Newcastle, effectively accusing Russell of treason:

I pass over the fault the writer finds with every thing and every body, however calculated his strictures may be to excite discontent and encourage indiscipline, but I ask you to consider whether the paid agent of the Emperor of Russia could better serve his Master than does the correspondent of the paper that has the largest circulation in Europe… I am very doubtful, now that Communications are so rapid, whether a British Army can long be maintained in the presence of a powerful Enemy, that Enemy having at his command thro’ the English press, and from London to his Head Quarters by telegraph, every detail that can be required of the numbers, condition, and equipment of his opponent’s force.³⁴

Newcastle was not impressed. By this time, he was already feeling the political pressure created by the Times campaign. The scandal surrounding the condition of the army was threatening the government. Adding his own voice to the mounting criticisms of the military administration, Newcastle urged Raglan to dimiss generals Airey and Estcourt, the Quartermaster and Adjutant Generals of the army respectively, hoping this would satisfy the public demand for heads to roll. Raglan would not give them up – he did not seem to think that anybody in the high command was to blame for the army’s difficulties – though he happily accepted the recall of Lord Lucan, whom he blamed (most unjustly) for the sacrifice of the Light Brigade.

By the time Lucan received his recall on 12 February, the power of the press and public criticism had brought down the government. On 29 January two-thirds of the House of Commons had voted for a motion by the Radical MP John Roebuck calling for the appointment of a select committee to investigate the condition of the army and the conduct of the government departments responsible for it – in effect, a vote of no-confidence in the government’s leadership of the war campaign. Roebuck had not wanted to bring down the government – his main aim had been to make a stand for parliamentary accountability – but the pressures working on the government were no longer contained inside Parliament: they were coming from the public and the press. The next day Aberdeen resigned, and a week later, on 6 February, the Queen called on Palmerston, her least favourite politician, now aged 70, to form his first government. Palmerston was the popular choice of the patriotic middle classes – through his cultivation of the press he had captured the imagination of the British public with his aggressive foreign policy which they had come to see as the embodiment of their own national character and popular ideals – and they now looked to him to save the war campaign from the incompetent generals.

‘At the stage of civilization in which we are,’ the French Emperor announced in 1855, ‘the success of armies, however brilliant they may be, is only transitory. In reality it is public opinion that wins the last victory.’ Louis-Napoleon was well aware of the power of the press and public opinion – his rise to power had relied on them – and for that reason the French press was censored and controlled by his government during the Crimean War. Editorials were usually ‘paid for’ by supporters of the government and politically were often to the right of the viewpoint held by most readers of the newspaper. Napoleon saw the war as a way of winning popular support for his regime, and he pursued it with one eye on the public reaction. He instructed Canrobert (renowned for his indecision) not to order an assault ‘unless perfectly certain of the result being in our favour, but also not to attempt it if the sacrifice of life should be great’.³⁵

Sensitive to public criticism, Napoleon ordered his police to collect information on what people were saying about the war. Informers listened to private conversations, priests’ sermons and speeches by orators, and what they heard was recorded in reports by local procurators and prefects. According to these reports, the French had never been in favour of the war, and, with the army’s failure to achieve an early victory, they were becoming increasingly impatient and critical about its continuation. Much of their frustration was focused on the leadership of Canrobert and the ‘cowardice’ of Prince Napoleon, who had left the Crimea after Inkerman and returned to France in January, where (courting opposition views against the war) he then made well known his view that Sevastopol was ‘impregnable’ and that the siege should be raised. By this time, the prefects were reporting on the possibility of war-weariness becoming opposition to the government. Henri Loizillon, an engineer in the French trenches before Sevastopol, heard the soldiers talking of a revolution being planned, with strikes and demonstrations against the mobilization of further troops in France. ‘The most alarming rumours circulate,’ he wrote to his family. ‘All the talk is of revolution: Paris, Lyon, all the major cities will be in a state of siege; in Marseille the people will rise up against the embarkation of the troops; everybody wants peace, and it seems they are ready to pay almost any price for it.’ In Paris an impatient Emperor of the French was justly terrified of revolutionary violence – it was only six and a half years since crowds had taken to the barricades to bring down the July Monarchy – and made detailed plans to deal with any more disturbances in the capital. Buildings were constructed in the centre of Paris ‘with the view of being capable of holding a number of troops in case of any rising’, he informed Queen Victoria, and macadam was ‘laid down in almost all the streets to prevent the populace from taking up the paving stones as hitherto, “pour en faire des barricades”’. To stop public criticism of the war he concluded that the time had come to take a firmer control of the high command and go to the Crimea himself to accelerate the capture of Sevastopol and restore glory to the name of Napoleon.³⁶

In Russia there was very little public information about the war. There was only one Russian newspaper, the Odessa Bulletin (Odesskii Vestnik), for the whole Black Sea area, but it did not have a corrrespondent in the Crimea, and it published only the most basic news about the war, usually two or three weeks late. Strict censorship limited what could be printed in the press. Reports of the battle on the Alma, for example, appeared in the Odessa Bulletin only on 12 October, a full twenty-two days after the event, when the defeat was described as a ‘tactical withdrawal under threat from much larger numbers of the enemy on both flanks and from the sea’. When this laconic and mendacious bulletin failed to satisfy the reading public, which had heard rumours of the fall of Sevastopol and the destruction of the Black Sea Fleet, the newspaper printed a more detailed report on 8 November, forty-nine days after the battle, in which it admitted a defeat but failed to mention the panic flight of the Russian troops or the superiority of the enemy’s riflemen whose firepower had overwhelmed the outdated muskets of the Tsar’s infantry. The public simply could not be told that the Russian army had been poorly led or that it was technically behind the armies of Europe.³⁷

Without official information they could trust, the educated public listened to rumours. An Englishwoman living in St Petersburg noted some ‘ridiculous ideas’ about the war among the upper classes, who were ‘kept entirely in the dark by all the government accounts’. It was rumoured, for example, that Britain was attempting to raise Poland against Russia, that India was about to fall to the Russians, and that the Americans would come to Russia’s aid in the Crimea. Many were convinced that a military treaty had been signed with the United States.[44] ‘They appeared to regard the President of the United States with as much respect as a sailor does his sheet-anchor in a storm,’ wrote the anonymous Englishwoman. Americans in Russia were fêted and showered with honours, ‘and seemed rather pleased than otherwise’, she added.

It is odd that citizens of a republican nation such as that of the States should have so great a reverence for titles, orders, stars, and the like trumpery… The very day I left [St Petersburg], one of the attachés of their embassy showed my friends, with the greatest exultation, the Easter eggs with which the Princess so-and-so, the Countess such-an-one, and several officials of high rank about the court, had presented him: he also exhibited the portraits of the whole of the Imperial family, which he intended to hang up, he said, as household treasures, when he returned to New York.

The police struggled to contain the spread of rumours, although their informers were said to be everywhere. The Englishwoman told of two women summoned to the offices of Count Orlov, the head of the Third Section, the secret police, after they had been heard in a coffee shop voicing doubts about what was printed in the Russian press about the war. ‘I was informed that they received a severe reprimand, and were ordered to believe all that was written under the government sanction.’³⁸

The war generated varied responses throughout Russian society. The invasion of the Crimea caused outrage in educated circles, which rallied round the patriotic memory of 1812. Ironically, however, most of the public anger seemed to be focused on the English rather than the French, who, as a result of the Russian victory against Napoleon, were treated ‘as a people too insignificant and helpless to merit any other sentiment but that of the most profound pity and compassion’, according to our unknown Englishwoman in St Petersburg. Anglophobia had a long tradition in Russia. ‘Perfidious Albion’ was blamed for everything in some circles of high society. ‘To hear them talk one would imagine that all the evils existing in the world are to be ascribed to British influence,’ the Englishwoman wrote. In the salons of St Petersburg it was a commonplace that England had been the aggressor responsible for the war, and that English money was at the root of the trouble. Some said the English had made war to gain possession of the Russian gold mines in Siberia; others that they wanted to expand their empire to the Caucasus and the Crimea. They all saw Palmerston as the prime mover of British policy and as the author of their misfortunes. Over much of the European continent, Palmerston was hated as a symbol of the bullying and dishonest British, who preached free trade and liberty as a means of advancing their own economic and imperial interests in the world. But the Russians had a special reason to despise the statesman who had spearheaded Europe’s anti-Russian policy. According to the Englishwoman in St Petersburg, the names of Palmerston and Napier, the admiral in charge of the campaign in the Baltic, ‘inspired the lower classes with so great a terror’ that women would frighten their children off to bed by saying ‘that the English Admiral was coming!’

And among the common men, after exhausting all the opprobious terms they could think of (and the Russian language is singularly rich in that respect), one would turn to the other and say, ‘You are an English dog!’ Then followed a few more civilities, which they would finish by calling each other, ‘Palmerston!’, without having the remotest idea of what the word meant; but at the very climax of hatred and revenge, they would bawl out ‘Napier!’, as if he were fifty times worse than Satan himself.

A poem widely circulated among Russian officers caught the patriotic mood:

And so in bellicose ardour Commander Palmerston Defeats Russia on the map With his index finger. Roused by his valour, The Frenchman, too, following fast behind, Brandishes his uncle’s sword And cries: allons courage!³⁹

The pan-Slavs and Slavophiles were the most enthusiastic supporters of the war. They had hailed the Russian invasion of the Balkans as the start of a religious war for the liberation of the Slavs, and were disappointed when the Tsar had ordered the retreat from the Danube, many of them urging him to go to war against the whole of Europe on his own. Pogodin, the editor of the Moscow journal Moskvitianin, became even more extreme in his pan-Slav views as a result of the retreat, calling on the Tsar to throw all caution to the wind and launch a revolutionary war against the Austrians as well as the Ottomans for the liberation of the Slavs. The allied invasion of Russia turned their calls for a European war into a reality, and their bellicose ideas were carried on a wave of patriotic sentiment that swept through society. Pogodin received the blessing of the Tsar, which gave him access to the court and the chance to write to him with opinions on foreign policy. How much influence Pogodin had on Nicholas remains unclear, but his presence at the court gave a green light to the aristocracy to subscribe openly to his ideas. According to the Englishwoman in St Petersburg: ‘How much soever the Tsar might have sought to disguise his intentions concerning Turkey and Constantinople, his nobles did not attempt to do so, and that even two years ago, long ere this war was certain. “Quant à Constantinople, nous l’aurons, soyez tranquille,”[45] said a nobleman one evening.’⁴⁰

Among the more liberal and pro-Western circles of society, however, there was less support for the war, and those with access to the foreign press were likely to be critical of it. Many did not see the need for Russia to become involved in the Eastern Question, let alone to become entangled in a potentially disastrous war against the Western powers. ‘All sorts of dirty tricks are performed in the name of Holy Rus′,’ wrote Prince Viazemsky, a veteran of the war against the French in 1812, a critic and a poet of liberal persuasions, who served for twenty years in the Ministry of Finance before becoming chief of censorship in 1856. ‘How will it all end? In my modest view… we have no chance of victory. The English allied to the French will always be stronger than us.’ According to the reports of the Third Section in 1854, many people in the educated classes were basically hostile to the war and wanted the government to continue with negotiations to avoid it.⁴¹

The opinion of the lower classes is harder to discern. Merchants were afraid of losing trade and tended to be hostile to the war. In St Petersburg, the unnamed Englishwoman noted, ‘not only every street but every house gave some intimation of the struggle in which they are engaged; trade was almost at a standstill; scarcely any of the shops had customers in them; everybody seemed to be economizing their money lest poverty should come’. The serf peasants suffered most, losing young and able-bodied men from their family farms to the military drafts and at the same time shouldering most of the increased burden of taxation that resulted from the war. The peasant population declined dramatically – in some areas by as much as 6 per cent – during the Crimean War. There were crop failures, partly because of bad weather but also due to shortages of labour and draught animals that had been conscripted by the army, and around 300 serf uprisings or serious disturbances with physical attacks on landowners and the burning of their property. Among the upper classes, there was a fear of revolution, wrote the Englishwoman: ‘It was the opinion of many when I left St Petersburg that the 80,000 soldiers (as the Russian said) who were bivouacked in the streets and billeted on the houses were a great deal more for the purpose of ensuring peace within the barriers of the town than for that of repelling a foreign invader.’⁴²

Yet there were peasants who viewed the war as an opportunity. During the spring of 1854 a rumour spread through the countryside that freedom had been promised to any peasant serf who volunteered for the army or navy. The rumour had its roots in the decision of the government to create a fleet of galleys in the Baltic by recruiting peasant volunteers: they would be released by their landowners for the period of service provided they agreed to return to their estates afterwards. The result was a massive rush of peasants to the northern ports. Police blocked the roads, and thousands of peasants were locked up in jails, until they could be marched home in chained convoys. Once these rumours of emancipation spread, subsequent troop levies were interpreted in the same way. Priests, peasant scribes and agitators helped to spread the wrong idea. In Riazan’, for example, a deacon told the serfs that if they joined the army they would be given eight silver roubles every month and that after three years of military service they and their families would be liberated from serfdom.

Everywhere the story was the same. The peasants were convinced that the Tsar Batiushka had issued a decree promising them freedom if they volunteered, and, when told that this was not true, they assumed the decree had been hidden or replaced by his evil officials. It is hard to tell how far their belief was innocent, and how far deliberate, an expression of their hopes for liberation from serfdom. In many places the rumours were confused with older peasant notions of a ‘Golden Manifesto’ in which the Tsar would liberate the peasants and give them all the land. One group of peasants, for example, turned up at a recuiting station, having heard that the Tsar was sitting in a ‘golden chamber’ on top of a mountain in the Crimea: ‘he gives freedom to all who come to him, but those who do not come or are too late will remain serfs to their masters as before.’ In other areas the rumours were replaced by stories that the English and the French would liberate the serfs who volunteered to join them in the Crimea, stories which began a flight of peasants to the south. In the peasant mind the south was linked to the idea of land and liberty: since medieval times it was to the steppelands of the south that the serfs had run away from their masters. The traditions of the free Cossacks remained strong among the peasantry of the southern provinces, where the volunteer movement assumed an almost revolutionary character. Bands of peasants marched to the local garrisons, demanding to be enlisted in the army and refusing to work any longer for their landowners. Armed with pikes, knives and clubs, the peasants clashed with soldiers and police.⁴³

With no shortage of volunteers, and all the resources of their empire to draw from, the Russians had an ideal opportunity in these winter months to attack and destroy the weakened allied armies on the frozen heights above Sevastopol. But there was no initiative. The Russian high command had lost authority and self-confidence since the defeat at Inkerman. Without faith in his commanders, the Tsar had become increasingly gloomy and despondent, believing that the war could not be won and perhaps regretting that he had caused it in the first place. Courtiers described him as a broken man, physically ill, exhausted and depressed, who had aged ten years since the beginning of the war.

Perhaps the Tsar was still counting on his trusted ‘Generals January and February’ to defeat the British and the French. As long as they were losing men from cold, disease and hunger on the open heights, he was happy for his commanders to limit their attacks to small nightly sorties against the allies’ forward positions. These sorties caused little damage but added to their exhaustion. ‘Our Tsar won’t let them eat or sleep,’ wrote a Cossack to his family from Sevastopol on 12 January. ‘It’s only a shame they don’t all die so we don’t have to fight them.’⁴⁴

The Russians had supply problems that prevented them developing a more ambitious strategy. With the allied fleets in control of the sea, the Russians had to bring in all their supplies by horse or oxen-driven peasant carts on snow-bound and muddy roads from south Russia. There were no railways. By the time of the hurricane, the whole of the Crimea was suffering from shortages of hay; the draft animals began to die at an alarming rate. Pirogov saw ‘the swollen bodies of dead oxen at every step along the road’ from Perekop to Sevastopol in the first week of December. By January the Russian army in the Crimea had just 2,000 carts to bring in supplies, one-third the number it had deployed at the start of November. In Sevastopol, rations were drastically reduced. The only meat available was rotten salted beef from the dead oxen. Transferred to Esky-Ord near Simferopol in December, Tolstoy found the soldiers there had no winter coats but plentiful supplies of vodka which they had been given to keep warm. In Sevastopol, the defenders of the bastions were just as cold and hungry as the British and the French in the trenches. Every day through these winter months at least a dozen Russians ran away.⁴⁵

But the main reason why the Tsar would not commit to a major new offensive in the Crimea was his growing fear of an Austrian invasion of Russia. The cautious Paskevich, the only one of his senior commanders in whom he really trusted after Inkerman, had long been warning of the Austrian threat to Russian Poland, which he thought was far more serious than the danger to the Crimea. In a letter to the Tsar on 20 December, Paskevich persuaded him to keep a large corps of infantry in the Dubno, Kamenets and Galicia border regions in case of an attack by the Austrians rather than send them to the Crimea. The Austrian threat had been underlined two weeks before, when the Austrians had entered a military alliance with France and Britain promising to defend the Danubian principalities against the Russians in exchange for the allies’ pledge to defend them against the Russians and guarantee their possessions in Italy for the duration of the war. In reality, the Austrians were far more concerned to use their new alliance to force the Western powers to negotiate a peace with the Russians under their own influence at Vienna than they were to go to war against Russia. But the Tsar still felt the betrayal of the Austrians, who had mobilized their troops to force the Russians out of the Danubian principalities only the previous summer, and he was afraid of them. Between 7 January and 12 February the Tsar wrote long notes in his own hand in which he planned the measures he would take if Russia faced a war against the Austrians, the Prussians and the other German states. In each memorandum he became more convinced that such a war was imminent. It was perhaps a symptom of the growing desperation that took hold of the Tsar in his final days. He was haunted by the possibility that the whole Russian Empire would collapse – that all the territorial gains of his ancestors would be lost in this foolish ‘holy war’ – with Britain and the Swedes attacking Russia through the Baltic, Austria and Prussia attacking through Poland and the Ukraine, and the Western powers attacking in the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Realizing that it was impossible to defend all sectors simultaneously, he agonized over where to place his defences, and concluded that in the last resort it would be better to lose the Ukraine to the Austrians than to weaken the defences of the centre and ‘the heart of Russia’.⁴⁶

At last, in early February, fearing that the Western powers were about to land a new invasion force to cut off the Crimea from the Russian mainland at Perekop, the Tsar ordered an offensive to recapture their likely landing base at the port of Evpatoria, which was then held by a Turkish force of around 20,000 troops under the command of Omer Pasha, supported by the guns of part of the allied fleets. The port’s defensive works, which included 34 pieces of heavy artillery, were formidable, so much so that Lieutenant General Baron Wrangel, the commander of the Russian cavalry in the Evpatoria area, thought that its capture was impossible, and would not take responsibility for an offensive. But Nicholas insisted that the attack should go ahead, giving the command to Wrangel’s deputy, Lieutenant General Khrulev, an artilleryman who was once described by Gorchakov as having ‘not much in the head, but very brave and active, who will do exactly what you tell him’. Asked by Menshikov whether it was possible to capture Evpatoria, Khrulev was confident of success. His force of 19,000 men (with 24 squadrons of cavalry and 108 guns) set off at daylight on 17 February, by which time the Tsar was having second thoughts about the wisdom of the expedition, thinking that it might be better to let the allies land their troops and attack them on their flank as they moved to Perekop. But it was too late to stop Khrulev. The offensive lasted three hours. The Russian troops were easily repulsed, with the loss of 1,500 men, and retreated across the open country towards Simferopol. Without shelter, many of them died from exhaustion and the cold, their frozen bodies abandoned on the steppe.

By the time the news of the defeat reached the Tsar in St Petersburg on 24 February, he was already gravely ill. The Tsar had come down with influenza on 8 February, but he continued with the daily tasks of government. On the 16th, feeling slightly better and ignoring the advice of his doctors, he went out without a winter coat in a frost of 23 degrees below zero to review the troops in St Petersburg. The next day he went out again. From that evening his health began to deteriorate terminally.

He caught pneumonia. Doctors could hear liquid in his lungs, a sign that finally persuaded his personal physician, Dr Mandt, that there was no hope of a recovery. Badly shaken by the defeat at Evpatoria, on the advice of Mandt, Nicholas handed over government to his son, the Tsarevich Alexander. He asked his son to dismiss Khrulev and replace Menshikov (who was then sick himself) with Gorchakov as the commander-in-chief. But everybody knew that Nicholas had himself to blame for having ordered the attack, and he was filled with shame. According to Mandt, who was with him when he died, the Tsar’s ‘spiritual suffering broke him more than his physical illness’, and news of the reverses at Evpatoria ‘struck the final blow’ to his already failing health.⁴⁷

Nicholas died on 2 March. The public had known nothing of the Tsar’s illness (he had forbidden any bulletins on his health to be published) and the announcement of his sudden death immediately gave rise to rumours that he had committed suicide. It was said that the Tsar had been distraught about Evpatoria and had asked Mandt to give him poison. A crowd assembled outside the Winter Palace, where the black flag was raised, and angry voices called for the death of the doctor with the German name. Fearing for his life, Mandt was whisked away in a carriage from the palace, and left Russia shortly afterwards.⁴⁸

Various other rumours began to circulate: that Mandt had killed the Tsar (a version advanced by certain figures at the court to counteract the idea that Nicholas had killed himself); that Mandt was rewarded for his loyalty with a portrait of the Tsar in a diamond-studded frame; and that a doctor by the name of Gruber had been imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for showing too much interest in the Tsar’s death. Rumours of the Tsar’s suicide were readily believed by those who were opposed to his authoritarian rule: that he should have taken his own life seemed to them a tacit recognition of his sins. The rumours were given credence by distinguished scholars in the final decades before 1917, including Nikolai Shil’der, the author of a four-volume biography of Nicholas, whose father, Karl Shil’der, had been at his court; and they were widely cited by historians in the Soviet period. They are still believed by some historians today.⁴⁹

In her intimate diary of life at court, Anna Tiutcheva presents enough details of the Tsar’s final hours to rule out the serious possibility of suicide. But she also makes it clear that Nicholas was broken morally, that he was so filled with remorse for his mistakes, for the disastrous war that he had brought to Russia through his impulsive foreign policies, that he welcomed death. Perhaps he thought that he no longer had God on his side. Before he died, the Tsar called his son to him and asked him to tell the army and in particular the defenders of Sevastopol that ‘I have always tried to do my best for them, and, where I failed, it was not for lack of good will, but from lack of knowledge and intelligence. I ask them to forgive me.’⁵⁰

Dressed in military uniform, Nicholas was buried in the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the burial place of all Russia’s rulers since Peter the Great. Just before the lid of his coffin was closed, the Empress laid upon the heart of Nicholas a silver cross with a depiction of the Church of St Sophia in Constantinople, ‘so that in Heaven he would not forget to pray for his brothers in the East’.⁵¹

The question facing the British and the French was not just how to enlist new allies and recruits for a broader war against Russia, but where to focus that attack. By the spring of 1855 Russia’s forces had become extremely thinly spread and there were many weak points in the empire’s defences, so it made good sense to broaden the campaign with new assaults in these places. The only problem was deciding where. Of the 1.2 million Russian soldiers in the field, 260,000 were guarding the Baltic coast, 293,000 were in Poland and western Ukraine, 121,000 were in Bessarabia and along the Black Sea coast, while 183,000 were stationed in the Caucasus.¹¹

So stretched were the Russians’ defences, and so frightened were they that the allies would break through, that plans were made for a partisan war on the lines of 1812. A secret memorandum (‘On National Resistance in the Event of the Enemy’s Invasion of Russia’) was drawn up by General Gorchakov in February. Gorchakov was worried by the build-up of the allied European armies for a new offensive in the spring, and feared that Russia would not have enough forces to defend all its borders against them. Like Paskevich and Tsar Nicholas, he was most afraid of an Austrian invasion through Poland and Ukraine, where the largest Russian forces were deployed, because of the ethnic and religious composition of these borderlands: if the Austrians broke through, they were likely to be joined, not only by the Poles, but by the Catholic Ruthenians in Volhynia and Podolia. Gorchakov proposed that Russia’s line of partisan defence should be drawn up on religious lines in areas behind these borderlands, in Kiev and Kherson provinces, where the population was Orthodox and might be persuaded by their priests to join partisan brigades. Under the command of the Southern Army, the brigades would destroy bridges, crops and cattle, following the scorched-earth policies of 1812, and then take to the forests, from which they would ambush the invading troops. Approved by Alexander, Gorchakov’s proposals were put into operation during March. Priests were sent to the Ukraine. Armed with copies of a manifesto written by the Tsar on his deathbed, they called on the Orthodox peasants to wage a ‘holy war’ against the invaders. This initiative was not a success. Bands of peasants did appear in the Kiev area, some of them with as many as 700 men, but most were under the impression that they would be fighting for their liberation from serfdom, not against a foreign enemy. They marched with their pitchforks and hunting guns against the local manors, where they had to be dispersed by soldiers from the garrisons.¹²

Meanwhile the allies discussed where to direct new offensives in the spring. Many British leaders pinned their hopes on a campaign in the Caucasus, where the Muslim rebel tribes under the command of the Imam Shamil had already linked up with the Turkish army to attack the Russians in Georgia and Circassia. In July 1854, Shamil had launched a large-scale assault on the Russian positions in Georgia. With 15,000 cavalry and troops, he had advanced to within 60 kilometres of Tbilisi, at that time defended by only 2,000 Russian troops. But the Turks had failed to move their forces up from Kars to join in his attack on the tsarist military headquarters, so he had retreated into Daghestan. Some of Shamil’s forces under the command of his son Gazi Muhammed attacked the summer house of the Georgian Prince Chavchavadze in Tsinandali, taking off as prisoners the Prince’s wife and her sister (granddaughters of the last Georgian king) with their children and their French governess. Shamil had hoped to exchange them for his son Jemaleddin, a prisoner in St Petersburg, but news of their capture caused an international sensation, and French and British representatives demanded their unconditional release. But by the time their letters reached Shamil, in March 1855, the Imam had in fact successfully exchanged the women and their children for Jemaleddin and 40,000 silver roubles from the Russian court.¹³

The British had been running guns and ammunition to the rebel Muslim tribes since 1853, but so far they had been reluctant to commit wholeheartedly to Shamil’s army or indeed to the Turks in the Caucasus, both of whom they looked on with colonial contempt. The capture of the princesses did not win Shamil any friends in London. But in the spring of 1855, prompted by the hunt for new ways to bring Russia to its knees, the British and the French began to explore the possibility of developing relations with the Caucasian tribes. In April the British government sent a special agent, John Longworth, its former consul in Monastir and a close associate of David Urquhart, the Turcophile supporter of the Circassians, on a secret mission to make contact with Shamil and encourage him to unite the Muslim tribes in a ‘holy war’ against Russia by promising British military support. The French government sent its own agent, Charles Champoiseau, its viceconsul in Redutkale, on a separate mission to the Circassian tribes around Sukhumi in Georgia.¹⁴

The British pledged to arm Shamil’s army and expel the Russians from Circassia. On 11 June Stratford Canning reported to the Foreign Office that he had got the Porte ‘to issue a firman on Circassian independence in the event of the expulsion of Russia from their country’ (a dubious concept in this complex tribal area). By this time Longworth himself had arrived in Circassia, and had reported that the mountain tribes were well armed with Minié rifles and hunting guns. The British agent thought the Turks could lead the Circassian tribes on the Kuban plain in a war against Russia. Mustafa Pasha, the commander-in-chief of the Turkish forces in Batumi, had met with the Circassian tribal leaders and had ‘virtually become the governor-general of Circassia’, Longworth reported. There were rumours of Mustafa raising a large Circassian army, up to 60,000 strong, to raid southern Russia from the Caucasus. But Longworth was afraid that the Ottomans were using the situation to reassert their power in the Caucasus, and he warned the British to oppose them. The local pashas were taking advantage of their renewed links with the Porte to rule despotically, and this had alienated many tribes from the British and the French as the allies of the Turks. Longworth also rejected the idea of supporting Shamil’s movement on the grounds that it had been infiltrated by Islamic fundamentalists, most notably by Shamil’s emissary (Naib) in Circassia, Muhammed Emin, who had pledged to expel all the Christians from the Caucasus and had forbidden Shamil’s followers from having any contact with the non-Muslims. According to Longworth, the Naib planned to build ‘a feudal empire based upon the principles of Islamic fanaticism’. Longworth’s reservations about supporting Shamil were shared by many Eastern experts at the Foreign Office in London. They warned against the use of Muslim forces (especially the Turks) against the Russians in Georgia and Armenia on the grounds that only a European army could have any real authority among the Christian population there.¹⁵

Unwilling to send in their own forces to the Caucasus, and frightened of depending upon Muslim troops, the British and the French delayed making a decision on what sort of policy they should develop in this crucial area. With an effective force in the Caucasus, the allies might have dealt a much swifter and more devastating blow to Russia than they achieved by laying siege to Sevastopol for eleven months. But they were too wary to exploit this potential.

The allies also had high hopes for the naval campaign in the Baltic, which was renewed in the spring. With a new fleet of steamships and floating batteries, and a new commander, Rear Admiral Sir Richard Dundas, in place of Napier, who had been widely blamed for the perceived failure of the campaign in 1854, there was optimistic talk of taking Kronstadt and Sveaborg, the Russian fortresses that Napier had failed to attack, and then of threatening St Petersburg itself. The naval surveyor and hydrographer who was placed in charge of planning the campaign was Captain Bartholomew Sulivan, who had accompanied Charles Darwin on the Beagle expedition. From his preliminary researches, Sulivan concluded that the fortresses could be captured by ships alone, without the need of land troops. When Clarendon went to Paris at the beginning of March to try to dissuade Napoleon from carrying out his threat to go to the Crimea, he took Sulivan’s report with him. It was warmly received by the Emperor, who thought that the decision not to attack Kronstadt in 1854 had been a disgrace. Like the British, Napoleon believed that Kronstadt’s capture would encourage Sweden to join the alliance against Russia.

The first British warships left Spithead on 20 March, with more following a fortnight later; the French fleet under Admiral Pénaud arrived in the Baltic on 1 June. In a vain attempt to reinforce the allied blockade of Russian trade – a blockade that was circumvented by trade through Germany – the British fleet attacked and destroyed various Russian coastal stations. But their main targets remained Kronstadt and Sveaborg. From his ship, 8 kilometres from Kronstadt, Prince Ernest of Leiningen wrote to his cousin Queen Victoria on 3 June:

While they waited for the French to arrive, Sulivan carried out a careful reconnaissance of the Baltic’s shallow waters, including the coastline of Estonia, where he was invited to a surreal dinner by an Anglophile noble family at their country house. ‘It really all seemed like a dream,’ he wrote:

In early June Sulivan submitted his report. He was now pessimistic about the possibility of overcoming the powerful defences at Kronstadt, as Napier had been in 1854. During the past year the Russians had reinforced their fleet (Sulivan counted thirty-four gunboats) and strengthened the seaward defences with electrical and chemical underwater mines (described as ‘infernal machines’) and a barrier made up of timber frames secured to the seabed and filled with rocks. It would be difficult to remove it without suffering severe losses from the heavy guns of the fortress. The planned attack on Kronstadt was abandoned – and with it went the hopes of a decisive allied breakthrough in the Baltic.¹⁷

Meanwhile the allies also thought of ways to broaden their campaign in the Crimea. The military stalemate of the winter months led many to conclude that continuing to bombard Sevastopol from the south would not produce results, as long as the Russians were able to bring in supplies and reinforcements from the mainland via Perekop and the Sea of Azov. For the siege to work, Sevastopol had to be encircled on its northern side. That had been the rationale of the original allied plan in the summer of 1854 – a plan which had been overturned by Raglan, who feared that his men would suffer in the heat if they occupied the Crimean plain to cut the Russians off from Perekop. By the end of the year the foolishness of Raglan’s strategy had become clear for all to see, and military leaders were calling for a broader strategy. In a memorandum of December, for example, Sir John Burgoyne, Raglan’s chief engineer, urged the creation of an allied force of 30,000 men on the River Belbek, ‘with a view to further operations against Bakhchiserai and Simferopol’ which would cut off Sevastopol from one of its two main routes of supply (the other being via Kerch in the eastern Crimea).¹⁸

The Russian attack on Evpatoria in February prompted more plans for a stronger allied presence to interrupt the Russian supply lines from Perekop. Allied troops were sent to Evpatoria to reinforce the Turkish force during March. They found an appalling situation there – a real humanitarian crisis – with up to 40,000 Tatar peasants living in the streets, without food or shelter, having fled their villages out of fear of the Russians. The crisis encouraged the allied commanders to think about committing further troops to the north-west Crimean plain, if only to protect and mobilize the Tatar population against the Russians.¹⁹

But it was in April that the allies really got down to the serious business of rethinking their military strategy in the Crimea. On 18 April, Palmerston, Napoleon, Prince Albert, Clarendon, Lord Panmure (the new Secretary of State for War), Vaillant, Burgoyne and Count Walewski (Drouyn’s successor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris) met in a council of war at Windsor Castle. Palmerston and Napoleon were decidedly in favour of a change in strategy, running down the bombardment of Sevastopol in order to concentrate on the conquest of the Crimea as a whole, which both men saw as the beginning of a larger war against Russia. The new plan would have the advantage of involving the Crimean Tatars on the allied side. Above all, it would represent a return to the sort of fighting in the open field in which the allied armies had proved themselves technically superior to the Russians at Alma and Inkerman. It was in the skill and rifle power of their infantry that the allies had their greatest superiority over the Russians – advantages that counted for very little in the siege warfare of Sevastopol. In engineering and artillery, the Russians were at least the equal of the British and the French.

Napoleon was the most enthusiastic about a change of strategy. Though the occupation of Sevastopol was central to his aims, he was convinced that the town would not fall until it was fully encircled, but, when it was, it would fall without a fight. He proposed that instead of bombarding the city from the south, the allies should land an army at Alushta, 70 kilometres to the east, and march from there towards Simferopol, through which most of the Russian army’s supplies were transported. The British agreed with the broad outlines of Napoleon’s strategy, although as part of the bargain they managed to dissuade him from his daring idea of going to the Crimea to take command of the military operations himself. The ‘Emperor’s plan’ (as the Alushta expedition became known in French circles) was included as one of three options for a diversionary attack on the Crimean interior, the others being an offensive by allied troops based at Sevastopol against Bakhchiserai, and the landing of a force at Evpatoria which would march across the plain to Simferopol. The two war ministers signed a memorandum of the agreed plan, which Panmure sent to Raglan on the authority of the British cabinet. Panmure’s instructions left it up to Raglan to choose between the three alternatives, but made it clear that he was being ordered to embark on one of them. The trenches at Sevastopol were to be left in the hands of 60,000 men (30,000 Turks and 30,000 French), whose new task would be to maintain a barrage to prevent the Russians from breaking out of the city rather than continue with any intention of taking the offensive.

Raglan was sceptical of the new plan. He wanted to continue with the bombardment, which he was convinced was on the point of a breakthrough, and believed that a field offensive would not leave enough troops to defend the allied positions before Sevastopol. In an act of open defiance, if not mutiny, against his political superiors, Raglan convened a council of war in the Crimea at which he told his allied commanders, Canrobert and Omer Pasha, that Panmure’s memorandum was only a ‘suggestion’ and that he (Raglan) could proceed with it or not as he thought fit. Raglan dragged his heels over the new plan, coming up with various excuses not to take men away from the siege, until Canrobert, who was in favour of the field campaign and had several times offered to place his troops under Raglan’s command if only he would start it, exploded in frustration. ‘The field plan worked out by Your Majesty’, Canrobert informed Napoleon, ‘has been rendered practically impossible by the non-cooperation of the Commander in Chief of the English Army.’²⁰

For many years the French would blame the British for the failure of the plan to march on Simferopol and conquer the rest of the Crimea. They had good reason to be enraged by Raglan, who could have been removed by Palmerston for insubordination, if not incompetence, after his refusal to implement the order for an attack on the Crimean interior. With their superior rifle power, and the support of the Tatar population on the plain, there was good reason to suppose that a field campaign would have captured Simferopol and cut off the Russians’ main route of supply through the peninsula. This was exactly the scenario the Russians had feared most, which was why the Tsar had ordered the attack on Evpatoria in February. The Russians knew how vulnerable they were to an attack on their supply lines, and had always seen the route from Evpatoria as the most likely one for an allied offensive towards Simferopol or Perekop. As they later admitted, they were amazed that the British and the French had never tried to launch such an attack.²¹

The one serious effort the allies made to cut off Sevastopol from its bases of supply was their raid on the port of Kerch, which controlled the supply lines across the Sea of Azov, although it took two attempts to accomplish it. Plans for an attack had been advanced at the start of the campaign, but the first order for the action was not made until 26 March, when Panmure wrote to Raglan instructing him to organize a ‘combined operation by sea and land’ to ‘reduce the defences of Kerch’. It was an attractive proposal, not least because it would involve the Royal Navy, which had hardly been used so far, at a time when the British contribution to the allied effort was being seriously questioned by the French. Canrobert was initially doubtful about the operation, but on 29 April he gave his agreement for a squadron of French warships under the command of Admiral Bruat and 8,500 soldiers to join the expedition, which would be led by Lieutenant General Brown, the veteran commander of the Light Division. The allied fleet set off on 3 May, sailing north-west towards Odessa to disguise its intentions from the Russians before doubling back towards Kerch. But just before it reached its destination, a fast boat caught up with the fleet and delivered an order from Canrobert for the French ships to return. Shortly after the fleet had left, the new telegram line to Paris had brought an order from Napoleon for Canrobert, instructing him to bring up the reserves from Constantinople: since Bruat’s ships would be required, Canrobert reluctantly decided to withdraw from the Kerch attack. The Royal Navy was forced to turn back, and Canrobert was disgraced in British (and many French) eyes.²²

The recall of the expedition antagonized the already worsening relations between the British and the French. It played a major part in Canrobert’s decision to resign his command on 16 May. He felt that his position had been undermined, that he had let the British down, and hence had no authority to compel Raglan to carry out the plans for a field campaign. The new French commander-in-chief, General Pélissier, a short, stocky man with a rough-and-ready manner, was far more decisive, more a man of action, than Canrobert, who had long been nicknamed ‘Robert Can’t’ by the British. Pélissier’s appointment was greeted with enthusiasm in the British camp. Colonel Rose, the British commissioner at the headquarters of the French army, who had been close to Canrobert, wrote to Clarendon that the time had come for a more ‘can-do’ approach to the war and that Pélissier was the man to deliver it:

Eager to repair relations with the British, Pélissier agreed to revive the operation against Kerch, although he concurred with Raglan that the main target of the allied operations should remain the Sevastopol defences. On 24 May sixty ships of the allied fleet set off with a combined force of 7,000 French, 5,000 Turks and 3,000 British troops under Brown’s command. Seeing the approach of the armada, most of the Russian inhabitants of Kerch fled to the countryside. After a brief bombardment, the allied troops were able to come ashore without opposition. Brown was met by a deputation of the Russian civilians who were left. They told him they were frightened of attacks by the local Tatar population and begged him to protect them. Brown ignored their pleas. Ordering the destruction of the arsenal in Kerch, Brown left a small force of mainly French and Turkish toops in the town and marched with the remainder of his troops to the important fort at Yenikale, further along the coast, where the looting of Russian property continued under Brown’s supervision. Meanwhile, the allied warships entered the Sea of Azov, sailed towards the Russian coastline, destroyed Russian shipping, and laid waste to the ports of Mariupol and Taganrog.[50]

The attacks on Russian property in Kerch and Yenikale soon descended into a drunken rampage, and some terrible atrocities by the allied troops. The worst took place in Kerch, where the local Tatar population took advantage of the allied occupation to carry out a violent revenge against the Russians of the town. Aided by the Turkish troops, the Tatars looted shops and houses, raped Russian women, and killed and mutilated hundreds of Russians, including even children and babies. Among the excesses was the destruction of the town’s museum, with its rich and magnificent collection of Hellenic art, an outrage reported by Russell in The Times on 28 May:

For several days Brown did nothing to stop the atrocities, even though he had received reports that a contingent of French and British troops had taken part in the looting. Brown saw the Tatars as allies, taking the view that they were engaged in a ‘legitimate rebellion’ against Russian rule. Eventually, having been informed of the worst atrocities, Brown dispatched a tiny force (just twenty British cavalrymen) to restore order. They were far too few in number to have any real effect, though they did shoot some British troops whom they had caught committing rape.²⁴

According to Russian witnesses, it was not just the allied soldiers who had taken part in the looting, the violence and rape; it was also officers. ‘I saw several English officers carrying to their ship furniture and sculptures, and all sorts of other items they had plundered from our homes,’ recalled one resident of Kerch. Several women claimed they had been raped by British officers.²⁵

Realizing that Sevastopol could not withstand the siege for much longer, the Tsar ordered Gorchakov to launch one last attempt to break the ring of allied troops. Gorchakov was doubtful that it could be done. An offensive ‘against an enemy superior in numbers and entrenched in such solid positions would be folly’, the commander-in-chief reasoned. But the Tsar insisted that something should be done: he was looking for a way to end the war on terms acceptable to Russia’s national honour and integrity, and needed a military success to begin peace talks with the British and the French from a stronger position. Sending three of his reserve divisions to the Crimea, Alexander bombarded Gorchakov with instructions to attack (though not suggesting where) before the allies sent more troops, as he believed they were about to do. ‘I am convinced that we must go on the offensive,’ he wrote to Gorchakov on 30 July; ‘otherwise all the reinforcements I have sent to you, as has happened in the past, will be sucked into Sevastopol, that bottomless pit.’¹⁴

The only line of action that Gorchakov believed had any chance of success was an attack on the French and Sardinian positions on the Chernaia river. By ‘capturing the enemy’s watering places, it might be possible to threaten his flank and limit his attacks on Sevastopol, maybe opening the way for further advantageous operations’, he wrote to the Tsar. ‘But we should not deceive ourselves, for there is little hope of success in such an initiative.’ Alexander would not listen to Gorchakov’s reservations. On 3 August he wrote to him again: ‘Your daily losses in Sevastopol underline what I have told you many times before in my letters – the necessity to do something decisive to end this frightful massacre [the Tsar’s italics].’ Alexander knew that Gorchakov was essentially a courtier, an acolyte of the cautious Paskevich, and suspected that he was reluctant to take the responsibility for an offensive. He concluded his letter with the words: ‘I want a battle, but if you as commander-in-chief fear the liability, then convene a military council to take it for you.’¹⁵

A council of war met on 9 August to discuss a possible attack. Many of the senior commanders were against an offensive. Osten-Sacken, who had been much affected by the death of Nakhimov and was now convinced that the loss of Sevastopol was unavoidable, argued that enough men had been sacrificed and that it was time to evacuate the naval base. Most of the other generals shared Osten-Sacken’s pessimistic view but no one else was brave enough to speak out in such terms. Instead they went along with the idea of an offensive to please the Tsar, though few had any confidence in any detailed plan. The most audacious proposal came from the gung-ho General Khrulev, who had led the failed attack on Evpatoria. Khrulev now favoured the complete destruction of Sevastopol (even bettering the example of Moscow 1812) followed by a mass assault on the enemy’s positions by every man available. When Osten-Sacken objected that the suicidal plan would end in tens of thousands of needless deaths, Khrulev answered: ‘Well, so what? Let everybody die! We will leave our mark upon the map!’ Cooler heads prevailed, and the meeting ended with a vote in favour of Gorchakov’s idea of an attack on the French and Sardinian positions on the Chernaia, though Gorchakov himself remained extremely doubtful that it could succeed. ‘I am marching on the enemy because if I don’t, Sevastopol will soon be lost,’ he wrote on the eve of the offensive to Prince Dolgoruky, the Minister of War. But if the attack did not succeed, ‘it would not be [his] fault’, and he would ‘try to evacuate Sevastopol with as little loss as possible’.¹⁶

The attack was scheduled for the early morning of 16 August. The evening before, the French troops had been celebrating the fête de l’empereur – also (not coincidentally) the Feast of the Assumption, a major holiday for the Italians, who, like the French, had been drinking late into the night. They had only just gone off to bed, when, at 4 a.m., they were woken by the sound of Russian cannon.

Using the cover of an early morning fog, the Russians advanced towards the Traktir Bridge with a combined force of 47,000 infantry, 10,000 cavalry and 270 field guns under the command of General Liprandi on the left (opposite the Sardinians) and General Read, the son of a Scottish engineer who had emigrated to Russia, on the Russian right (opposite the French). The two generals were under orders not to cross the river before receiving orders from Gorchakov, the commander-in-chief, who was not sure whether to deploy his reserve divisions against the French on the Fediukhin Heights or the Sardinians on Gasfort Hill. He was relying on the opening artillery bombardment to expose the enemy’s positions and help him make up his mind.

The Russians’ opening cannon shots failed to reach their targets, however. They merely served to raise the alarm for the 18,000 French troops and 9,000 Sardinians to prepare themselves for battle and for those in the forward position to move up to the Traktir Bridge. Frustrated with the lack of progress, Gorchakov sent his aide-de-camp, a Lieutenant Krasovsky, to hurry out to Read and Liprandi and tell them it was ‘time to start’. By the time the message got to Read, its meaning was far from clear. ‘Time to start what?’ Read asked Krasovsky, who did not know. Read decided that the message could not mean to begin the artillery fire, which had started already, but the start of an infantry attack. He ordered his men to cross the river and storm the Fediukhin Heights – even though the cavalry and infantry reserves that were supposed to support an attack had not arrived. Gorchakov, meanwhile, had decided to concentrate his reserve forces on the left, having been encouraged by the ease with which Liprandi’s skirmishers had driven off the Sardinian outposts from Telegraph Hill (known by the Italians as the Roccia dei Piemontesi). Hearing the sound of muskets firing from Read’s men in front of the Fediukhin, Gorchakov redirected some of his reserves to support them, but, as he acknowledged afterwards, he knew already that the battle had been lost: his troops were divided and attacking on two fronts when the whole point of the offensive had been to deal a single mighty blow.¹⁷

Read’s men crossed the river near the Traktir Bridge. Without cavalry or artillery support, they marched towards their almost certain destruction by the French artillery and riflemen firing down on them from the slopes of the Fediukhin Heights. Within twenty minutes 2,000 Russian infantry had been gunned down. Reserves arrived, in the form of the 5th Infantry Division. Its commander suggested that the whole division should be committed to the attack. Perhaps by weight of numbers, they might have broken through. But Read chose instead to commit them piecemeal to the battle, regiment by regiment, and each one, in turn, was shot down by the French, who by this time were entirely confident of their ability to defeat the Russian columns and held off their fire until they were at close hand. ‘Our artillery played havoc with the Russians,’ recalled Octave Cullet, a French infantry captain who was on the Fediukhin.

At last, Gorchakov put an end to Read’s bungling and ordered the entire division to join in the attack. For a while, they pushed the French back up the hill, but the deadly salvoes of the enemy’s rifles eventually forced them to retreat and cross over to the other side of the river. Read was killed by a shell splinter during the retreat, and Gorchakov took over his command, ordering eight battalions from Liprandi’s forces on the left to support him at the eastern end of the Fediukhin Heights. But these troops came under heavy rifle fire from the Sardinians, who had moved across from Gasfort Hill to protect the open flank, and were forced back towards Telegraph Hill. The situation was hopeless. Shortly after 10 a.m. Gorchakov ordered a general withdrawal, and with one last round from all their cannon, as if to sound a note of defiance in defeat, the Russians retreated to lick their wounds.¹⁹

The allies lost 1,800 casualties on the Chernaia river. The Russians counted 2,273 dead, almost 4,000 men wounded and 1,742 missing, most of them deserters who had used the morning mist and confusion of the battle to run away.[54] It was several days before the dead and wounded were cleared away (the Russians did not even come to collect theirs) and in that time there were many visitors who saw the frightful scene, not just nurses who came to help the wounded, but war tourists, who took trophies from the bodies of the dead. At least two British army chaplains took part in the plundering for souvenirs. Mary Seacole describes the ground ‘thickly numbered with the wounded, some of them calm and resigned, others impatient and restless, a few filling the air with their cries of pain – all wanting water, and all grateful to those who administered it’. Thomas Buzzard, a British doctor with the Turkish army, was struck by how most of the dead ‘lay on their faces, literally, to use the Homeric phrase, “biting the dust”’, in contrast to the way they were usually depicted on their backs in classical paintings of battles (most of the Russians had been shot from the front while advancing up the hill and so had fallen forwards naturally).²⁰

Somehow the Russians had contrived to lose against an enemy less than half their size. In his explanation to the Tsar, Gorchakov put the entire blame on the unfortunate General Read, arguing that he had failed to understand his order when he moved his men against the French on the Fediukhin Heights. ‘It is grievous to think that if Read had carried out my orders to the letter, we might have ended with something like success and that at least a third of those brave troops who have been killed might have been alive today,’ he wrote to the Tsar on 17 August. Alexander was not impressed by Gorchakov’s attempt to shift the blame onto the dead general. He had wanted a success to approach the allies with proposals for a peace on favourable terms, and this setback had ruined all his plans. ‘Our brave troops’, he replied to Gorchakov, ‘have suffered enormous losses without any gain [the Tsar’s italics].’ The truth was that both men were to blame for the needless slaughter: Alexander for insisting on an offensive when none was really possible; and Gorchakov for failing to withstand his pressure for attack.²¹

The defeat on the Chernaia was a catastrophe for the Russians. It was now only a question of time before Sevastopol would fall to the allies. ‘I am sure that this is the second-to-last bloody act of our operations in the Crimea,’ wrote Herbé to his parents on 25 August, after being wounded on the Chernaia; ‘the last will be the capture of Sevastopol.’ According to Nikolai Miloshevich, one of the defenders of the naval base, after the defeat ‘the Russian troops lost all their trust in their officers and generals’. Another soldier wrote: ‘The morning of 16 August was our last hope. By the evening it had disappeared. We began to say farewell to Sevastopol.’²²

Realizing that the situation was hopeless, the Russians now prepared to evacuate Sevastopol, as Gorchakov had warned they would have to do if they were defeated on the Chernaia in his letter to the Minister of War on the eve of the battle. The evacuation plan centred on the building of a floating bridge across the sea harbour to the North Side, where the Russians would have a commanding position against the allied forces if they occupied the town on the southern side. The idea of a bridge was first advanced by General Bukhmeier, a brilliant engineer, in the first week of July. It was rejected by scores of engineers on the grounds that it would be impossible to build, especially where Bukhmeier had suggested, between Fort Nicholas and the Mikhailov Battery, where the sea harbour was 960 metres wide (which would make it one of the longest pontoon bridges ever built) and strong winds often made the water very rough. But the urgency of the situation persuaded Gorchakov to give his backing to the dangerous plan, and with several hundred soldiers to cart the timbers from as far as Kherson, 300 kilometres away, and vast teams of sailors to link them to the pontoons, Bukhmeier organized the building of the bridge, which was finally completed on 27 August.²³

News of the peace arrived in the Crimea the next day – as long as it took for the telegram to be relayed from Paris to Varna and communicated by the underwater cable to Balaklava. On 2 April the allied guns in the Crimea were fired for the final time – in salute to mark the end of the war.

Six months were given to the allies to evacuate their armed forces. The British used the port of Sevastopol, where they oversaw the destruction of the magnificent docks by a series of explosions, while the French destroyed Fort Nicholas. There were enormous quantities of war matériel to be counted, loaded onto ships and taken home: captured guns and cannon, munitions, scrap metal and food supplies, including vast amounts of booty from the Russians. It was a complicated logistical operation to allocate it all to the various departments of the ministries of war, and many things were left behind, sold off to the Russians, or, like the English wooden huts and barracks, donated to them on condition that they were used ‘for the inhabitants of the Crimea who had been made homeless by the war’ (the Russians accepted the English offer but kept the huts and barracks for the army). ‘It is an enormous endeavour to carry off, in just a few months, everything that was brought here over a period of two years,’ wrote Captain Herbé to his family on 28 April. ‘A large number of the horses and mules will have to be abandoned or sold off cheaply to the population of the Crimea, and I don’t count on ever seeing mine again.’ The animals were not the only means of transport to be sold off privately. The Balaklava railway was purchased by a company established by Sir Culling Eardly and Moses Montefiore, who wanted to use the equipment to build a new railroad between Jaffa and Jerusalem, a communication that would ‘civilize and develop the resources of a district now wild and disorderly’, according to Palmerston, who authorized the sale. It would serve the growing traffic of religious pilgrims to the Holy Lands. The Jaffa railway was never built and in the end the Balaklava line was sold to the Turks as scrap.⁸

Considering how long it took to ship all these supplies to the Crimea, the evacuation was completed speedily. By 12 July Codrington was ready to hand over possession of Balaklava to the Russians before departing with the final British troops on HMS Algiers. A stickler for military etiquette, the commander-in-chief was offended by the low rank and appearance of the Russian delegation sent to meet him and receive control of Balaklava:

Left behind in the Crimea were the remains of many thousands of soldiers. During the last weeks before their departure, the allied troops laboured hard to build graveyards and erect memorials to those comrades they would leave behind. In one of his last reports from the Crimea, William Russell described the military cemeteries:

After the allied armies left, the Russians, who had withdrawn towards Perekop during their evacuation, moved back to the southern towns and plains of the Crimea. The battlefields of the Crimean War returned to farms and grazing lands. Cattle roamed across the graveyards of the allied troops. Gradually, the Crimea recovered from the economic damage of the war. Sevastopol was rebuilt. Roads and bridges were repaired. But in other ways the peninsula was permanently changed.

Most dramatically, the Tatar population had largely disappeared. Small groups had begun to leave their farms at the start of the conflict, but their numbers grew towards the end of the war, in line with their fear of reprisals by the Russians after the departure of the allied troops. There had already been reprisals for the atrocities at Kerch, with mass arrests, confiscations of property, and summary executions of ‘suspicious’ Tatars by the Russian military. The inhabitants of the Baidar valley petitioned Codrington to help them leave the Crimea, fearing what would happen to them if their villages should fall into the hands of the Russians, ‘as our past experience of them gives us little ground to hope for good treatment’. Written and translated into English by a local Tatar scribe, their supplication continued:

Codrington did nothing to help the Tatars, even though they had provided the allies with foodstuffs, spies and transport services throughout the Crimean War. The idea of protecting the Tatars against Russian reprisals never crossed the minds of the allied diplomats, who might have included a stronger clause about their treatment in the peace treaty. Article V of the Paris Treaty obliged all warring nations to ‘give full pardon to those of their subjects who appeared guilty of actively participating in the military affairs of the enemy’ – a clause that appeared to protect not only the Crimean Tatars but the Bulgarians and Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, who had sided with the Russians during the Danubian campaigns. But Count Stroganov, the governor-general of New Russia, found a way around this clause by claiming that the Tatars had lost their treaty rights, if they had broken Russian law by departing from their place of residence without prior approval from the military authorities – as tens of thousands of them had been forced to do during the Crimean War. In other words, any Tatar who had left his home without a stamp in his passport was deemed to be a traitor by the Russian government, and was subject to penal exile in Siberia.¹²

As the allied armies began their evacuation of the Crimea, the first large groups of Tatars also left. On 22 April, 4,500 Tatars set sail from Balaklava for Constantinople in the belief that the Turkish government had invited them to relocate in the Ottoman Empire. Alarmed by the mass exodus, which was a threat to the Crimean agricultural economy, Russian local officials looked for guidance from St Petersburg as to whether they should stop the departure of the Tatars. Having been informed that the Tatars had collaborated en masse with the enemy, the Tsar responded that nothing should be done to prevent their exodus, adding that in fact it ‘would be advantageous to rid the peninsula of this harmful population’ (a concept re-enacted by Stalin during the Second World War). Communicating Alexander’s statement to his officials, Stroganov interpreted it as a direct order for the expulsion of the Muslim population from the Crimea by claiming that the Tsar had said that it was ‘necessary’ (and not just ‘advantageous’) to make the Tatars leave. Various pressures were applied to encourage their departure: there were rumours of a planned mass deportation to the north, of Cossack raids on Tatar villages, of campaigns to force the Tatars to learn Russian in Crimean schools, or to convert to Christianity. Taxes were increased on Tatar farms, and Tatar villages were deprived of access to water, forcing them to sell their land to Russian landowners.

Between 1856 and 1863 about 150,000 Crimean Tatars and perhaps 50,000 Nogai Tatars (roughly two-thirds of the combined Tatar population of the Crimea and southern Russia) emigrated to the Ottoman Empire. Precise figures are hard to calculate, and some historians have put the figures much higher. Concerned about growing labour shortages in the region, in 1867 the Russian authorities tried to work out from police statistics how many Tatars had left the peninsula since the ending of the war. It was reported that 104,211 men and 88,149 women had left the Crimea. There were 784 deserted villages, and 457 abandoned mosques.¹³

Along with the removal of the Tatar population, the Russian authorities pursued a policy of Christianizing the Crimea after 1856. More than ever, as a direct consequence of the Crimean War, they saw the peninsula as a religious borderland between Russia and the Muslim world over which they needed to consolidate their hold. Before the war, the relatively liberal governor-general, Prince Vorontsov, had opposed the spread of Christian institutions to the Crimea, on the grounds that it would ‘germinate among the [Tatar] natives unfounded dangerous thoughts about intentions of deflecting them from Islam and converting them to Orthodoxy’. But Vorontsov retired from his post in 1855, to be replaced by the aggressively Russian nationalist Stroganov, who actively supported the Christianizing goals of Innokenty, the Archbishop of the Kherson-Tauride diocese, within which the Crimea fell. Towards the end of the Crimean War, Innokenty’s sermons had been widely circlated to the Russian troops in the form of pamphlets and illustrated prints (lubki). Innokenty portrayed the conflict as a ‘holy war’ for the Crimea, the centre of the nation’s Orthodox identity, where Christianity had arrived in Russia. Highlighting the ancient heritage of the Greek Church in the peninsula, he depicted the Crimea as a ‘Russian Athos’, a sacred place in the ‘Holy Russian Empire’ connected by religion to the monastic centre of Orthodoxy on the peninsula of Mount Athos in north-eastern Greece. With Stroganov’s support, Innokenty oversaw the creation of a separate bishopric for the Crimea as well as the establishment of several new monasteries in the peninsula after the Crimean War.¹⁴

To encourage the Christian settlement of the Crimea, the tsarist government introduced a law in 1862 granting special rights and subsidies to colonists from Russia and abroad. Land abandoned by the Tatars was set aside for sale to foreigners. The influx of new Christian populations during the 1860s and 1870s transformed the ethnic profile of the Crimea. What had once been Tatar settlements were now populated by Russians, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, even Germans and Estonians – all of them attracted by promises of cheap and fertile land or by special rights of entry into urban guilds and corporations not ordinarily available to newcomers. Armenians and Greeks turned Sevastopol and Evpatoria into major trading centres, while older Tatar towns like Kefe (Theodosia), Gözleve and Bakhchiserai fell into decline. Many of the rural immigrants were Bulgarian or other Christian refugees from Bessarabia, territory ceded by the Russians to the Turks after the Crimean War. They were settled by the government in 330 villages once occupied by the Tatars, and were helped financially to transform mosques into churches. Meanwhile, many of the Tatars who had fled from the Crimea were resettled on the lands abandoned by the Christians in Bessarabia.¹⁵

All around the Black Sea rim, the Crimean War resulted in the uprooting and transmigration of ethnic and religious groups. They crossed in both directions over the religious line separating Russia from the Muslim world. Greeks emigrated in their tens of thousands from Moldavia and Bessarabia to southern Russia after the Crimean War. Moving in the opposite direction, from Russia into Turkey, were tens of thousands of Polish refugees and soldiers who had fought in the Polish Legion (the so-called ‘Ottoman Cossacks’) against Russia in the Crimea and the Caucasus. They were settled by the Porte on Turkish lands in the Dobrudja region of the Danube delta, in Anatolia and other areas, while others ended up in Adampol (Polonezkoi), the Polish settlement established by Adam Czartoryski, the leader of the Polish emigration, on the outskirts of Constantinople in 1842.

On the other side of the Black Sea, tens of thousands of Christian Armenians left their homes in Anatolia and emigrated to Russian-controlled Transcaucasia in the wake of the Crimean War. They were fearful that the Turks would see them as allies of the Russians and carry out reprisals against them. The European commission appointed by the Paris Treaty to fix the Russian-Ottoman border found Armenian villages ‘half inhabited’ and churches in a state of ‘advanced decay’.¹⁶

Meanwhile, even larger numbers of Circassians, Abkhazians and other Muslim tribes were forced out of their homelands by the Russians, who after the Crimean War stepped up their military campaign against Shamil, engaging in a concerted policy of what today would be defined as ‘ethnic cleansing’ to Christianize the Caucasus. The campaign was largely driven by the strategic demands created by the Paris settlement in the Black Sea, where the Royal Navy could freely operate and the Russians had no means of self-defence in their vulnerable coastal areas where the Muslim population was hostile to Russia. The Russians focused first on the fertile lands of Circassia in the western Caucasus – territories close to the Black Sea coast. Muslim villages were attacked by Russian troops, men and women massacred, farms and homes destroyed to force the villagers to leave or starve. The Circassians were presented with the choice of moving north to the Kuban plains – far enough away from the coastal areas for them not to be a threat in case of an invasion – or emigrating to the Ottoman Empire. Tens of thousands resettled in the north but equally large numbers of Circassians were herded by the Russians to the Black Sea ports, where, sometimes after weeks of waiting by the docks in terrible conditions, they were loaded onto Turkish boats and taken off to Trebizond, Samsun and Sinope in Anatolia. The Ottoman authorities were unprepared for the mass influx of refugees and several thousands of them died from disease within months of their arrival in Turkey. By 1864 the Muslim population of Circassia had been entirely cleared. The British consul C. H. Dickson claimed that one could walk a whole day in formerly Circassian territories and not meet a living soul.¹⁷

After the Circassians, it was the turn of the Abkhazian Muslims, at that time settled in the Sukhumi – Kale region, where the Russian campaign to clear them off their lands began in 1866. The tactics were essentially the same as those employed against the Circassians, except this time the Russians had a policy of keeping back the able-bodied male workers out of fear for the economy, and forcing out their women, children and the elderly. The British consul and Arabic scholar William Gifford Palgrave, who made a tour of Abkhazia to collect information on the ethnic cleansing, estimated that three-quarters of the Muslim population had been forced to emigrate. Overall, counting both Circassians and Abkhazians, around 1.2 million Muslims were expelled from the Caucasus in the decade following the Crimean War, most of them resettling in the Ottoman Empire, and by the end of the nineteenth century the Muslims of these two regions were outnumbered by new Christian settlers by more than ten to one.¹⁸

As a signal of his intention to grant religious toleration, the Sultan agreed to attend two foreign balls in the Turkish capital, one at the British embassy, the other at the French, in February 1856. It was the first time in the history of the Ottoman Empire that a sultan had accepted invitations to a Christian entertainment in the house of a foreign ambassador.

Abdülmecid arrived at the British embassy wearing the Order of the Garter presented to him a few weeks before to mark the allied victory. Stratford Canning, the ambassador, met the Sultan at the carriage door. As the Sultan alighted, a signal was transmitted by electric wire to the British fleet, anchored in the Bosporus, which saluted then with prolonged salvoes of cannon. It was a costume ball and princes, pirates, musketeers, fake Circassians and shepherdesses were in attendance. Lady Hornby wrote down her impressions the next day.

It would take me a day to enumerate half the costumes. But everyone who had been to the Queen’s bals costumés agreed that they did not approach this one in magnificence; for besides the gathering of French, Sardinian and English officers, the people of the country appeared in their own superb and varied costumes; and the groups were beyond all description beautiful. The Greek Patriarch, the Armenian Archbishop, the Jewish High Priest were there in their robes of state. Real Persians, Albanians, Kurds, Servians, Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Austrians, Sardinians, Italians and Spaniards were there in their different dresses, and many wore their jewelled arms. Abdülmecid quietly walked up the ballroom with Lord and Lady Stratford, their daughters, and a gorgeous array of Pashas in the rear. He paused with evident delight and pleasure at the really beautiful scene before him, bowing on both sides, and smiling as he went… Pashas drink vast quantities of champagne, of which they pretend not to know the exact genus, and slyly call it ‘eau gazeuse’.

At the ball at the French embassy the Sultan appeared wearing the medal of the Légion d’honneur that had been presented to him by Thouvenel, the French ambassador. Welcomed by a military salute, he talked to foreign dignitaries and moved among the dancers, who improvised to the Turkish marches performed by the army band.¹⁹

One of the things that pleased the Sultan most at these events was the appearance of the European women, whose dress he claimed greatly to prefer to that of Muslim women. ‘If socializing with these ladies is like their outer appearance,’ he told his Austrian physician, ‘then I certainly envy you Europeans.’ Encouraged by the Sultan, palace women and high officials’ wives began to adopt more elements of Western dress – corsets, silk capes and transparent veils. They appeared more often in society and socialized more frequently with men.

Domestic culture was also Westernized, with the appearance of European table manners, cutlery and crockery, furniture and decorative styles in the homes of the Ottoman élites in Constantinople.²⁰

In almost every sphere of life, the Crimean War marked a watershed in the opening up and Westernization of Turkish society. The mass influx of refugees from the Russian Empire was only one of many ways in which the Ottoman Empire became more exposed to external influence. The Crimean War brought new ideas and technologies into the Ottoman world, accelerated Turkey’s integration into the global economy, and greatly increased contacts between Turks and foreigners. More Europeans came to Constantinople during and immediately after the Crimean War than at any other time in its previous history; the many diplomats, financiers, military advisers and soldiers, engineers, tourists, merchants, missionaries and priests left a deep impression on Turkish society.

The war also led to a vast expansion of foreign capital investment in the Ottoman Empire, and with it an increase in Turkey’s financial dependence on Western banks and governments (foreign loans to finance the war and Tanzimat reforms spiralled from about £5 million in 1855 to a staggering £200 million by 1877). It stimulated the development of telegraphs and railways, and accelerated the emergence of what might be called Turkish public opinion through newspapers and a new type of journalistic writing that came about directly as a result of the huge demand for information during the Crimean War. With the New Ottomans (Yeni Osmanlilar), a loose group of journalists and would-be reformers who briefly came together in something like a political party during the 1860s, the war also triggered a reaction against some of these changes and fostered the emergence of the first Ottoman (Turkish) nationalist movement. The New Ottomans’ belief in adopting Western institutions within a framework of Muslim tradition made them in many ways the ‘spiritual fathers’ of the Young Turks, the creators of the modern Turkish state.²¹

The New Ottomans were opposed to the growing intervention of the European powers in the Ottoman Empire. They were against reforms which they believed had been imposed on Turkey by Western governments to promote the special interests of Christians. In particular, they disapproved of the Hatt-i Hümayun decree of 1856, which had indeed been imposed by the European powers. The decree was written by Stratford Canning along with Thouvenel and then presented to the Porte as a condition of the continuation of foreign loans. It reiterated the principles of religious toleration articulated in the Hatt-i Sharif of 1839 but defined them more clearly in Western legal terms, without reference to the Koran. In addition to promising toleration and civil rights for non-Muslims, it introduced some new political principles to Ottoman governance stipulated by the British: strict annual budgets by the government; the establishment of banks; the codification of criminal and civil law; the reform of Turkish prisons; and mixed courts to oversee a majority of cases involving Muslims and non-Muslims. It was a thoroughgoing programme of Westernization for the Ottoman Empire. The New Ottomans had supported the principles contained in the Hatt-i Sharif of 1839 as a necessary element of the Tanzimat reforms; unlike the decree of 1856, it had some domestic origins and had not threatened the privileged position of Islam in the Ottoman Empire. But they saw the Hatt-i Hümayun as a special dispensation for the non-Muslims conceded under pressure by the great powers, and they feared that it would compromise the interests of Islam and Turkish sovereignty.

The foreign origins and terminology of the Hatt-i Hümayun stirred even greater resentment among Muslim clerics and conservatives. Even the old Tanzimat reformer Mustafa Reshid – who returned for a brief spell as Grand Vizier after Stratford had insisted on his reappointment in November 1856 – thought it went too far in its concessions to the Christians. Angered by the Hatt-i Hümayun, a group of Muslim theologians and students plotted a conspiracy against the Sultan and his ministers, but they were arrested in 1859. Under interrogation their leaders claimed that the Hatt-i Hümayun was a contravention of shariah law because it had granted Christians equal rights to Muslims. Sheikh Ahmet, one of the main conspirators, claimed that the Christians had obtained these rights only through the help of foreign powers, and that the concessions would mean the end of the privileged position of Islam in the Ottoman Empire.²²

Their views were shared by many power-holders and beneficiaries of the old Muslim hierarchy – local pashas, governors, landowners and notables, clerics and officials, tax-farmers and moneylenders – who were all afraid that the better-educated and more active Christian minorities would soon come to dominate the political and social order, if they were granted civil and religious equality. For centuries the Muslims of the empire had been told that the Christians were inferior. Faced with the loss of their privileged position, the Muslims became increasingly rebellious. There were riots and attacks by Muslims against Christians in Bessarabia, in Nablus and in Gaza in 1856, in Jaffa during 1857, in the Hijaz during 1858, and in Lebanon and Syria, where 20,000 Maronite Christians were massacred by Druzes and Muslims during 1860. In each case religious and economic divisions reinforced each other: the livelihood of Muslims engaged in agriculture and small trades was directly threatened by the import of European goods by Christian middlemen. Rioters attacked Christian shops and houses, foreign churches and missionary schools, even embassies, after they had been stirred up by Muslim clerics opposed to the Hatt-i Hümayun.

In Nablus, to take just one example, the troubles began on 4 April, shortly after Muslim leaders had denounced the Hatt-i Hümayun at Friday prayers. There were 5,000 Christians in Nablus, a town of 10,000 people, and before the Crimean War they had lived peacefully with the Muslims. But the war had increased tensions between them. The defeat of Russia was seen as a ‘Muslim victory’ by the local Palestinians, whose religious pride was offended by the new laws of religious toleration in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Christians, for their part, saw it as an allied triumph. They raised French and British flags on their houses in Nablus and placed a new bell over the Protestant mission school. These were provocations to Islamic sentiment. At Friday prayers, the ulemas condemned these signs of Western domination, arguing that Muslims would soon be called to prayer by the English bell, unless they rose up to destroy the Christian churches, which, they said, would be ‘a proper form of prayer to God’. Calling for jihad, crowds spilled out onto the streets of Nablus, many of them gathering by the Protestant mission, where they tore down the British flag.

Amid these heightened tensions, violence was sparked by a bizarre incident involving the Reverend Mr Lyde, a Protestant missionary and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, who had accidentally shot a beggar attempting to steal his coat. ‘The cup of fanaticism was full, and one drop more caused it to run over,’ wrote James Finn, the British consul in Jerusalem, who reported on the incident. Lyde had taken refuge from the mob in the house of the town governor, Mahmud Bek, who pacified the family of the dead man and proposed to bury him. But the ulemas were not satisfied with this. After a religious council, they forbade the burial and suspended public prayers in all the mosques ‘until the price of the blood of Islam should be paid’. Calling for ‘Vengeance on the Christians!’ a large crowd assembled outside the governor’s house and demanded to be given Lyde, who offered to sacrifice himself, but Mahmud Bek refused, whereupon the the mob began to rampage through the town, pillaging and destroying any property on which they could lay their hands. Christian houses, schools and churches were ransacked and burned. Several Prussian consular officials were murdered, along with a dozen Greeks, according to Finn, who also reported that ‘eleven women are known to have given premature birth to infants from the effect of fright’. Order was eventually restored by the intervention of the Sultan’s troops, and on 21 April Lyde was put on trial in a Turkish court in Jerusalem, where a mixed Muslim and Christian jury acquitted him of murder but ordered him to pay a large sum in compensation to the beggar’s family.[55] Lyde returned to England in a deranged mental state: he had delusions of himself as Christ. The ringleaders of the Muslim riots were never brought to trial, and attacks on Christians in the area continued for many months. In August 1856 the violence spread from Nablus to Gaza. In February 1857 Finn reported that 300 Christians were ‘still living in a state of terror in Gaza’, for ‘no one could control the Muslim fanatics’, and the Christians would not testify for fear of reprisals.²³

Faced with the prospect of this sort of violence almost anywhere, the Ottoman authorities dragged their heels over implementing the new laws of religious toleration in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Stratford Canning was increasingly frustrated with the Porte. ‘Turkish ministers are very little disposed to meet the demands of Her Majesty’s Government on the subject of religious persecution,’ he wrote to Clarendon. ‘They pretend to entertain apprehensions of popular discontent among the Mussulmans, if they were to give way.’ Turkish participation in the Crimean War had led to a resurgence of ‘Muslim triumphalism’, Stratford reported. As a result of the war, the Turks had become more protective of their sovereignty, and more resentful of Western intervention into their affairs. There was a new generation of Tanzimat reformers at the head of the Turkish government who were more secure in their personal position and less dependent on the patronage of foreign powers and ambassadors than Reshid’s generation of reformers had been before the Crimean War; they could afford to be more cautious and more practical in their implementation of reforms, carrying out the economic and political requirements of the Western powers but not hurrying to fulfil the religious promises contained in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Throughout his last year as ambassador, Stratford urged the Turkish leaders to be more serious about the protection of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire: it was the price, he told them, that Turkey had to pay for British and French help in the Crimean War. He was particularly exercised by the continued execution of Muslims for converting to Christianity, despite the Sultan’s promises to secure the Christians from religious persecution and abolish the ‘barbarous practice of putting seceders to death’. Citing numerous cases of Christian converts being driven from their homes and killed, Stratford wrote to the Porte on 23 December 1856:

The great European powers can never consent to perpetuate by the triumphs of their fleets and armies the enforcement in Turkey of a law [apostasy], which is not only a standing insult to them, but a source of cruel persecution to their fellow Christians. They are entitled to demand, the British Government distinctly demands, that the Mohamedean who turns Christian shall be as free from every kind of punishment on that account as the Christian who embraces the Mohamodean faith.²⁴

Yet by the time of his return to London the next year, very little had been done by the Porte to satisfy the demands of the European governments. ‘Among the Christians,’ Finn reported in July 1857, ‘a strong feeling of discontent is on the increase because of the slowness of the Turkish government to implement religious toleration.’

The Christians complain that they are insulted in the streets, that they are not placed in equal rank at public courts with Muslim fellow subjects, that they are ousted from almost every office of government employment, and that they are not allowed the honour of military service but instead of it have the old military tax doubled upon them.

In the rural areas of Palestine, according to Finn, the Hatt-i Hümayun remained unobserved for many years. Local governors were corrupt, ill-disciplined and closely linked to the Muslim notables, clerics and officials, who kept the Christians in their place, while the Porte was too remote and weak to curb their excesses, let alone to force them to uphold the new laws of equality.²⁵

But it was in the Balkans that the failure of the Porte to carry out reforms would have the most lasting consequences for the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the Balkan region, Christian peasants would rise up against their Muslim landlords and officials, beginning in Bosnia in 1858. The continuation of the millet system would give rise to nationalist movements that would involve the Ottomans and the European powers in a long series of Balkan wars, culminating in the conflicts that would bring about the First World War.

The Paris Treaty did not make any major territorial changes to the map of Europe. To many at the time, the outcome did not appear worthy of a war in which so many people died. Russia ceded southern Bessarabia to Moldavia. But otherwise the treaty’s articles were statements of principle: the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire were confirmed and guaranteed by the great powers (the first time a Muslim state was recognized by international law, the Congress of Vienna having specifically excluded Turkey from the European powers regulated by its international laws); the protection of the non-Muslim subjects of the Sultan was guaranteed by the signatory powers, thereby annulling Russia’s claims to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire; Russia’s protectorate over the Danubian principalities was negated by an article confirming the autonomy of these two states under Ottoman sovereignty; and, most humiliating of all for the Russians, Article XI declared the Black Sea to be a neutral zone, open to commercial shipping but closed to all warships in peacetime, thus depriving Russia of its naval ports and arsenals on this crucial southern coastal frontier.²⁶

But if the Paris Treaty made few immediate changes to the European map, it marked a crucial watershed for international relations and politics, effectively ending the old balance of power, in which Austria and Russia had controlled the Continent between themselves, and forging new alignments that would pave the way for the emergence of nation states in Italy, Romania and Germany.

Although it was Russia that was punished by the Paris Treaty, in the longer term it was Austria that would lose the most from the Crimean War, despite having barely taken part in it. Without its conservative alliance with Russia, which never quite forgave it for its armed neutrality in favour of the allies in 1854, and equally mistrusted by the liberal Western powers for its reactionary politics and ‘soft-on-Russia’ peace initiatives during the war, Austria found itself increasingly isolated on the Continent after 1856. Consequently it would lose out in Italy (in the war against the French and Piedmontese in 1859), in Germany (in the war against the Prussians in 1866) and in the Balkans (where it steadily retreated from the 1870s until 1914).

None of that was yet apparent in April 1856, when Austria joined France and Britain in a Triple Alliance to defend the Paris settlement. The three powers signed an agreement that any breach of the Paris Treaty would become a cause of war. Palmerston saw it as a ‘good additional Security and Bond of Union’ against Russia, which he fully expected to re-emerge in due course as a major threat to the Continent. He wanted to expand the entente into an anti-Russian league of European states.²⁷ Napoleon was not so sure. Since the fall of Sevastopol, there had been a growing rapprochement between the French and the Russians. Napoleon needed Russia for his plans against the Austrians in Italy. Meanwhile, for the Russians, and in particular for their new Foreign Minister, Alexander Gorchakov, who replaced Nesselrode in 1856, France represented the most likely power to support their efforts to remove the humiliating Black Sea clauses of the Paris Treaty. Both France and Russia were revisionist powers: where Russia wanted revisions to the treaty of 1856, France wanted to remove the remnants of the 1815 settlement. A deal between them could be made.

Unlike Nesselrode, a firm supporter of the Holy Alliance and its legitimist principles, Gorchakov took a pragmatic view of Russia’s role on the Continent. In his opinion, Russia should not form alliances that committed it to general principles, such as the defence of legitimate monarchies, as it had done before the Crimean War. The war had shown that Russia could not rely in any way on the solidarity of legitimate European monarchies. Nesselrode’s policy had made Russia vulnerable to the failings of other governments, Austria in particular, a power Gorchakov despised from his time as ambassador in Vienna. Instead, Gorchakov believed Russia should focus its diplomacy on its own national interests, and ally with other powers regardless of their ideology to further those interests. Here was a new type of diplomacy, the realpolitik later practised by Bismarck.

The Russians tested the Paris Treaty from the start, focusing on minor issues which they could exploit to open up divisions in the Crimean alliance. In May 1856 they claimed ownership of a lighthouse on tiny Serpent Island, in Turkish waters near the mouth of the Danube delta, and landed seven men with an officer to take up residence in the lighthouse. Walewski was inclined to let the Russians have the insignificant island, but Palmerston was adamant that they had to be ejected, on the grounds that they were infringing Turkish sovereignty. When the captain of a British ship made contact with the Turks on Serpent Island, he was told that they did not mind the Russians being there: they saw them as guests and were happy to sell them their supplies. Palmerston put his foot down. ‘We must avoid the fatal mistake made by Aberdeen in permitting the early movements and indications of Russian aggression to go on unnoticed and unrepressed,’ he wrote to Clarendon on 7 August. Orders were prepared to send the gunboats in to remove the Russians physically, but John Wodehouse, the British envoy in St Petersburg, was doubtful whether Britain had the right to do this, and the Queen shared these doubts, so Palmerston backed down and diplomatic pressure was used instead. Gorchakov insisted that the island had been owned by the Russians since 1833, and appealed to the French, who were thus manoeuvred into a position of international mediation between Britain and Russia.²⁸

Meanwhile, the Russians launched a second challenge to the Paris Treaty in connection with the border between Russian Bessarabia and Turkish-controlled Moldavia. By an accident of mapping and confusion over names, the allies had drawn the border running to the south of an old village called Bolgrad, 3 kilometres to the north of New Bolgrad, a market town situated on the shores of Lake Yalpuk, which runs into the Danube. The Russians made use of the lack of clarity, claiming that they should be given both Bolgrads, and thus joint ownership of Lake Yalpuk. Palmerston insisted that the border should remain at the old village – the intention of the treaty having been to deprive the Russians of access to the Danube. He urged the French to remain firm and show a united front against the Russians, who would otherwise exploit their differences. But the French were happy to concede the Russian claim as a matter of good faith, though they then proposed that the boundary should run along a narrow strip of land between the market town and Lake Yalpuk, thereby granting more territory to the Russians but depriving them of access to the lake. Once again, the French acted as intermediaries between Russia and Britain.

By mid-November the Duc de Morny had persuaded Gorchakov to give up Russia’s claim to Serpent Island, provided Russia was given New Bolgrad, without access to the lake, and territorial compensation for their loss in a form decided by the French Emperor. The deal was linked to a proposal by the Tsar and Gorchakov (drawn up with the help of Morny in St Petersburg) for a Franco-Russian convention for the protection of the neutrality of the Black Sea and the Danubian principalities, as set out in the Paris Treaty, but now necessitated, it was claimed by the Russians, ‘by the fact that the treaty has been violated by England and Austria’, who had ‘tried to cheat’ the Russians of legitimate possessions in the Danube area. Morny recommended the Russian proposal to Napoleon and passed on to the French Emperor a promise made to him by Gorchakov: Russia would support French acquisitions on the European continent if France signed the convention. ‘Mark well,’ Morny wrote, ‘Russia is the only power that will ratify the territorial gains of France. I have already been assured of that. Try and get the same from the English! And who knows, with our demanding and capricious people, one day we might have to come to Russia for their satisfaction.’ Details of the Russian attitude to French territorial acquisitions had been outlined in a secret instruction to Count Kiselev, the former governor of the Danubian principalities who became ambassador to France after the Crimean War: protocol required that a senior statesman represent the Tsar’s new policy of friendship towards France. Should Napoleon direct his attention to the Italian peninsula, Kiselev was told, Russia ‘would consent in advance to the reunion of Nice and Savoy with France, as well as to the union of Lombardy with Sardinia’. If his ambitions were directed to the Rhine, Russia would ‘use its good offices’ to help the French, while continuing to honour its commitments to Prussia.²⁹

A conference of the powers’ representatives in Paris brought about a speedy resolution of the two disputes in January 1857: Turkish ownership of Serpent Island was confirmed with an international commission to control the lighthouse; and New Bolgrad was given to Moldavia, with Russia compensated by a boundary change elsewhere in Bessarabia. On the face of it, the Russians had been forced to back down on both issues, but they had scored a political victory by weakening the bonds of the Crimean alliance. The French had made it clear that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was of secondary significance to them, and they were ready to enter into a deal with the Russians to redraw the European map.

Over the next eighteen months a number of high-level Russian visitors appeared in France. In 1857, the Grand Duke Constantine, the Tsar’s younger brother and the admiral in charge of the much-needed reform of the Russian navy after the Crimean War, made a trip to Paris, having decided that a partnership with France was the best way to get the technical assistance Russia needed to modernize its backward fleet (he gave to French firms all the orders that could not be fulfilled by Russian shipbuilders). On his way, he stopped at the Bay of Villafranca, near Nice, where he negotiated an agreement with Cavour for the Odessa Shipping Company to rent a coaling station from the Turin government, thereby providing Russia with a foothold in the Mediterranean.[56] Napoleon gave a splendid reception to the Grand Duke in Paris, and drew him into private conversations about the future of Europe. The French Emperor knew that the Grand Duke was trying to assert himself as a force in Russian foreign policy, and that he had pan-Slav views at odds with those of Gorchakov, so he played to his political ambitions. Napoleon referred specifically to the possibility of an Italian uprising against the Austrians and the eventual unification of Italy under Piedmont’s leadership, and talked about the likelihood of Christian uprisings in the Ottoman Empire, a subject of great interest to Constantine, suggesting that in both cases it would suit their interests to encourage the formation of smaller nation states.³⁰

Encouraged by the Grand Duke, Napoleon entered into direct contact with the Tsar with the aim of securing his support for a French-Piedmontese war against the Austrians in Italy. Having met the Tsar at Stuttgart in September 1857, Napoleon became so confident of his support that when he met Cavour the following July at Plombières to draw up war plans he assured the Piedmontese Prime Minister that he had Alexander’s solemn promise to back their plans in Italy: after the defeat of the Austrians in Lombardy-Venetia, an enlarged Piedmont would form a Kingdom of Northern Italy (as had emerged briefly in 1848–9) and become united with Tuscany, a reduced Papal State and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in an Italian Confederation; and for his efforts on behalf of the Italian cause, Napoleon would be rewarded with the return of Nice and Savoy to France. Cavour had pinned his hopes for Italy on the Franco-British alliance. That was why he had committed his Sardinian troops to the Crimean War. At the Paris congress he had won the sympathies of the British and the French through his influence behind the scenes, and although he had gained nothing tangible, no firm promise of support for the idea of Italy, he continued to believe that the Western powers were his only hope. Hardly believing that a Russian tsar would give his blessing to a national revolution, Cavour rushed to the nearby spa resort of Baden-Baden, where the ‘run-down kings and princes’ of Europe congregated, to consult with the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (Alexander’s influential liberal aunt), who confirmed that Russia could be counted on. ‘The Grand Duchess told me’, Cavour wrote to General Marmora, ‘that if France were to unite with us, public opinion would force the Russian government to participate.’³¹

But in truth, the Tsar was not keen to get involved in any war. In return for French commitments to cancel their support for the Black Sea clauses of the Paris Treaty, Alexander promised only armed neutrality, mobilizing a large Russian force on the border with Galicia to prevent the Austrians from sending troops to Italy. The Austrians had used armed neutrality in favour of the allies during the Crimean War, and Alexander’s decision to follow the same tactic let him take revenge on Austria for its betrayal. Napoleon, for his part, was unwilling to give a firm pledge on the Black Sea clauses, fearing it would damage his relations with Britain, so no formal treaty with the Russians could be reached. But there was a gentlemen’s agreement between the emperors, signed in March 1859, by which the Russians would adopt a stance of ‘benevolent neutrality’ in the event of a Franco-Austrian war in exchange for French ‘good offices’ at a ‘future date’.³²

It was on this basis that the French and Piedmontese began their war against Austria in April 1859, in the knowledge that the Russians would advance 300,000 troops towards the Austrian frontier while they attacked in Italy. Only a few years before, Russia would have given military support to Austria against any French attempts to revise the Vienna treaty. The Crimean War had changed everything.

Under the command of Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel, the Franco-Piedmontese army won a series of rapid victories, destroying the Austrian forces under the command of Emperor Franz Joseph at the battle of Solferino on 24 June, the last major battle in history in which all the armies were under the personal command of their monarchs. By this time, Napoleon was afraid that the German states might take up arms in support of Austria; therefore, without telling the Piedmontese, he signed an armistice with the Austrians at Villafranca, by which most of Lombardy, including its capital, Milan, was transferred to the French, who immediately gave it to Piedmont, as agreed by Napoleon and Cavour at Plombières. The Villafranca deal restored the monarchs of the central Italian states (Parma, Modena and Tuscany) who had been unseated by the popular revolts that broke out at the beginning of the war – a deal that enraged the Piedmontese, though it pleased the Russians, who had deep concerns about the way the Italian movement was taking a revolutionary turn. The Piedmontese army proceeded to annex the central states. Savoy and Nice were transferred to France, its agreed reward for helping the Italian cause. Their cession was opposed by the revolutionary general Giuseppe Garibaldi, a hero of the war against the Austrians, who had been born in Nice. In the spring of 1860, he led his thousand Redshirts on an expedition to conquer Sicily and Naples and unite them with the rest of Italy under Piedmont’s leadership.

The revolutionary turn taken by the Garibaldians placed a severe strain on the Tsar’s relations with Napoleon. It brought home to him that giving his support to the French Emperor’s policies could have dangerous consequences. There was nothing to prevent the tide of nationalism spreading into Habsburg lands and from there into Poland and other Russian territories. In October 1860 Russia broke off relations with Piedmont as a protest against its annexation of Naples. Gorchakov condemned Piedmont for promoting revolution, pledged to oppose the territorial changes taking place in Italy unless they were approved by a new international congress, and gave his cautious backing to the Austrians in Italy (there was no chance of the Russians actually fighting to keep the Habsburgs in Venetia, the only part of the peninsula, along with the papal city of Rome, that had not yet been unified under the control of the first Italian parliament, which met at Turin in 1861). When Victor Emmanuel took the title of King of Italy, in March 1861, the Russians and the Austrians agreed together to refuse him recognition, despite pressure from the British and French. When the British asked Gorchakov to use his influence on the Prussians to recognize the King, the Russian Foreign Minister refused. The Holy Alliance was not quite dead, it seemed. Justifying his refusal to cooperate with Britain’s plans for Italy, Gorchakov maintained that Austria and Turkey might be undermined by revolutionary movements if the powers left unchecked the nationalist uprisings started by the Piedmontese. With tongue in cheek, perhaps, given how the British had justified their actions in the Crimean War, Gorchakov informed Lord Napier, the British ambassador in St Petersburg: ‘We have two cardinal objects: the preservation of Turkey and the preservation of Austria.’³³

François Rochebrune

The Polish uprising of 1863 was the final breaking point for Russia’s policy of friendship towards France. Inspired by Garibaldi, Polish students began demonstrations in 1861, prompting General Lambert, the Tsar’s viceroy, to impose martial law. The Polish leaders gathered secretly, some supporting the idea of a popular democratic revolution uniting peasants and workers, others, led by Czartoryski, more conservative, seeking to establish a national movement led by nobles and intellectuals. The uprising began as a spontaneous protest against conscription into the Russian army. Small groups of insurgents fought the mighty Russian army from guerrilla strongholds mainly in the forests of Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and western (Catholic) Ukraine. Some of them had fought against the Russians during the Crimean War, including many of the ‘Zouaves of Death’, organized by François Rochebrune, who had served as an officer with the French Zouaves in the Crimea and had taken part in the Anglo-French expedition to China in the Second Opium War of 1857 before settling in Cracow in Austrian Poland, where he set up a fencing school. Dressed in a black uniform with a white cross and a red fez, and many of them armed with Minié rifles from the Crimean War, the Polish Zouaves swore to die rather than surrender to the Russians.

A clandestine revolutionary government was established in Warsaw. It declared ‘all sons of Poland free and equal citizens’, gave the peasants ownership of land, and appealed for help to the nations of Europe. Pope Pius IX ordered special prayers for the victory of Catholic Poland against Orthodox Russia, and was active in arousing sympathy for the Polish rebels in Italy and France. Napoleon wanted to land troops in the Baltic to support the Poles, but was held back by the British, who feared a renewal of the Crimean War. In the end, the competing French invasion of Mexico prevented troops from being sent. The diplomatic intervention of the Western powers on behalf of Poland angered the Russians, who felt betrayed by the French, in particular. It made the Russians even more determined to crush the Polish insurrectionaries. The Russian army burned whole towns and villages. Tens of thousands of Polish men and women were exiled to Siberia, and hundreds of insurgents were publicly hanged.

Alarmed by the consequences of their pro-French policies, the Russians moved away from France in the wake of the Polish uprising and returned to their old alliance with Prussia, another ruler of annexed Polish territory and the only power that had supported them against the Poles (a military convention had allowed the Russians to transport troops on Prussian trains). To Alexander, who had always had his doubts about the liberal French, Prussia seemed a more reliably conservative ally, and a counterbalance to the growing influence and power of the French on the Continent. The Russians gave considerable backing to Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian Prime Minister, whose conservatism had been noted by the Tsar during his period as ambassador in St Petersburg between 1859 and 1862. Bismarck himself placed a high priority on his good relations with Russia, which consistently supported Prussia in its wars against Denmark (in 1864), Austria (in 1866) and France (in 1870). With the defeat of France and the support of a grateful Germany, united by Bismarck, in 1871 Russia finally succeeded in getting the removal of Article XI of the Paris Treaty, allowing it to recommission its Black Sea Fleet. Events moved so rapidly in the fifteen years since the treaty that the international landscape was almost unrecognizable: with Napoleon III in exile in England following his removal by the forces of the Third Republic, Austria and France reduced in power and prestige, and the establishment of Germany and Italy as new states, the issues and passions of the Crimean War rapidly receded into the distance.

Russia did not lose a lot in terms of territory but it was humbled by the Paris Treaty. Apart from the loss of its Black Sea Fleet and Bessarabia, it lost prestige in the Balkans and forfeited the gains that it had made in the Eastern Question since the eighteenth century. Russia did not recover the dominant position it had held in Europe until after 1945.

The demilitarization of the Black Sea was a major strategic blow to Russia, which was no longer able to protect its vulnerable southern coastal frontier against the British or any other fleet, should the Sultan call on them in the event of war. The destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol and other naval docks was a humiliation. No compulsory disarmament had ever been imposed on a great power previously. Not even France had been disarmed after the Napoleonic Wars. The way Russia had been treated was unprecedented for the Concert of Europe, which was supposed to honour the principle that no great power should be humbled by others. But the allies did not really think that they were dealing with a European power in Russia. They regarded Russia as a semi-Asiatic state. During the negotiations at the Paris congress, Walewski had asked the British delegates whether it would not be too humiliating for the Russians if the Western powers installed consuls in their Black Sea ports to police the demobilization. Cowley insisted that it would not, pointing out that a similar condition had been imposed on China by the Treaty of Nanking after the First Opium War.³⁴

In Russia itself, the Crimean defeat discredited the armed services and highlighted the need to modernize the country’s defences, not just in the strictly military sense, but also through the building of railways, industrialization, sound finances and so on. The Ministry of War lost the favoured position it had held in the government system of Nicholas I and became overshadowed by the ministries of Finance and the Interior, although unavoidably it continued to receive the lion’s share of state expenditure.

The image many Russians had built up of their country – the biggest, richest and most powerful in the world – had suddenly been shattered. Russia’s backwardness had been exposed. Calls for reform were heard from every quarter of society. Everything was open to question. The Crimean disaster had exposed the shortcomings of every institution in Russia – not just the corruption and incompetence of the military command, the technological backwardness of the army and the navy, or the inadequate roads and lack of railways that accounted for the chronic problems of supply, but the poor condition and illiteracy of the serfs who had made up the armed forces, the inability of the serf economy to sustain a state at war against the industrial powers, and the failures of autocracy itself. Critics focused on Nicholas I, whose arrogant and wilful policies had led the country to ruin and sacrificed so many lives. ‘Public opinion is now very scornful of the memory of Nicholas,’ Tiutcheva noted in her diary.

With every new setback there are bitter reproaches against his name. They accuse him of pursuing a purely personal policy, which for the sake of his own pride and glory renounced the historical traditions of Russia, failed our brothers, the Orthodox Slavs, and turned the Tsar into the Gendarme of Europe when he could and should have brought new life to the East and the Church.

Even in the governing élite the bankruptcy of the Nicholaevan system was recognized. ‘My God, so many victims,’ wrote the tsarist censor Alexander Nikitenko in his diary. ‘All at the behest of a mad will, drunk with absolute power and arrogance…. We have been waging war not for two years, but for thirty, maintaining an army of a million men and constantly threatening Europe. What was the point of it all? What profit, what glory has Russia reaped from this?’ A few years earlier, Nikitenko reflected, the pan-Slav nationalists in Moscow had been preaching that the West was in decline, that a new Slavic civilization under Russian leadership would take its place. ‘And now Europe has proved to us in our ignorance and apathy, our arrogant contempt for her civilization, just how decayed Russia really is! Oh what wretches we are!’³⁵

One of the voices calling for reform belonged to Tolstoy, whose Sevastopol Sketches had catapulted him to literary fame. Tolstoy’s experience of the Crimean War shaped his ideas on life and literature. He had witnessed at first hand the incompetence and corruption of many officers, and their often brutal treatment of the ordinary soldiers and sailors, whose courage and resilience had inspired him. It was in his diary of the campaign that he first developed his ideas for radical reform and vowed to fight injustice with his pen. On his way from Odessa to Sevastopol in November 1854, he was told by the pilot of his boat about the transport of the soldiers: ‘how a soldier lay down in the pouring rain on the wet bottom of the boat and fell asleep; how an officer beat a soldier for scratching himself; and how a soldier shot himself during the crossing for fear of having overstayed his leave by two days and how he was thrown overboard without burial.’ The contrast with the way he thought the ordinary soldier was treated in the Western armies brought home the need for change. ‘I spent a couple of hours chatting with French and English wounded,’ Tolstoy noted in his diary at Eski-Orda near Simferopol the same month.

Every soldier is proud of his position and respects himself, for he feels himself to be an effective spring in the army machine. Good weapons and the skill to use them, youth, and general ideas about politics and the arts give them an awareness of their own worth. With us, stupid foot and arms drills, useless weapons, oppression, age, lack of education, and bad food and keep destroy the men’s last spark of pride, and even give them too high an opinion of the enemy.³⁶

It is doubtful whether many private soldiers in the French or British army had strong ideas about the arts. As with so much Russian admiration of ‘the West’, there was a good deal of naivety in Tolstoy’s assessment, but such ideals gave energy to his reformist zeal.

On the death of Nicholas I, Tolstoy drafted ‘A Plan for the Reform of the Army’ and presented it to Count Osten-Sacken, the commander of the Sevastopol garrison, in the hope that he would forward it to the new Tsar Alexander, who was said to favour more humane policies.

On the strength of this rumour, Tolstoy opened his proposal with a bold declaration of principle that was true in part yet hardly a fair comment on the brave defenders of Sevastopol:

My conscience and sense of justice forbid me to keep silent in the face of the evil being openly perpetrated before me, causing the deaths of millions and sapping our strength and undermining our country’s honour…. We have no army, we have a horde of slaves cowed by discipline, ordered about by thieves and slave traders. This horde is not an army because it possesses neither any real loyalty to faith, tsar and fatherland – words that have been so much misused! – nor valour, nor military dignity. All it possesses are, on the one hand, passive patience and repressed discontent, and on the other, cruelty, servitude and corruption.

Tolstoy strongly condemned the harsh treatment of the serf soldiers. In an early version of his proposals he even went so far as to maintain that in ‘every beaten soldier’ there was a buried ‘feeling of revenge’ that was ‘too suppressed to appear yet as a real force’ but was waiting to erupt (‘and Oh Lord what horrors lie in wait for our society if that should occur’). He later cut this inflammatory sentence, on the calculation that it would scotch his reform ideas in government circles. Tolstoy called for an end to corporal punishment in the army, blaming Russia’s poor performance in the Crimean War on the brutalization of the troops. He advanced plans for the reform of the artillery, which had been shown to be so ineffective against the Minié rifles. Putting forward his ideas about how to improve the command, he delivered a devastating critique of the officers in the Crimea, denouncing them as cruel and corrupt, concerned mainly with the minutiae of the soldiers’ uniforms and drill, and serving in the army only because they were unfit for anything else. But once again he cut out a fiery passage – in which he had claimed that the senior commanders were courtiers, selected because the Tsar liked them and not for their competence – on the grounds that it would lessen his chances of getting a hearing for his plans. It was already being rumoured that he was the anonymous author of a satirical army song in which the defeats in the Crimea were blamed on the incompetence of the officers with the biggest epaulettes. The ballad circulated widely in the army and society, earning Tolstoy, as its suspected author, a reprimand from the Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich, the Tsar’s brother, who accused the verses of destroying the morale of the soldiers.[57] Though Tolstoy’s authorship was never established, he was denied promotion beyond second lieutenant, a rank he had obtained before his arrival in Sevastopol.³⁷

Tolstoy’s experience in the Crimean War had led him to question more than just the military system. The poet Afanasy Fet, who first met Tolstoy in Turgenev’s St Petersburg apartment in the winter of 1855, was struck by the young man’s ‘automatic opposition to all generally accepted opinions’. Living side by side with the ordinary soldiers in the Crimea had opened Tolstoy’s eyes to the simple virtues of the peasantry; it had set him on a restless search for a new truth, for a way to live morally as a Russian nobleman and landowner, given the injustices of serfdom. He had touched on these matters before. In A Landowner’s Morning (1852), he wrote about a landowner (for which read: Tolstoy) who seeks a life of happiness and justice in the country and learns that it can only be found in constant labour for the good of others less happy than himself. At around the same time, he had proposed to reduce the dues of the serfs on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, but the serfs were suspicious of his intentions (they were not accustomed to such benevolence) and had turned his offer down. But it was only in the Crimea that Tolstoy began to feel a close attachment to the serfs in uniform – those ‘simple and kind men, whose goodness is apparent during a real war’. He was disgusted with his former life – the gambling, the whoring, the excessive feasting and drinking, the embarrassment of riches, and the lack of any real work or purpose in his life. And after the war, he threw himself into the task of living with the peasants in ‘a life of truth’ with new determination.³⁸

By the time of Tolstoy’s return, there was a new reformist spirit in the air. Among the more liberal and enlightened noblemen it was generally accepted that the time had come to liberate their serfs. In the words of Sergei Volkonsky, the famous Decembrist and one of Tolstoy’s distant relatives, who was released from his Siberian exile in 1856, the abolition of serfdom was ‘the least the state could do to recognize the sacrifice the peasantry has made in the last two wars: it is time to recognize that the Russian peasant is a citizen as well’. The peasant soldiers who had fought in the Crimea had been led to expect their freedom. In the spring of 1854 thousands of peasants had turned up at the recuiting stations after hearing rumours that freedom had been promised by the Tsar to any serf who volunteered for the army or navy, and there had been clashes with the soldiers and police when they were turned away. Expectations of emancipation mounted after the Crimean War. In the first six years of Alexander’s reign there were 500 peasant uprisings and strikes against the gentry on the land.³⁹

The new Tsar believed that the liberation of the serfs was a necessary measure to prevent a revolution. ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for the time when it begins to abolish itself from below,’ he told a group of Moscow noblemen in 1856. The defeat in the Crimean War had persuaded Alexander that Russia could not compete with the Western powers until it swept aside its old serf economy and modernized itself. The gentry had very little idea how to make a profit from their estates. Most of them knew next to nothing about agriculture or accounting. Yet they went on spending in the same old lavish way as they had always done, mounting up enormous debts. By 1859 one-third of the estates and two-thirds of the serfs owned by the landed nobles had been mortgaged to the state and noble banks. The economic argument for emancipation was becoming irrefutable, and many landowners were shifting willy-nilly to the free labour system by contracting other people’s serfs. Since the peasantry’s redemption payments would cancel out the gentry’s debts, the economic rationale was becoming irresistible.[58]

In 1858 the Tsar appointed a special commission to formulate proposals for the emancipation in consultation with provincial gentry committees. Under pressure from diehard squires to limit the reform or to fix the rules for the land transfers in their favour, the commission became bogged down in political wrangling for the best part of two years. In the end, the reactionary gentry were defeated and the moderate reformists got their way, thanks in no small measure to the personal intervention of the Tsar. The Edict of Emancipation was signed by Alexander on 19 February 1861 and read to the peasants by their parish priests. It was not as far-reaching as the peasantry had expected. The Edict allowed the landowners considerable leeway in choosing the bits of land for transfer to the peasantry, and in setting the redemption dues the peasant communes would have to pay for them, whereas the peasants had expected to be given all the land without payment.[59] There were rebellions in many areas, sometimes after rumours circulated that the published law was not the one the Tsar had meant to sign but a forgery by nobles and officials who wanted to prevent the real emancipation, the long-awaited ‘Golden Manifesto’ in which the Tsar would liberate the peasants and give them all the land.

Despite the disappointment of the peasantry, the emancipation was a crucial watershed. Freedom of a sort, however limited it may have been in practice, had at last been granted to the mass of the people, and there were grounds to hope for a national rebirth. Writers compared the Edict to the conversion of Russia to Christianity in the tenth century. They spoke about the need for Young Russia to liberate itself from the sins of its past, whose riches had been purchased by the people’s sweat and blood, about the need for the landlord and the peasant to overcome their old divisions and become reconciled by nationality. For, as Fedor Dostoevsky wrote in 1861, ‘every Russian is a Russian first of all’.⁴⁰

Along with the emancipation of the serfs, the defeat in the Crimean War accelerated the Tsar’s plans for a reform of the army. Tolstoy was not the only officer to advance proposals for reform during the Crimean War. In the summer of 1855, Count Fedor Ridiger, commander of the Guards and Grenadiers, endorsed many of Tolstoy’s criticisms of the officers corps in a memorandum to the Tsar. Blaming Russia’s imminent defeat on the gross incompetence of the senior command and the army’s administration, Ridiger advised that officers should be trained in military science rather than in parades and reviews, and that those with talent should be given wider scope to take responsibility on the battlefield. Shortly afterwards, similar ideas were put forward by another high-ranking member of the military establishment, Adjutant General V. A. Glinka, who also criticized the army’s system of supply. Proposals were advanced for the building of railways, the lack of which, it was agreed by everyone, had been a major reason for the supply problems of the military during the Crimean War.⁴¹

The Tsar set up a ‘Commission for the Improvement of the Military Sphere’ under General Ridiger, but then began to waver over implementing its proposed reforms, with which he clearly sympathized, although plans for a network of railways to link Moscow and St Petersburg with the major centres of agriculture and the border areas were approved by the Tsar as early as January 1857. Alexander was afraid of a possible reaction by the aristocracy at a time when he needed its support for the emancipation of the serfs. He put in charge of the War Ministry a man well known for his loyalty and military incompetence, General Nikolai Sukhozanet, who oversaw a period of tinkering reforms, mostly minor statutes altering the appearance of the Guards’ uniforms, but including two initiatives that were to have more significance: a revision of the Military Criminal Statute to reduce the maximum number of lashes permissible as corporal punishment from 6,000 to 1,500 (a figure still quite adequate to kill any soldier); and measures to improve the education and military training of the peasant soldiers, who were nearly all illiterate and unfit for modern war, as the Crimean War had clearly shown.

One of the results of these attempts to improve the army’s education was the creation of a new journal, Voennyi sbornik (Military Miscellany). Its aim was to appeal to officers and soldiers by presenting them with lively articles about military science and affairs, stories, poems and articles about society written in a liberal spirit of reform. Exempted from military censorship, it was similar in conception to the ‘Military Gazette’ which Tolstoy had proposed in 1854. Its literary section was edited by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, editor of the hugely influential democratic journal the Contemporary, in which Tolstoy’s own works had appeared. Chernyshevsky was himself the author of the novel What Is to Be Done? (1862) which would inspire several generations of revolutionaries, including Lenin. By the 1860s, Voennyi sbornik was rivalling the sales of the Contemporary, with more than 5,000 subscribers, demonstrating that ideas of reform had a receptive audience in the Russian army after the Crimean War.

The idea of setting up Voennyi sbornik had come from Dmitry Miliutin, the main driving force behind the military reforms after the Crimean War. A professor at the Military Academy, where he had taught since being gravely wounded in the campaign against Shamil in the Caucasus in 1838, Miliutin was a brilliant military analyst who quickly took on board the lessons of the defeat in the Crimea: the need to reform and modernize the military on the model of the Western forces that had so roundly beaten Russia’s backward serf army. He soon had a chance to apply these lessons to the Tsar’s ongoing struggles in the Caucasus.

In 1856 the Tsar had appointed his long-time confidant Prince A. I. Bariatinsky as viceroy of the Caucasus, with extraordinary powers to finish off the war against Shamil. Bariatinsky was an advocate of expanding Russia’s influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia as an antidote to the curtailment of her influence in Europe after the Crimean War. Alexander was persuaded by his arguments. Even before the Paris Treaty was announced, the Tsar announced his intention to step up the campaign against the Muslim rebels in the Caucasus. He exempted units in the Caucasus from the general military demobilization, mobilized new regiments, and ordered a consignment of 10,000 Minié rifles purchased from abroad to be sent to Bariatinsky, who by the end of 1857 had overall control of more than one-sixth of the military budget and 300,000 men. Bariatinsky brought in Miliutin as his chief of staff to introduce the military reforms which he saw were needed in the Caucasus: if they were successful there, they would reinforce the arguments for the reform of the Russian army as a whole. Drawing on Western military thinking as well as the proposals of General Ridiger, Miliutin proposed to rationalize the chain of command, giving more initiative and control of resources to local commanders to exercise their judgement in response to local conditions, an idea predicated on a general improvement in the training of officers.⁴²

The end of the Crimean War had left Shamil’s movement completely demoralized. Without the intervention of the Western powers and little real assistance from the Ottomans, the guerrilla movement of the Muslim tribes came to the end of its ability to continue fighting the Russians. The Chechens were exhausted by the war, which had lasted forty years, and delegations from all over Chechnya were appealing to Shamil to make peace with the Russians. Shamil wanted to fight on. But against the massive surge of military forces deployed by Bariatinsky he was unable to hold out for long and he finally surrendered to the Russians on 25 August 1859.[60]

On the basis of the army’s triumph in the Caucasus, in November 1861 Miliutin was appointed Minister of War on Bariatinsky’s recommendation to the Tsar. Once the Edict of Emancipation had been passed, Alexander felt the time had at last come to push through the military reforms. The legislative package presented by Miliutin to the Tsar built upon his earlier plans. The most important piece of legislation (passed only in 1874) was the introduction of universal conscription, with military service declared compulsory for all males at the age of 20. Organized through a territorial system of military districts for the maintenance of a peacetime standing army, the new Russian system was similar to the modern conscript armies of other European states, although in tsarist Russia, where government finances were inadequate and class, religious and ethnic hierarchies continued to be felt in the application of every policy, the universal principle was never fully realized. The main emphasis of Miliutin’s legislation was on military efficiency but humanitarian concerns were never far behind in his reform. His fundamental mission was to reshape the army’s culture so that it related to the peasant soldier as a citizen and no longer as a serf. The army schools were modernized, with greater emphasis on the teaching of military science and technology. Elementary schooling was made compulsory for all recruits, so that the army became an important means of education for the peasantry. The military justice system was reformed and corporal punishment was abolished, in theory at least, for in practice the Russian soldier continued to be punished physically and sometimes even flogged for relatively minor infringements of discipline. The army’s culture of serfdom continued to be felt by the common soldier until 1917.

The Crimean War reinforced in Russia a long-felt sense of resentment against Europe. There was a feeling of betrayal that the West had sided with the Turks against Russia. It was the first time in history that a European alliance had fought on the side of a Muslim power against another Christian state in a major war.

No one resented Europe more than Dostoevsky. At the time of the Crimean War, he was serving as a soldier in the fortress of Semipalatinsk in Central Asia following his release from a Siberian prison camp, to which he had been exiled for his involvement in the left-wing Petrashevsky circle in 1849. In the only published verse he ever wrote (and the poetic qualities of ‘On the European Events of 1854’ are such that one can see why this was so), Dostoevsky portrayed the Crimean War as the ‘crucifixion of the Russian Christ’. But, as he warned the Western readers of his poem, Russia would arise and, when she did so, she would turn towards the East in her providential mission to Christianize the world.

Unclear to you is her predestination! The East – is hers! To her a million generations Untiringly stretch out their hands…. And the resurrection of the ancient East By Russia (so God has commanded) is drawing near.⁴³

Having been defeated by the West, Russia turned towards Asia in its imperial plans. For Bariatinsky and the War Ministry, the defeat of Shamil in the Caucasus was to serve as a springboard for the Russian conquest of the independent khanates of Central Asia. Gorchakov and the Foreign Ministry were not so sure, fearing that an expansionist policy would set back their attempts to mend relations with the British and the French. Caught at first between these opposing policies, in 1856–7 the Tsar moved towards the view that Russia’s destiny lay in Asia and that only Britain stood in the way of its fulfilment. Deeply influenced by the climate of mutual suspicion between Russia and Britain after the Crimean War, it was a viewpoint that would define Russia’s policies in the Great Game, its imperial rivalry with Britain for supremacy in Central Asia.

The Tsar was concerned by the growing presence of the British in Persia following their victory in the Anglo-Persian War of 1856–7. By the Paris Treaty of March 1857, the Persians withdrew from Herat, the north-western Afghan city they had occupied with Russian backing in 1852 and 1856. From his correspondence with Bariatinsky, it is clear that Alexander was afraid that the British would use their influence in Tehran to install themselves on the southern shores of the Caspian. He shared Bariatinsky’s gloomy prediction that ‘the appearance of the British flag on the Caspian would be a fatal blow not only to our influence in the East, not only to our foreign trade, but also to the political independence of the [Russian] Empire’.

Alexander commissioned a report from Sukhozanet, ‘On the Possibility of an Armed Clash between Russia and England in Central Asia’. Although the report rejected the idea of a British military threat, the Tsar persisted in his fear that the British might deploy their Indian army to conquer Central Asia and expel the Russians from the Caucasus. In the spring of 1857 the British steamer Kangaroo and several smaller vessels carrying military supplies for Shamil’s forces had been caught on the Circassian coast. Russia no longer had a Black Sea Fleet to block such acts of intervention into its affairs by the British. Alexander demanded ‘categorical explanations’ from the British government, but received none. The ‘unmentionable infamy’, as he called the Kangaroo affair, reinforced the Tsar’s belief that Russia would not be secure against the British threat as long as the Caucasus remained unconquered and the Central Asian steppe beyond her political control.

Throughout the Crimean War the Russians had considered various ideas for an attack through Central Asia towards Kandahar and India, mainly as a means of diverting British troops from the Crimea. Although these plans were all rejected as impracticable, rumours of a Russian invasion were widely circulated and believed in India, where inflammatory pamphlets called on Muslims and Hindus to take advantage of the exhaustion of the British in the Crimea to rise up against their rule. The outbreak of the Indian Mutiny in the early summer of 1857 encouraged the Tsar to reconsider his Central Asia plans. The Royal Navy could threaten Russia’s coastline in the Baltic, in the Pacific Ocean and in the Black Sea, which was now defenceless as a result of the demilitarization imposed on the Russians by the Paris Treaty. The only place where the Russians could even pretend to mount a counter-threat was in India. The British were extremely sensitive to any threat against their Indian empire, mainly because of their fragile tax-base there, which they dared not increase for political reasons. Few Russians strategists believed in the reality of a campaign against India, but exploiting British nervousness was good tactics.

In the autumn of 1857 the Tsar commissioned a strategic memorandum on Central Asia by a brilliant young military attaché, Nikolai Ignat′ev, who had been brought to his attention after he had represented Russia on the question of its disputed border with Moldavia at the Paris congress. Considering the possibility of a renewed war against Britain, Ignat′ev argued that the only place where Russia stood a chance of victory was in Asia. Russia’s strength in Central Asia was the ‘best guarantee of peace’, so Russia should exploit the Indian crisis to strengthen its position at the expense of Britain in ‘the countries which separate Russia from the British possessions’. Ignat′ev proposed sending expeditions to explore and map the ‘undiscovered’ steppe of Central Asia for the benefit of Russian trade and military intelligence. By developing commercial and diplomatic ties with the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva, Russia could turn them into buffer states against British expansion. Giving his approval to the plan, the Tsar sent an exploratory party to Khiva and Bukhara under the leadership of Ignat′ev which concluded economic treaties with the two khanates in the summer of 1858. Officially, the mission had been sent by the Foreign Ministry, but unofficially it was also working for the War Ministry, collecting topographical, statistical and ‘general military information’ on various routes into Central Asia. From the start of the Russian initiative there was a more forward policy, favoured by the followers of Bariatinsky in the War Ministry, to set up protectorates and military bases in the khanates for the conquest of Turkestan and the Central Asian steppe right up to the borders of Afghanistan.⁴⁴

The Russian advance into Central Asia was led by two veterans of the Crimean War. One was Mikhail Cherniaev, who had fought against the Turks on the Danube in 1853 and had distinguished himself for his bravery at Inkerman and Sevastopol, before being transferred to defend Russian colonists against the raids of the Central Asian tribes on the steppes of southern Orenburg. From 1858 Cherniaev began launching his own raids deep into the territory of Turkestan, destroying Kirghiz and other hostile tribal settlements and supporting rebellions against the khanates of Khiva and Kokand by other Central Asian tribes who were willing to declare their allegiance to Russia. Cherniaev’s military initiatives, quietly supported but not endorsed officially by the War Ministry, led by stealth to the Russian annexation of Turkestan. In 1864, Cherniaev led a force of a thousand men across the steppes of Turkestan to occupy the fortress of Chimkent. Joined by a second Russian column from Semipalatinsk, they then seized Tashkent, 130 kilometres to the south, effectively imposing Russian rule on this vital power-base of the Central Asian cotton trade. Cherniaev was awarded the St George Cross and appointed military governor of Turkestan in 1865. After angry diplomatic protests by the British, who were afraid that the Russian troops might continue their advance from Tashkent to India, the Russian government disowned responsibility for the invasion carried out by Cherniaev. The general was forced into retirement in 1866. But unofficially he was received as a hero in Russia. The nationalist press proclaimed him the ‘Ermak of the nineteenth century’.[61]

Meanwhile, the conquest of the Central Asian steppe was carried on by General Kaufman, a second veteran of the Crimean War, who had led the sappers at the siege of Kars before becoming Miliutin’s chief of engineers at the War Ministry. Kaufman replaced Cherniaev as the military governor of Turkestan. In 1868 he completed the conquest of Samarkand and Bukhara. Five years later Khiva also fell to the Russians, followed by Kokand in 1876. Left in the hands of their respective khans as far as their internal government was concerned, but subject to the control of the Russians in their foreign relations, Bukhara and Khiva became essentially protectorates along the lines of the Princely States of British India.

Cherniaev and Ignat′ev became leading figures in the pan-Slav movement of the 1860s and 1870s. Along with Russia’s turn towards the East, pan-Slavism was the other main reaction by the Russians to their defeat in the Crimean War, as their feelings of resentment against Europe led to an explosion of nationalist sentiment. With censorship relaxed by the liberal reforms of the new Tsar, a new slew of pan-Slav journals forcefully criticized Russia’s foreign policy before the Crimean War. In particular, they attacked the legitimist policies of Nicholas I for having sacrificed the Balkan Christians to Muslim rule in the interests of the Concert of Europe. ‘For the sake of the balance of Europe,’ Pogodin wrote in the first number of the pan-Slav journal Parus in January 1859, ‘ten million Slavs are forced to groan, suffer, and agonize under the yoke of the most savage despotism, the most unbridled fanaticism, and the most desperate ignorance.’⁴⁵ With Gorchakov’s abandonment of these legitimist principles, the pan-Slavs renewed their calls on the government to support the liberation of the Balkan Slavs from Turkish rule. Some went so far as to claim that Russia should protect itself against a hostile West by uniting all the Slavs of Europe under Russian leadership – an idea first put forward by Pogodin during the Crimean War and repeated with even more insistence in his writings afterwards.

As pan-Slav ideas gained influence in Russian intellectual and government circles, there was a proliferation of philanthropic organizations to promote the pan-Slav cause by sending money to the Balkan Slavs for schools and churches, or by bringing students to Russia. The Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee was established in 1858, with separate branches opening in St Petersburg and Kiev in the 1860s. Funded by private benefactors and the Ministry of Education, it brought together officials and miltary men (many of them veterans of the Crimean War who had fought in the Balkans) with academics and writers (including Dostoevsky and Tiutchev, who both belonged to the St Petersburg Committee).

During the first post-war years the pan-Slavs were cautious not to discuss openly their more radical ideas of Slavic political unification, nor to criticize too severely the foreign policy of the government (the views expressed by Pogodin led to Parus being banned). But by the early 1860s, when Ignat′ev emerged as a pan-Slav supporter and became a leading figure in the government, they became more vocal in their views. Ignat′ev’s growing influence in foreign affairs was based largely on his highly successful negotiation of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing, in November 1860, which gave Russia possession of the Amur and Ussuri regions as well as Vladivostok in the Far East. In 1861 Ignat′ev became Director of the Asiatic Department of the Foreign Ministry, the office responsible for Russia’s policy in the Balkans. Three years later he was appointed as the Tsar’s envoy to Constantinople – a post he held until the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8. Throughout these years Ignat′ev pushed for a military solution to the Eastern Question in the Balkans: Russian-sponsored Slav uprisings against Turkish rule and the intervention of the tsarist army, leading to the liberation of the Slavs and the creation of a Slavic Union under Russian leadership.

Pan-Slav ambitions for the Balkans focused first on Serbia, where the restoration of the Europeanized but autocratic Prince Mihailo to the throne in 1860 was seen as a victory for Russian influence and yet another defeat for the Austrians. Gorchakov supported the Serb movement for liberation from the Turks, fearing otherwise that, if they gained independence on their own, the Serbs would fall under Austrian or Western influence. Writing to the Russian consul in Bucharest, the Foreign Minister underlined that ‘our policy in the East is directed mainly toward strengthening Serbia materially and morally and giving her the opportunity to stand at the head of the movement in the Balkans’. Ignat’ev went further, advocating an immediate solution to the Eastern Question by military means. Taking up a proposal by Mihailo, he urged the Russian government to support the Serbs in a war against the Turks and help them form a confederation with the Bulgarians, to which Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro could be joined.

Under pan-Slav pressure, the Russian Foreign Ministry increased its support for the Serb movement. After a Turkish bombardment of Belgrade in 1862, the Russians called a special conference of the signatories of the Paris Treaty at Kanlidze near Constantinople and eventually succeeded in getting the removal of the final Turkish garrisons from Serbia in 1867. It was their first major diplomatic victory since the end of the Crimean War. Encouraged by their success, the Russians gave their backing to the Serbian attempt to create a Balkan League. Serbia formed a military alliance with Montenegro and Greece and a pact of friendship with the Romanian leadership, and established closer ties with Croatian and Bulgarian nationalists. The Russians subsidized the Serb army, though a mission sent by Miliutin to inspect it found it in a chronic state. Then in the autumn of 1867 Prince Mihailo backed away from war against the Turks, prompting Russia to suspend its war credits. The assassination of Mihailo the following June confirmed the end of Russian-Serb cooperation and the collapse of the Balkan League.⁴⁶

The next seven years were a period of relative calm in the Balkans. The imperial monarchies of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany (the Three Emperors’ League of 1873) guaranteed the preservation of the status quo in the Balkans. Official Russian policy in these years was based on a firm commitment to the European balance of power, and on that basis Gorchakov secured a major diplomatic victory with the annulment of the Paris Treaty’s Black Sea clauses at a conference of the European powers in London in 1871. But unofficially the policy of Russia remained the encouragement of the pan-Slav movement in the Balkans – a policy coordinated by Ignat′ev from the Russian embassy in Constantinople through its consulates in the Balkan capitals. In his memoirs, written at the end of his long life in the 1900s, Ignat′ev explained that his aim in the Balkans in the 1860s and 1870s had been to destroy the Treaty of Paris, to recover southern Bessarabia, and to control the Turkish Straits, either directly through military conquest or indirectly through a treaty with a dependent Turkey, of the kind Russia had enjoyed before the Crimean War. ‘All my activities in Turkey and among the Slavs’, he wrote, ‘were inspired by… the view that Russia alone could rule in the Balkan peninsula and Black Sea… Austria-Hungary’s expansion would be halted and the Balkan peoples, especially the Slavs, would direct their gaze exclusively to Russia and make their future dependent on her.’⁴⁷

In the summer of 1875 revolts by Christians against Turkish rule in Herzegovina spread north into Bosnia, and then into Montenegro and Bulgaria. The revolts had been sparked by a sharp increase in taxes levied by the Turkish government on the Christian peasants after harvest failures had left the Porte in a financial crisis. But they soon took on the character of a religious war. The leaders of the uprisings looked to Serbia and Russia for support. Encouraged by Ignat′ev, Serbian nationalists in Belgrade called on their government to send in troops to defend the Slavs against the Turks and unite them in a Greater Serbia.

In Bulgaria, the rebels were badly armed and organized, but their hatred of the Turks was intense. In the spring of 1876 the revolt spilled over into massacres against the Muslim population, which had increased massively since the Crimean War as a result of the immigration of about half a million Crimean Tatars and Circassians fleeing from the Russians to Bulgaria. Tensions with the Christians were intensified when the newcomers reverted to a semi-nomadic way of life, launching raids on the Christian settlements and stealing livestock in a way not experienced before by the peasants in the area. Lacking enough regular troops to quell the Bulgarians, the Ottoman authorities used the Bashi Bazouks, irregulars mostly drawn from the local Muslim population, who brutally suppressed their Christian neighbours, massacring around 12,000 people in the process. In the mountain village of Batak, where a thousand Christians had taken refuge in a church, the Bashi Bazouks set fire to the building, burning to death all but one old woman, who survived to tell the tale.⁴⁸

News of the Bulgarian atrocities spread throughout the world. The British press claimed that ‘tens of thousands’ of defenceless Christian villagers had been slaughtered by ‘fanatical Muslims’. British attitudes to Turkey changed dramatically. The old policy of promoting the Tanzimat reforms in the belief that the Turks were willing pupils of English liberal governance was seriously questioned, and for many Christians completely undermined, by the Bulgarian massacres. Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal opposition whose views on foreign policy were closely linked to his High Church Anglican moral principles, took the lead in a popular campaign for British intervention to protect the Balkan Christians against Turkish violence. Gladstone had only cautiously supported the Crimean War. He was hostile to the presence of the Turks in Europe on religious grounds, and had long wanted to use British influence to secure more autonomy for the Christians in the Ottoman Empire. In 1856 he had even advanced the idea of a new Greek empire in the Balkans to protect the Christians, not just against the Muslims of Turkey, but against the Russians and the Pope.⁴⁹

The strongest reaction to the Bulgarian atrocities was in Russia. Sympathy for the Bulgarians engulfed the whole of educated society in a surge of patriotic feeling, intensified by a national desire for revenge against the Turks after the Crimean War. Calls for intervention to protect the Bulgarians were heard from all quarters: from Slavophiles, such as Dostoevsky, who saw in a war for the liberation of the Balkan Slavs the fulfilment of Russia’s historical destiny to unite the Orthodox; and from Westernizers, such as Turgenev, who thought it was the duty of the liberal world to liberate enslaved Bulgaria. Here was a golden opportunity for the pan-Slavs to realize their dreams.

Officially, the Russian government denounced the Christian revolts in the Balkans. It was on the defensive, having been accused by Western governments of instigating the revolts. But pan-Slav opinion, and in particular the journal Russkii mir (Russian World), owned and edited by Cherniaev, the former military governor of Turkestan, came out in support of the Balkan Christian cause and called on the government to support it. ‘Speak but one word, Russia,’ Russkii mir predicted, ‘and not only the entire Balkans… but all the Slav peoples… will rise in arms against their oppressors. In alliance with her 25 million fellow Orthodox, Russia will strike fear into all of Western Europe.’ Everything depended on the actions of Serbia, the ‘Piedmont of the Balkans’, in the phrase of Cherniaev. The Tsar and Gorchakov warned the Serbian leaders not to intervene in the uprisings, though privately they sympathized with the pan-Slavs (‘Do anything you like provided we do not know anything about it officially,’ Baron Jomini, the acting head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, told a member of the St Petersburg Committee). Encouraged by Ignat’ev and the Russian consul in Belgrade, as well as by the arrival of Cherniaev as a volunteer for the Slav cause in April, the Serb leaders declared war on Turkey in June 1876.⁵⁰

The Serbs were counting on the armed intervention of Russia. Cherniaev was in charge of their main army. Along with his presence, Ignat′ev’s promises had led them to believe that this would be a repetition of the Balkan war of 1853–4, when Nicholas I had sent his army into the Danubian principalities in the expectation – ultimately disappointed – that it would encourage a war of liberation by the Slavs. Public opinion in Russia was increasingly belligerent. The nationalist press called on the army to defend the Christians against the Turks. Pan-Slav groups sent volunteers to fight on their behalf – and about five thousand made their way to Serbia.[62] Subscriptions were organized to send money to the Slavs. Pro-Slav feeling swept across society. People talked about the war as a crusade – a repeat of the war against the Turks in 1854.

By the autumn of 1876 war fever had spread to the Russian court and government circles. Cherniaev’s army faced defeat. Responding to his desperate pleas for help, the Tsar sent an ultimatum to the Porte and mobilized his troops. This was enough to force the Turks to end hostilities against the Serbs, who duly made their peace with them. Abandoning the Serbs, the Russians shifted their support to the Bulgarians and demanded autonomy for them, which the Turks would not accept. With Austria’s neutrality assured through promises of gains in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in April 1877 Russia declared war on Turkey once again.

From the start, the Russian offensive in the Balkans assumed the character of a religious war. It was overwhelmingly redolent of the opening Russo-Turkish phase of the Crimean War. As the Russians crossed the Danube under the command of the Grand Duke Nikolai, they were joined by Slav irregulars, Bulgarians and Serbs, some of them demanding money to fight, but most fighting for their national cause against the Turks. This was the sort of Christian war that Nicholas had wanted when his troops had crossed the Danube in 1853–4. Encouraged by the rising of the Slavs, Alexander considered pushing on to seize Constantinople and impose a Russian settlement on the Balkans. He was urged to do so not only by the pan-Slav press but by his own brother, the Grand Duke Nikolai, who wrote to him after his armies had captured Adrianople, a short march from Constantinople, in January 1878: ‘We must go to the centre, to Tsargrad, and there finish the holy cause you have assumed.’ Pan-Slav hopes were at their height. ‘Constantinople must be ours,’ wrote Dostoevsky, who saw its conquest by the Russian armies as nothing less than God’s own resolution of the Eastern Question and as the fulfilment of Russia’s destiny to liberate Orthodox Christianity.

It is not only the magnificent port, not only the access to the seas and oceans, that binds Russia so closely to the resolution… of this fateful question, nor is it even the unification and regeneration of the Slavs. Our goal is more profound, immeasurably more profound. We, Russia, are truly essential and unavoidable both for the whole of Eastern Christendom and for the whole fate of future Orthodoxy on the earth, for its unity. This is what our people and their rulers have always understood. In short, this terrible Eastern Question is virtually our entire fate for years to come. It contains, as it were, all our goals and, mainly, our only way to move out into the fullness of history.⁵¹

Alarmed by the advance of the Russian troops to Adrianople, the British ordered their Mediterranean fleet to enter the Dardanelles and agreed in Parliament to raise £6 million for military purposes. It was a repeat of the movements that had led to the Crimean War. Under pressure from the British, the Russians agreed to an armistice with the Ottomans but continued advancing towards Constantinople, halting only under threat from the Royal Navy at San Stefano, a village just outside the Turkish capital, where on 3 March they signed a treaty with the Turks. By the Treaty of San Stefano, the Porte agreed to recognize the full independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, as well as the autonomy of a large Bulgarian state (to include Macedonia and part of Thrace). In exchange for a narrow strip of land to the south of the Danube, Romania ceded back to Russia southern Bessarabia, the territory taken from the Russians by the Treaty of Paris. With the restoration of her Black Sea status completed seven years before, Russia had succeeded in reversing all the losses she had suffered after the Crimean War.

The Treaty of San Stefano was mainly Ignat′ev’s doing. It was the realization of most of his pan-Slav dreams. But it was totally unacceptable to the Western powers, which had not gone to war to stop the Russians bullying the Turks in 1854 only to allow them to do so again twenty-four years afterwards. In Britain, the old warlike feelings against Russia were expressed in ‘jingoism’, a new aggressive mood of can-do foreign policy summed up by the current hit song of pubs and music halls:

We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

Afraid of British intervention and a possible repeat of the Crimean War, the Tsar ordered the Grand Duke to withdraw his troops to the Danube. As they did so they took part in revenge attacks against the Muslims of Bulgaria which were joined and sometimes instigated by Christian volunteers: several hundred thousand Muslims fled Bulgaria for the Ottoman Empire at the end of the Russo-Turkish war.

Determined to halt the extension of Russian power into the Balkans, the great powers met at the Congress of Berlin to revise the Treaty of San Stefano. The main objection of the British and the French was the establishment of a greater Bulgaria, which they viewed as a Russian Trojan horse threatening the Ottoman Empire in Europe. With direct access to the Aegean Sea in Macedonia, this enlarged Bulgarian state could easily be used by the Russians to attack the Turkish Straits. The British forced the Russians to agree to the division of Bulgaria, returning Macedonia and Thrace to direct Ottoman control. A week before the Berlin congress, Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, had concluded a secret alliance with the Ottomans against Russia, whereby Britain was allowed to occupy the strategic island of Cyprus and bring in troops from India. The revelation of this alliance, along with Disraeli’s threats of war, forced the Russians to concede to his demands.

The Congress of Berlin ended Russia’s pan-Slav hopes. Ignat’ev was dismissed as the Tsar’s envoy to Constantinople and went into retirement. Arriving back in London to a hero’s welcome, Disraeli claimed that he had brought back ‘Peace with honour’ from Berlin. He told the House of Commons that the Treaty of Berlin and the Cyprus Convention would protect Britain and its route to India against Russian aggression for years to come. But tensions in the Balkans would remain. In many ways the congress sowed the seeds of the future Balkan wars and the First World War by leaving so many border disputes unresolved. Above all, the fundamental problem of the Eastern Question, the ‘sick man of Europe’, Turkey, remained without a cure. As the British Foreign Secretary, the Marquess of Salisbury, acknowledged on his return from Berlin, ‘We shall set up a rickety sort of Turkish rule south of the Balkans once again. But it is a mere respite. There is no vitality left in it.’⁵²

In Jerusalem, where all these international conflicts had begun, the end of the Crimean War was proclaimed on 14 April 1856. A salute from the Castle guns announced that the Pasha had been informed of the peace, and his troops assembled on the public square outside the Jaffa Gate for thanksgiving prayers led by the imam. It was to the same square that they had been summoned in September 1853 to go and fight for their Sultan against Russia.⁵³ History had come full circle in Jerusalem.

Twelve days later, on 26 April, the old religious rivalries began once again. Fights broke out between the Greeks and the Armenians during the ceremony of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. For several days before the sacred ceremony, rival groups of pilgrims had smuggled various weapons into the church and concealed them there. Others were supplied with knives and iron spikes thrown from a window near the roof of the St Nicholas Convent. It was not clear how the fighting started, the British consul Finn, who witnessed it, reported three days afterwards, but ‘during the conflict the missiles were also flung upwards to the galleries, demolishing rows of lamps and tearing church pictures representing the most sacred subjects of faith – glass and oil pouring down upon their heads – and silver lamps on silver chains were beaten down and the materials have since vanished’. The Pasha left his place in the gallery and ordered up his guard to separate the fighters. But he was badly hurt by a blow to his head and had to be carried away on his men’s shoulders – the crowd in the church being too thick to allow a passage otherwise – while his secretary was also beaten up. Eventually, a squadron of the Pasha’s soldiers rounded up the rioters, the church attendants cleared up all the mess, and the ceremony of the Holy Fire proceeded as usual, the monks standing guard before the tomb of Christ, the congregation chanting ‘Lord have mercy’, until the patriarch emerged bearing lighted candles, and, as the church bells rang, the pilgrims pressed towards him to light their torches from the miraculous flames.⁵⁴

On a sunny Friday morning, 26 June 1857, the Queen and Prince Albert attended a parade of Crimean veterans in Hyde Park. By a royal warrant the previous January, the Queen had instituted a new medal, the Victoria Cross, to reward bravery by servicemen regardless of their class or rank. Other European countries had long had such awards – the French, the Légion d’honneur, since 1802; the Dutch, the Military Order of William, and even the Russians had a merit medal before 1812. In Britain, however, there was no system of military honours to recognize the bravery of the troops on the basis of merit, only one to reward officers. The war reports by Russell of The Times and other journalists had brought to the attention of the British public many acts of bravery by ordinary troops; they had portrayed the suffering of the soldiers in heroic terms, giving rise to a widespread feeling that a new award was needed to recognize their deeds. Sixty-two Crimean veterans were chosen to receive the first Victoria Crosses – a small bronze medal supposed to be cast from the captured Russian cannon of Sevastopol.[63] At the ceremony in Hyde Park, each one took his turn to bow before the Queen as Lord Panmure, Secretary of State for War, read out his name and gave the citation for gallantry. Among these first recipients of Britain’s highest military honour were sixteen privates from the army, four gunners and one sapper, two seamen and three boatswains.⁹

The institution of the Victoria Cross not only confirmed the change in the idea of heroism; it also marked a new reverence for war and warriors. The troops who had received the Victoria Cross found their deeds commemorated in a multitude of post-war books that exalted the bravery of men at arms. The most popular, Our Soldiers and the Victoria Cross, was brought out by Samuel Beeton, best known as the publisher of his wife’s book, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, in 1861. Written to inspire and teach boys, the preface of Our Soldiers claimed:

This didactic cult of manliness animated the two major British novels set against the background of the Crimean War: Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857) and Henry Kingsley’s Ravenshoe (1861). It was also the pervading theme of Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855), a New World adventure story set at the time of the Spanish Armada, which was inspired by the militarism and xenophobia of Britain during the Crimean War. Its author himself described it in 1854 as ‘a most ruthless and bloodthirsty book (just what the times want, I think)’.¹¹

The argument for war was also at the heart of Thomas Hughes’s hugely influential novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), whose most famous scene, the fight between Tom and the bully Slogger Williams, was clearly meant to be read by the public as a moral lesson on the recent war against Russia:

Here was the origin of the cult of ‘muscular Christianity’ – the notion of ‘Christian soldiers’ fighting righteous wars that came to define the Victorian imperial mission. This was a time when Britons began to sing in church:

The argument for ‘muscular Christianity’ was first made in a review of Kingsley’s novel Two Years Ago in 1857, a year when the idea of the ‘Christian soldier’ was reinforced by the actions of the British troops in putting down the Indian Mutiny. But the idea of training boys to fight for Christian causes was also prominent in Hughes’s sequel to Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), where athletic sport is extolled as a builder of manly character, teamwork, chivalry and moral fortitude – qualities that had made Britons good at war. ‘The least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.’¹³ At the heart of this ideal was a new concentration on physical training and the mastery of the body as a form of moral strengthening for the purposes of holy war. It was a quality associated with the hardiness of the suffering soldiers in the Crimea.

But that suffering, too, played a role in transforming the public image of the British troops. Before the war the respectable middle and upper classes had viewed the rank and file of the British army as little more than a dissolute rabble – heavy-drinking and ill-disciplined, brutal and profane – drawn from the poorest sections of society. But the agonies of the soldiers in the Crimea had revealed their Christian souls and turned them into objects of ‘good works’ and Evangelical devotion. Religious ministering to the rank and file dramatically increased during the war. The army doubled its number of chaplains and every man was given a Bible free of charge, courtesy of middle-class donations to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Naval and Military Bible Society.¹⁴

The soldiers were recast as saintly figures, martyrs of a holy cause, in the eyes of many Evangelicals. Among them was Catherine Marsh, whose lively and sentimental hagiography, Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars, Ninety-Seventh Regiment (1856), sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few years of publication and reappeared in numerous abridged and juvenile editions up until the First World War. Compiled from Vicars’s diary and his letters to his mother from the Crimea, Memorials was dedicated to the ‘noble ideal of the Christian soldier’ and offered to the public as a ‘fresh and ample refutation to those who, in the face of examples to the contrary, still maintain that entire devotion of the heart to God must withdraw a man from many of the active duties of life and… that in making a good Christian you may spoil a good soldier’. Vicars is portrayed as a soldier-saint, a selfless hero who bears the burdens of his fellow-men on the Sevastopol heights by sharing his food and tent, caring for them and reading them the Bible when they are sick. Vicars leads his men to ‘Holy War’ against the Russians, who are described as ‘heathens’, ‘infidels’ and ‘savages’. He is mortally wounded during the sortie of 22–3 March 1855, and his death is compared to the martyrdom of Christ in Marsh’s final chapter (‘Victory’), which is prefaced by Longfellow’s verse (a translation from the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique):

Vicars was buried in Sevastopol but in St George’s Church on Bromley Road in Beckenham, Kent, there is a white marble tablet carved in the shape of a scroll with a sheathed sword behind on which these words are inscribed:

Beyond the sanctification of soldiers and the new manly ideal, the common effort of the war seemed to offer the possibility of national unity and reconciliation needed to end the class divisions and industrial strife of the 1830s and 1840s. In Dickens’s Household Words, alongside the serialization of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), a novel on the theme of ending the class conflict, there appeared a series of poems by Adelaide Anne Procter, Queen Victoria’s favourite poet, including ‘The Lesson of the War’.

A similar idea can be found in Tennyson’s poetic monodrama Maud (1855), where a state of ‘civil war’ created by the ‘lust of gain’ at home gives way to an ending in which the narrator looks to war abroad as a higher and more godly cause:

Painters picked up the same theme. In John Gilbert’s Her Majesty the Queen Inspecting the Wounded Coldstream Guards in the Hall of Buckingham Palace (1856), a painting (sadly lost) that was popular enough to be reproduced as a coloured lithograph as late as 1903, there is a touching poignancy in the meeting between the Queen and the wounded heroes of the Crimea which suggests the prospect of post-war unity between the highest and the lowest of the land. Jerry Barrett’s large painting Queen Victoria’s First Visit to Her Wounded Soldiers (1856) played on this emotion too. This sentimental picture of the royal family visiting Crimean invalids at the Chatham army hospital was such a success when it was first shown at Thomas Agnew’s gallery in Piccadilly that several thousand prints were subsequently sold to the public in various editions costing between three and ten guineas.¹⁷

The Queen herself was a collector of photographic souvenirs of Crimean veterans. She commissioned commercial photographers like Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett to make a series of commemorative portraits of maimed and wounded soldiers in various military hospitals, including Chatham, for the royal collection at Windsor. Cundall and Howlett’s striking photographs reached beyond their patroness’s hands. Through photographic exhibitions and their reproduction in the illustrated press, they brought home to the public in explicit terms the suffering of the soldiers and the human costs of war. These pioneering photographs were very different from Fenton’s genteel images. In Cundall and Howlett’s Three Crimean Invalids (1855), for example, the wounded infantrymen are seated on a hospital bed displaying their loss of limbs. There is no emotion in their expressions, no romanticism or sentimentality in their representation, only the documentary evidence in black and white of the impact made by iron shot and frostbite on the body. In their notes in the royal archives, Cundall and Howlett identified the men as William Young of the 23rd Regiment, wounded at the Redan on 18 June 1855; Henry Burland of the 34th, both legs lost to frostbite in the trenches before Sevastopol; and John Connery of the 49th, his left leg lost to frostbite in the trenches.¹⁸

Memories of the Crimean War continued to provide a winning subject for British artists well into the 1870s. The best known of these Crimean pictures was Calling the Roll after an Engagement, Crimea (1874) by Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), which caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. So great were the crowds that came to see it that a policeman was put on guard to provide protection. Already known for her earlier paintings on military themes, Thompson had conceived The Roll Call (as it became popularly known) in the immediate aftermath of the Cardwell reforms, when army matters were prominent in public life. From detailed sketches of Crimean veterans, she created a striking composition, in which the remnants of the Grenadiers, wounded, cold and utterly exhausted, assemble after a battle to be counted by their mounted officer. The painting was completely different from conventional depictions of war that focused on the glorious deeds of gallant officers: apart from the mounted officer, the 2-metre-high canvas was entirely dominated by the suffering of the rank and file. It stripped away the heroics and let the viewer look into the face of war. After its showing at the Royal Academy The Roll Call went on national tour, drawing immense crowds. In Newcastle, it was advertised by men with sandwich boards which simply read ‘The Roll Call is Coming!’ In Liverpool, 20,000 people saw the picture in three weeks – a huge number for the time. People came away profoundly moved by the painting, which had clearly touched the nation’s heart. The Queen purchased The Roll Call from its original buyer, a Manchester industrialist, but a printing company retained the right to reproduce it in a popular edition of engravings. Thompson herself became a national heroine overnight. A quarter of a million cartes-de-visite photographs of the artist were sold to the public, who put her on a par with Florence Nightingale.¹⁹

The Crimean War left a deep impression on the English national identity. To schoolchildren, it was an example of England standing up against the Russian Bear to defend liberty – a simple fight between Right and Might, as Punch portrayed it at the time. The idea of John Bull coming to the aid of the weak against tyrants and bullies became part of Britain’s essential narrative. Many of the same emotive forces that took Britain to the Crimean War were again at work when Britain went to war against the Germans in defence of ‘little Belgium’ in 1914 and Poland in 1939.

Today, the names of Alma, Balaklava, Inkerman, Sebastopol, Cardigan and Raglan continue to inhabit the collective memory – mainly through the signs of streets and pubs. For decades after the Crimean War there was a fashion for naming girls Florence, Alma, Balaklava, and boys Inkerman. Veterans of the war took these names to every corner of the world: there is a town called Balaklava in South Australia and another in Queensland; there are Inkermans in West Virginia, South and West Australia, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales in Australia, as well as Gloucester County, Canada; there are Sebastopols in California, Ontario, New South Wales and Victoria, and a Mount Sebastopol in New Zealand; there are four towns called Alma in Wisconsin, one in Colorado, two in Arkansas, and ten others in the United States; four Almas and a lake with the same name name in Canada; two towns called Alma in Australia, and a river by that name in New Zealand.

In France, too, the names of the Crimea are found everywhere, reminders of a war in which 310,000 Frenchmen were involved. One in three did not return home. Paris has an Alma Bridge, built in 1856 and rebuilt in the 1970s, which is now mainly famous for the scene of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in 1997. Until then it was better known for its Zouave statue (the only one of four to be kept from the old bridge) by which water levels are still measured by Parisians (the river is declared unnavigable when the water passes the Zouave’s knees). Paris has a place de l’Alma, and a boulevard de Sébastopol, both with metro stations by those names. There is a whole suburb in the south of Paris, originally built as a separate town, with the name of Malakoff (Malakhov). Initially called ‘New California’, Malakoff was developed in the decade after the Crimean War on cheap quarry land in the Vanves valley by Alexandre Chauvelot, the most successful of the property developers in nineteenth-century France. Chauvelot cashed in on the brief French craze for commemorating the Crimean victory by building pleasure-gardens in the new suburb to increase its appeal to artisans and workers from the overcrowded centre of Paris. The main attraction of the gardens was the Malakoff Tower, a castle built in the image of the Russian bastion, set in a theme-park of ditches, hills, redoubts and grottoes, along with a bandstand and an outside theatre, where huge crowds gathered to watch the reenactments of Crimean battles or take in other entertainments in the summer months. It was with the imprimatur of Napoleon that New California was renamed Malakoff, in honour of his regime’s first great military victory, in 1858. Developed as private building plots, the suburb grew rapidly during the 1860s. But after the defeat of France by Prussia in 1870, the Malakoff Tower was destroyed on the orders of the Mayor of Vanves, who thought it was a cruel reminder of a more glorious past.

Malakoff towers were built in towns and villages throughout provincial France. Many of them survive to this day. There are Malakoff towers in Sivry-Courtry (Seine-et-Marne), Toury-Lurcy (Nièvre), Sermizelles (Yonne), Nantes and Saint-Arnaud-Montrond (Cher), as well as in Belgium (at Dison and Hasard-Cheratte near Liège), Luxembourg and Germany (Cologne, Bochum and Hanover), Algeria (Oran and Algiers) and Recife in Brazil, a city colonized by the French after the Crimean War. In France itself, nearly every town has its rue Malakoff. The French have given the name of Malakoff to public squares and parks, hotels, restaurants, cheeses, champagnes, roses and chansons.

But despite these allusions, the war left much less of a trace on the French national consciousness than it did on the British. The memory of the Crimean War in France was soon overshadowed by the war in Italy against the Austrians (1859), the French expedition to Mexico (1862–6) and, above all, the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Today the Crimean War is little known in France. It is a ‘forgotten war’.

In Italy and Turkey, as in France, the Crimean War was eclipsed by later wars and quickly dropped out of the nationalist myths and narratives that came to dominate the way these countries reconstructed their nineteenth-century history.

In Italy, there are very few landmarks to remind Italians of their country’s part in the Crimean War. Even in Piedmont, where one might expect to see the war remembered, there is very little to commemorate the 2,166 soldiers who were killed in the fighting or died from disease, according to official statistics, though the actual number was almost certainly higher. In Turin, there is a Corso Sebastopoli and a Via Cernaia, in memory of the only major battle in which the Italians took part. The nationalist painter Gerolamo Induno, who went with the Sardinian troops to the Crimea and made many sketches of the fighting there, painted several battle scenes on his return in 1855, including The Battle of the Chernaia, commissioned by Victor Emmanuel II, and The Capture of the Malakoff Tower, both of which excited patriotic sentiment for a few years in northern Italy. But the war of 1859 and everything that happened afterwards – the Garibaldi expedition to the south, the conquest of Naples, the annexation of Venetia from the Austrians during the war of 1866 and the final unification of Italy with the capture of Rome in 1870 – soon overshadowed the Crimean War. These were the defining events of the Risorgimento, the popular ‘resurrection’ of the nation, by which Italians would come to see the making of modern Italy. As a foreign war led by Piedmont and Cavour, a problematic figure for the populist interpretation of the Risorgimento, the campaign in the Crimea had no great claim for commemoration by Italian nationalists. There were no public demonstrations for the war, no volunteer movements, no great victories or glorious defeats in the Crimea.

In Turkey the Crimean War has been not so much forgotten as obliterated from the nation’s historical memory, even though it was there that the war began and Turkish casualties were as many as 120,000 soldiers, almost half the troops involved, according to official statistics. In Istanbul, there are monuments to the allied soldiers who fought in the war, but none to the Turks. Until very recently the war was almost totally ignored by Turkish historiography. It did not fit the nationalist version of Turkish history, and fell between the earlier ‘golden age’ of the Ottoman Empire and the later history of Atatürk and the birth of the modern Turkish state. Indeed, if anything, despite its victorious conclusion for the Turks, the war has come to be seen as a shameful period in Ottoman history, a turning point in the decline of the empire, when the state fell into massive debt and became dependent on the Western powers, who turned out to be false friends. History textbooks in most Turkish schools charge the decline of Islamic traditions to the growing intervention of the West in Turkey as a result of the Crimean War.²¹ So do the official Turkish military histories, like this one, published by the General Staff in 1981, which contains this characteristic conclusion, reflecting many aspects of the deep resentments nationalists and Muslims in Turkey feel towards the West:

The effect of the war in Britain was matched only by its impact in Russia, where the events played a significant role in shaping the national identity. But that role was contradictory. The war was of course experienced as a terrible humiliation, inflaming profound feelings of resentment against the West for siding with the Turks. But it also fuelled a sense of national pride in the defenders of Sevastopol, a feeling that the sacrifices they made and the Christian motives for which they had fought had turned their defeat into a moral victory. The idea was articulated by the Tsar in his Manifesto to the Russians on learning of the fall of Sevastopol:

The defence of Sevastopol is unprecedented in the annals of military history, and it has won the admiration not just of Russia but of all Europe. The defenders are worthy of their place among those heroes who have brought glory to our Fatherland. For eleven months the Sevastopol garrison withstood the attacks of a stronger enemy against our native land, and in every act it distinguished itself through its extraordinary bravery… Its courageous deeds will always be an inspiration to our troops, who share its belief in Providence and in the holiness of Russia’s cause. The name of Sevastopol, which has given so much blood, will be eternal, and the memory of its defenders will remain always in our hearts together with the memory of those Russian heroes who fought on the battlefields of Poltava and Borodino.²³

The heroic status of Sevastopol owed much to the influence of Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches, which were read by almost the entire Russian literate public in 1855–6. Sevastopol Sketches fixed in the national imagination the idea of the city as a microcosm of that special ‘Russian’ spirit of resilience and courage which had always saved the country when it was invaded by a foreign enemy. As Tolstoy wrote in the closing passage of ‘Sevastopol in December’, composed in April 1855, at the height of the siege:

So now you have seen the defenders of Sevastopol on the lines of defence themselves, and you retrace your steps, for some reason paying no attention now to the cannonballs and bullets that continue to whistle across your route all the way back to the demolished theatre [i.e. the city of Sevastopol], and you walk in a state of calm exaltation. The one central, reassuring conviction you have come away with is that it is quite impossible for Sevastopol ever to be taken by the enemy. Not only that: you are convinced that the strength of the Russian people cannot possibly ever falter, no matter in what part of the world it may be put to the test. This impossibility you have observed, not in that proliferation of traverses, parapets, ingeniously interwoven trenches, mines and artillery pieces of which you have understood nothing, but in the eyes, words and behaviour – that which is called the spirit – of the defenders of Sevastopol. What they do, they do so straightforwardly, with so little strain or effort, that you are convinced they must be capable of a hundred times as much… they could do anything. You realize now that the feeling which drives them has nothing in common with the vain, petty and mindless emotions you yourself have experienced, but is of an altogether different and more powerful nature; it has turned them into men capable of living with as much calm beneath a hail of cannonballs, faced with a hundred chances of death, as people who, like most of us, are faced with only one such chance, and of living in those conditions while putting up with sleeplessness, dirt and ceaseless hard labour. Men will not put up with terrible conditions like these for the sake of a cross or an honour, or because they have been threatened: there must be another, higher motivation. This motivation is a feeling that surfaces only rarely in the Russian, but lies deeply embedded in his soul – a love of his native land. Only now do the stories of the early days of the siege of Sevastopol, when there were no fortifications, no troops, when there was no physical possibility of holding the town and there was nevertheless not the slightest doubt that it would be kept from the enemy – of the days when Kornilov, that hero worthy of ancient Greece, would say as he inspected his troops: ‘We will die, men, rather than surrender Sevastopol,’ and when our Russian soldiers, unversed in phrase-mongering, would answer: ‘We will die! Hurrah!’ – only now do the stories of those days cease to be a beautiful historic legend and become a reality, a fact. You will suddenly have a clear and vivid awareness that those men you have just seen are the very same heroes who in those difficult days did not allow their spirits to sink but rather felt them rise as they joyfully prepared to die, not for the town but for their native land. Long will Russia bear the imposing traces of this epic of Sevastopol, the hero of which was the Russian people.²⁴

The ‘epic of Sevastopol’ turned defeat into a national triumph for Russia. ‘Sevastopol fell, but it did so with such glory that Russians should take pride in such a fall, which is worth a brilliant victory,’ wrote a former Decembrist.²⁵ Upon this grand defeat, the Russians built a patriotic myth, a national narrative of the people’s selfless heroism, resilience and sacrifice. Poets likened it to the patriotic spirit of 1812 – as did Aleksei Apukhtin in his well-known ballad ‘A Soldier’s Song about Sevastopol’ (1869), which came to be learned by many Russian schoolboys in the final decades of the nineteenth century:

The song I’ll sing to you, lads, isn’t a jolly one; It’s not a mighty song of victory Like the one our fathers sang at Borodino, Or our grandfathers sang at Ochakov. I’ll sing to you of how a cloud of dust Swirled up from the southern fields, Of how countless enemies disembarked And how they came and defeated us. But such was our defeat that since then They haven’t come back looking for trouble, Such was our defeat that they sailed away With sour faces and bashed noses. I’ll sing of how leaving hearth and home behind The rich landowner joined the militia, Of how the peasant, bidding his wife farewell, Came out of his hut to serve as a volunteer. I’ll sing of how the mighty army grew As warriors came, strong as iron and steel, Who knew they were heading for death, And how piously did they die! Of how our fair women went as nurses To share their cheerless lot, And how for every inch of our Russian land Our foes paid us with their blood; Of how through smoke and fire, grenades Thundering, and heavy groans all round, Redoubts emerged one after another, Like a grim spectre the bastions grew – And eleven months lasted the carnage, And during all these eleven months The miraculous fortress, shielding Russia, Buried her courageous sons… Let the song I sing to you not be joyful: It’s no less glorious than the song of victory Our fathers sang at Borodino Or our grandfathers at Ochakov.²⁶

This was the context in which Tolstoy wrote his own ‘national epic’, War and Peace. Tolstoy’s conception of the war against Napoleon as Russia’s national awakening – the rediscovery of ‘Russian principles’ by the Europeanized nobility and the recognition of the patriotic spirit of the serf soldiers as the basis of a democratic nationhood – was a reflection of his reaction to the heroic deeds of the Russian people during the Crimean War. Written between 1862 and 1865, in the years immediately after the emancipation of the serfs, when Russian liberal society was inspired by ideals of national reform and reconciliation between the landed classes and the peasantry, War and Peace was originally conceived as a Decembrist novel set in the aftermath of the Crimean War. In the novel’s early form (‘The Decembrist’), the hero returns after thirty years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the late 1850s. A second Alexandrine reign has just begun, with the accession of Alexander II to the throne, and once again, as in 1825, high hopes for reform are in the air. But the more Tolstoy researched the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots lay in the war of 1812, and so set his novel then.

The memory of 1812 was bitterly contested after the Crimean War, which had opened up a new perspective on the national character. Democrats like Tolstoy, inspired by the recent sacrifices of the Russian peasant soldiers, saw 1812 as a people’s war, a victory attained by the patriotic spirit of the whole nation. To conservatives, on the other hand, 1812 represented the holy triumph of the Russian autocratic principle, which alone saved Europe from Napoleon.

The commemoration of the Crimean War was entangled in a similar ideological conflict. Conservatives and Church leaders portrayed it as a holy war, the fulfilment of Russia’s divine mission to defend Orthodoxy in the broader world. They claimed that this had been achieved with the international declaration to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire and the Paris Treaty’s preservation of the status quo, as the Russians had demanded, in the Holy Places of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In their writings and sermons on the war, they described the defenders of the Crimea as selfless and courageous Christian soldiers who had sacrificed their lives as martyrs for the ‘Russian holy land’. They re-emphasized the sanctity of the Crimea as the place where Christianity had first appeared in Russia. From the moment the war had ended, the monarchy sought to connect its commemoration to the memory of 1812. The Tsar’s visit to Moscow following the surrender of Sevastopol was staged as a re-enactment of Alexander I’s dramatic appearance in the former Russian capital in 1812, when he had been greeted by vast crowds of Muscovites. In 1856 the Tsar delayed his coronation until the anniversary of the battle of Borodino, Russia’s victory against Napoleon in September 1812. It was a symbolic move to compensate for the painful loss of the Crimean War and reunite the people with the monarchy on the basis of a more glorious memory.²⁷

For the democratic intellectual circles in which Tolstoy moved, however, the thread connecting the Crimean War to 1812 was not the holy mission of the Tsar but the patriotic sacrifice of the Russian people, who laid down their lives in the defence of their native land. That sacrifice, however, was hard to quantify. No one knew how many soldiers died. Precise figures for Russian casualties were never collected, and any information about heavy losses was distorted or concealed by the tsarist military authorities, but estimates of the Russians killed during the Crimean War vary between 400,000 and 600,000 men for all theatres of the war. The Medical Department of the Ministry of War later published a figure of 450,015 deaths in the army for the four years between 1853 and 1856. This is probably the most accurate estimate.²⁸ Without precise figures, the people’s sacrifice grew to assume a mythic status in the democratic imagination.

Sevastopol itself was elevated to a quasi-sacred site in the collective memory. The veneration of the fallen heroes of the siege began as soon as the war ended, not on the initiative of the government and official circles, but through popular efforts, by families and groups of veterans erecting monuments or founding churches, cemeteries and benevolent funds with money raised from public donations. The focal point of this democratic cult was the commemoration of admirals Nakhimov, Kornilov and Istomin, the popular heroes of Sevastopol. They were idolized as ‘men of the people’, devoted to the welfare of their troops, who had all died as martyrs in the defence of the town. In 1856 a national fund was organized to pay for the erection of a monument to the admirals in Sevastopol, and there were similar initiatives in many other towns. Kornilov was the central figure of numerous histories of the war. Nakhimov, the hero of Sinope and virtually a saint in the folklore of the siege, appeared in tales and prints as a brave and selfless soldier, a martyr of the people’s holy cause, who was ready for his death when he was struck down while inspecting the Fourth Bastion. It was entirely through private funding that the Museum of the Black Sea Fleet was established in Sevastopol in 1869. On display to the crowds who came on the opening day were various weapons, artefacts and personal items, manuscripts and maps, drawings and engravings collected from veterans. It was the first historical museum of this public nature in Russia.[64]

The Death of Admiral Nakhimov by Vasily Timm (1856)

The Russian state became involved in the commemoration of Sevastopol only in the later 1870s, around the time of the Russo-Turkish war, mainly as a result of the growing influence of the pan-Slavs in government circles, but government initiatives focused on court favourites, such as General Gorchakov, and virtually neglected the people’s hero Nakhimov. By this time the admiral had become an icon of a popular nationalist movement that the regime attempted to subordinate to its own Official Nationality by building monuments to the Crimean War. In 1905, a year of revolution and war against Japan, a splendid panorama of The Defence of Sevastopol was opened to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the siege, in a purpose-built museum on a site where the Fourth Bastion had once stood. Government officials insisted on replacing the portrait of Nakhimov with one of Gorchakov in Franz Roubaud’s life-size painting-model re-creating the events of 18 June, when the defenders of Sevastopol had repelled the assault by the British and the French.²⁹ Nakhimov did not appear in the museum, which was built upon the very ground where he had been mortally wounded.

The Soviet commemoration of the war returned the emphasis to the popular heroes. Nakhimov came to stand for the patriotic sacrifice and heroism of the Russian people in the defence of their motherland – a propaganda message that took on a new force during the war of 1941–5. From 1944, Soviet naval officers and sailors were decorated with the Nakhimov Medal, and trained in special cadet schools established in his name. In books and films he became a symbol of the Great Leader rallying the people against an aggressive foreign foe.

Production of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s patriotic film Admiral Nakhimov (1947) began in 1943, when Britain was an ally of the Soviet Union. Planned as a Soviet counterpart to Alexander Korda’s wartime epic about Lord Nelson, Lady Hamilton (1941), its first cut made light of Britain’s role as an enemy of Russia during the Crimean War, focusing instead on Nakhimov’s private life and on his relations with the population of Sevastopol. But as it went through editing, the film got caught up in the opening skirmishes of the Cold War – a conflict that arose in the Turkish Straits and the Caucasus, the starting points of the Crimean War. From the autumn of 1945, the Soviets pushed for a revision of the 1936 Montreux Convention on the neutrality of the Straits. Stalin demanded joint Soviet – Turkish control of the Dardanelles and the cession to the Soviet Union of Kars and Ardahan, territories conquered by tsarist Russia but ceded to the Turks in 1922. Mindful of the build-up of Soviet troops in the Caucasus, the United States sent warships to the eastern Mediterranean in August 1946. It was precisely at this moment that Stalin demanded changes to Pudovkin’s film: the focus shifted from Nakhimov as a man to Nakhimov as a military leader against the foreign foe; and Britain was depicted as the enemy of Russia who had used the Turks to pursue its aggressive imperialist aims in the Black Sea, just as Stalin claimed the Americans were doing in the early stages of the Cold War.³⁰

A similar patriotic line was taken by the great historian of the Stalin era, Evgeny Tarle, in his two-volume history of The Crimean War (1941–3), his biography Nakhimov (1948), and in his later book, The City of Russian Glory: Sevastopol in 1854–55 (1955), published to commemorate the centenary. Tarle was very critical of the tsarist leadership, but he glorified the patriotic courage and resilience of the Russian people, led and inspired by the example of such heroic leaders as Nakhimov and Kornilov, who laid down their lives for the defence of Russia against the ‘imperialist aggression’ of the Western powers. The fact that Russia’s enemies in the Crimean War – Britain, France and Turkey – were now all NATO members and adversaries of the newly founded Warsaw Pact in 1955 added greater tension to the Soviet celebration of the war’s centenary.

Pride in the heroes of Sevastopol, the ‘city of Russian glory’, remains an important source of national identity, although today it is situated in a foreign land – a result of the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 and the declaration of Ukrainian independence on the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the words of one Russian nationalist poet:

On the ruins of our superpower There is a major paradox of history: Sevastopol – the city of Russian glory – Is… outside Russian territory.³¹

The loss of the Crimea has been a severe blow to the Russians, already suffering a loss of national pride after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Nationalists have actively campaigned for the Crimea to return to Russia, not least nationalists in Sevastopol itself, which remains an ethnic Russian town.

Memories of the Crimean War continue to stir profound feelings of Russian pride and resentment of the West. In 2006 a conference on the Crimean War was organized by the Centre of National Glory of Russia with the support of Vladimir Putin’s Presidential Administration and the ministries of Education and Defence. The conclusion of the conference, issued by its organizers in a press release, was that the war should be seen not as a defeat for Russia, but as a moral and religious victory, a national act of sacrifice in a just war; Russians should honour the authoritarian example of Nicholas I, a tsar unfairly derided by the liberal intelligentsia, for standing up against the West in the defence of his country’s interests.³² The reputation of Nicholas I, the man who led the Russians into the Crimean War against the world, has been restored in Putin’s Russia. Today, on Putin’s orders, Nicholas’s portrait hangs in the antechamber of the presidential office in the Kremlin.

At the end of the Crimean War a quarter of a million Russians had been buried in mass graves in various locations around Sevastopol. All around the battle sites of Inkerman and Alma, the Chernaia valley, Balaklava and Sevastopol there are unknown soldiers buried underground. In August 2006 the remains of fourteen Russian infantrymen from the Vladimir and Kazan regiments were discovered not far from the spot where they were killed during the battle at the Alma. Alongside their skeletons were their knapsacks, water-bottles, crucifixes and grenades. The bones were reburied with military honours in a ceremony attended by Ukrainian and Russian officials at the Museum of the Alma near Bakhchiserai, and there are plans in Russia to build a chapel on the site.

Aaland Islands: British attack on Bomarsund Palmerston’s plans for

Abdi Pasha, General, Commander of the Anatolian army

Abdülmecid I, Sultan: attends British and French balls (1856) calls for help from Britain (1839) Islamic ultimatum Omer Pasha and reinauguration of Hagia Sophia mosque (1849) religious toleration Westernizing liberal reforms

Aberdeen, George Hamilton-Gordon: 4th Earl agrees to send combined fleet to Black Sea calm response to Sinope counsels against war with Russia limited campaigns aimed for and the ‘newspapers’ objects to Palmerstons plans problems with defence of Muslims resigns (1855)

Abkhazia, Russians eject Muslims

Adampol (Polonezkoi), Polish settlement in Turkey

Adams, Brigadier, at Inkerman

Adrianople (Edirne) Treaty of (1829) captured by Russia (1878)

Afghanistan: occupied by Great Britain (1838 – 42) Persian occupation of Herat (1837 – 57)

Agamemnon, HMS

Airey, Lt-Gen Sir Richard (Quartermaster General)

Aksakov, Konstantin, shock at Russian retreat

Alaska (Russian-America), purchased by USA

Albert, Prince Consort to Queen Victoria accused of treason council of war with allied leaders (1855) develops Palmerston’s plans opinion of General Saint-Arnaud support for Austrian Four Point Plan

Alexander I, Tsar protector of Poland (1815) ultimatum on behalf of Greeks

Alexander II, Tsar amenable to negotiations attempt to prize Britain and France apart Chernaia river defeat Central Asia ambitions continues his father’s policies coronation delayed until Borodino anniversary demands major offensive from Gorchakov (July/August 1855) determined to fight on after Sevastopol and the exodus of Tatars fearful of war with Austria and the Franco-Austrian peace ultimatum direct discussions with Napoleon III Italian unification and fearful of spread of Italian nationalism keeps up pressure on Kars moves closer to Prussia serf emancipation army reforms fears British presence in the Caspian Sea Sevastopol Manifesto warns Serbia not to interfere in Balkan revolts seeks Russian settlement on Balkans and Tsargrad see also Alexander Nikolaevich, Tsarevich; Russia

Alexander Nikolaevich, Tsarevich (later Alexander II) dismissal of Khrulev and Menshikov see also Alexander II, Tsar

Alexander, Col James (14th Regt)

Alexander Fort (Sevastopol)

Algeria: conquest of by France fighting experience of French troops Yusuf’s Spahis

Algiers, HMS

Ali Pasha (Grand Vizier), and the Paris Peace Congress (1856)

Alma, battle of (1854) storming of the Great Redoubt as reported in Russian press war graves

anaesthetics: British opinions divided Pirogov and surgery for wounded

Andrianov, Captain (10th Division)

Anglicans: church leaders and declaration of war dilemma of defending Muslim Turks in Jerusalem missionary work in Ottoman Empire see also Protestants

Anglo-French alliance: Czartoryski and Napoleon III and ultimatum to Tsar Nicholas (1854) lack of agreement over objectives colonial prejudice affects use of Turkish troops and Austrian intervention in Wallachia ‘robbed of victory’ allied siege strategy rethought (1855) troops committed to north-west Crimea council of war with allied leaders evacuation and clear up of Sevastopol installations expedition to China (1857) uncertainty after fall of Sevastopol (1855) allied armies in possession of Sevastopol (1855) see also British Army; France; French army; Great Britain

Anglo-Persian War (1856 – 7)

Anglo-Russian accord (1827)

Anglophobia, in Russia

Annesley, Ensign (later Colonel) Hugh, 5th Earl (Scots Fusilier Guards), wounded at Alma

Anstey, Thomas, Urquhart ally in parliament

Apuhktin, Aleksei, ‘A Soldier’s Song about Sevastopol’

archaeological discoveries, Crimea

Ardahan, cession of demanded by Stalin

Argyll, George John Campbell, 8th Duke

Armenians: emigrate to Transcaucasia new settlers in the Crimea

armies, comparison of costs of belligerents

army chaplains: André Damas (French army) British Army

Arthur the Great (troop transport), transport of British sick and wounded

artillery: allied bombardment of Sevastopol ineffective against Minié rifles at Inkerman Russian counter bombardment

Assembly of Nobles (Sevastopol): used as hospital see also medical treatment

Association for the Protection of Turkey and Other Countries…

Astrakhan (Mongol khanate)

atrocities: alleged after Balaklava alleged after Inkerman allied troops in Kerch Bashi Bazouks in Bulgaria in Constantinople (1821) Giurgevo religious justification for Tatar bands

Attwood, Thomas

Austria-Hungary: neutrality assured by future territorial gains Three Emperors’ League (1873) see also Austrian Empire

Austrian army, in Wallachia (1854)

Austrian Empire: armed neutrality in favour of allies benevolent neutrality with respect to Russia demands Napoleon III’s peaceful intentions demands Russian withdrawal from principalities direct talks with Russians fearful of Slav uprisings Four Points for Peace with Russia (1854) Franco-Austrian peace ultimatum hopes for alliance with Russia hoping to negotiate a peace Italian independence and military alliance with France and Britain mobilizes troops (1853 & 1854) motives for invading principalities negotiations with Britain and France Paris Peace Congress (1856) peace initiative, the Vienna Note (1853) ready to march into Serbia 1848 revolutions Russian foreign policy and Russian partition plans (1852) and Russian plans for Greece (1820s) steps back from war with Ottomans support from Gorchakov over revolution in Italy threatens to join anti-Russian alliance Triple Alliance (1856) and Tsar Nicholas’ Ottoman partition plans Vienna Conference (1855) war with French and Piedmontese (1859) war with Prussia (1866) wary of Russia in Slav lands see also Austria-Hungary

Bakhchiserai Museum of the Alma reserve hospital

Bakunin, Mikhail

Bakunina, Ekaterina (nurse)

Balaklava, British supply base

Balaklava, battle of (1854)

Balaklava helmets

Balaklava Railway

Balkan League

Balkan War (1853 – 4)

Balkans: continuing conflict between Christians and Muslims Czartoryski’s plan hoped for Slav/Christian uprisings Nationalism pan-Slavism retreat of Austria Russia and Russian partition plans (1852) seeds of future wars status quo guaranteed by Three Emperors’ League (1873) theatre of war see also European Turkey

Balta Liman, Act of (1849)

Baltic campaign (1854)

Baltic campaign (1855)

Baltic provinces, of Russia, Palmerston’s plans for

Bariatinsky, Prince Alexander I (viceroy of the Caucasus) fears British presence on the Caspian Sea

Bariatinsky, Prince Vladimir I (Flag Lt to Adm Kornilov)

Barrett, Jerry, Queen Victoria’s First Visit to Her Wounded Soldiers

Bashi Bazouks atrocities cholera and retreat to Varna in French service at Giurgevo

Bazancourt, César de

Beaumont, Thomas Wentworth

Beeton, Samuel, Our Soldiers and the Victoria Cross

Belarus, Ruthenian (Uniate) Catholics

Belgium, Russia and

Belgrade, Turkish bombardment

Bell, Col George (1st (Royal) Regt): complaint about uniforms letter to The Times

Bell, George and James Bell (shipping company)

Bell, John (sculptor), Guards’ Memorial (London)

Bellew, Walter (assistant surgeon)

Bem, General Jozef

Berlin, Congress (1878)

Bessarabia boundary debated at Paris Peace Congress (1856) boundary dispute with Moldavia and Franco-Austrian peace terms (1855) mobilization of Russian troops (1852) Palmerston’s plans for refugee problem (1820 – 21) riots and attacks on Christians

Bezborodko, Count Alexander

Bibescu, Prince Gheorghe of Romania

Bineau, Jean (French Finance Minister), argues against war

Bismarck, Otto von

Black Sea: declared neutral by Paris Peace Congress (1856) no firm pledge from France on penal clauses related Paris Congress clauses annulled (1871) Russian fleet recommissioned

Black Sea region: buffer zone Christian-Muslim relations crucial for Russian security and trade demilitarization of London Convention (1841) and religious and ethnic transmigration

Blackwood’s Magazine, British commerce and

Blakesley, Revd Joseph, letters to The Times

Bloomfield, Pvt (Derbys Regt): recollections of Alma recollections of Inkerman

Bludova, Antonina, Countess

Blunt, John (Turkish language interpreter)

Bond, Sgt (11th Hussars)

Bondurand, Baron, military intendant to Marshal Castellane

Borgo, Pozzo di

Borodino, battle of (1812)

Bosnia: pan-Slav movement and promised to Austria-Hungary revolts by Christians

Bosquet, General Pierre François: at Balaklava at Inkerman orders attack on the Mamelon removed from command before Malakhov second Malakhov battle

Botanov, Mikhail, in Sevastopol

Bourqueney, Adolphe de (French ambassador in Vienna)

Bright, John

British Army: Anglo-Austrian force in Palestine (1840) Cardwell reforms catering (1855) chaplains commissariat bureaucracy Crimean veterans receive the Victoria Cross dependent on recruiting mercenaries drunkenness entertainments the Guards’ Memorial (London) officer corps opinion of the French opinion of Turkish soldiers other ranks letters home recruits soldiers wives in invasion fleet ‘Tommy Atkins’ uniforms

British Army, Crimean timeline: unpreparedness for war at Varna cholera poor intelligence about Russian numbers sails for the Crimea officers avoid winter in Crimea officers better sheltered than men (winter 1854 – 55) officers and men question the war complaints of bad conditions scurvy march to Alma Light Brigade skirmish near Alma at Alma siege of Sevastopol at Balaklava Charge of Heavy Brigade Charge of Light Brigade at Inkerman lack of winter clothing or shelter cost of victory at Inkerman atrocities alleged in Kerch decline in morale, factors desertion rates winter (1854 – 55) desertions before the Redan assault Paxton’s huts Russian night raids and fraternization with Russian troops bombardment of Sevastopol assault on Vorontsov Ravine rifle pits capture of the Quarry Pits first attack on the Redan second attack on the Redan looting in Sevastopol Balaklava hand over (July 1856) return to Britain war graves war memorials see also Great Britain

British Army, units and regiments: 1st Division 2nd Division 3rd Division 4th Division Heavy Brigade 4th Dragoons 4th Light Dragoons (Queen’s Own) 5th Dragoons 6th Inniskilling Dragoons 8th Hussars 11th Hussars 13th Light Dragoons 15th Kings Hussars 17th Lancers Scots Greys Guards Brigade Grenadier Guards Coldstream Guards Scots Fusilier Guards 93rd Highland Brigade Light Division 1st Royal Regiment 9th Foot 14th Foot 23rd (Royal Welsh) Fuslrs 30th Foot 77th Foot Derbyshire Regiment

British and Foreign Review (journal)

‘British Hotel’ (Kadikoi)

British Indian Army, Tsar Alexander’s fears

Brotherhood of Sts Cyril and Methodius

Brown, General Sir George (Light Division) assault on the Redan Kerch raids

Bruat, Admiral Armand Joseph, abortive raid on Kerch

Brunov, Baron (Russian ambassador in London)

Bucharest: chaos and desertions in retreat (1854) provisional government declared (1848) Russian military headquarters (1853) Treaty of (1812)

Bukhara khanate

Bukhmeier, General, Sevastopol evacuation pontoon bridge

Bulganak, river

Bulgaria: Bashi Bazouk atrocities Circassians closer ties with Serbs and other Balkan Slavs Congress of Berlin resolutions Crimean Tatars lack of volunteers for Russian army massacre of Christians in Rumelia massacres of Muslims national church (Orthodox) possible support for Russians revolts by Christians Russian partition plans (1852) support from Russians against Turkey war dead

Bulgarians, new settlers in the Crimea

Bulwer, Henry

Buol, Karl von, Count (Austrian Foreign Minister) offers peace terms to Russians too soft on Russia (Clarendon) meets with de Morny and Gorchakov (1855)

Burgoyne, General Sir John RE council of war with allied leaders (1855) faulty judgements on Sevastopol siege at Inkerman plan to cut off supply routes to Sevastopol

Butler, Elizabeth (née Thompson), Calling the Roll after an Engagement, Crimea

Butler, Capt James (Ceylon Rifles), at Silistria

Buzzard, Thomas (doctor with Turkish army)

Cabrol, Jean (French army doctor)

Calthorpe, Somerset, ADC to Raglan fraternization incident witnesses Turkish rout

Cambridge, Prince George, Duke of, Lt-Gen at Alma at Inkerman recuperating from Inkerman resignation

Cameron, Capt William (Grenadier Gds), letters home

Campbell, Lady Charlotte, on a young Tsar Nicholas

Campbell, Lt-Gen Sir Colin (93rd Highland Bde)

Campbell, George John, Duke of Argyll

Campineanu, Ion

Canada, territorial claims by the United States

Canning, George

Canning, Stratford, 1st Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe agrees support for the Sultan appointment to St Petersburg refused by Tsar British fleet in the Dardanelles calls for break up of Russian Empire calls for decisive military action Circassian independence and comment on Poland at Paris (1856) on Constantinople riots (1853) conversation with Napoleon III Czartoryski and Hatt-i Hümayun decree invites hostility of Turks little influence on Turkish modifications to Vienna Note returns to Constantinople (1853) with the Sultan at a costume ball supports Palmerston (1853) sympathetic to expanding the war urges liberal reform in Moldavia and Wallachia urges Turks to protect Christians urges Turks to resist Russian demands urges Turks to toughen their stance Urquhart and and the Vienna Note warns of revolt against Westernizing policies

Canrobert, General François (1st Division, later commander-in-chief) follows Napoleon III’s instructions at Inkerman leadership questioned plans of assault in Sevastopol shelved until the sping protests to Menshikov about Inkerman atrocities disagreement with Raglan over the field plan (1855) the Kerch raid and resignation

Caradoc, HMS

Cardigan, Maj-Gen Thomas Brudenell, 7th earl (Light Bde commander)

Cardwell, Edward, Lord, army reforms

Carmichael, George (Derbys Regt)

Castellane, Pierre de, Comte (ADC to Bosquet)

Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount

casualties: at Alma British overall Chernaia river battle (allied) Chernaia river battle (Russian) injuries from artillery and rifle fire at Inkerman at Kars Malakhov and the Redan the Mamelon overall cost in lives Russians overall Sevastopol (Russians) treachery by and mistreatment of Turkish overall

Cathcart, General Sir George (4th Division)

Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia

Catholic Church: anti-Eastern Orthodox polemic in France Church of the Nativity Grotto France’s historic interest in Palestine pretext for war rivalry with Orthodox Churches in the Holy Land Russian Orthodox persecution Ruthenian (Uniate) Catholics solidarity with Poland

Catholic nuns: in French military hospitals the ‘Nuns of Minsk’

Caucasus Christianization of conquest of by Russia debated at Paris Peace Congress (1856) Mehmet Ali of Egypt inspires rebels Muslims ejected Palmerston’s plans for proposed attack by Indian Army support for Muslim tribes by Britain test for Russian army reforms Turkish army attacks (1853) Turkish forts captured (1829) see also Chechnya; Circassia; Georgia

Cavour, Camillo (Prime Minister of Piedmont): agreement with the Odessa Shipping Company Italian unification and Paris Peace Congress (1856) and support for a wider war with Russia ar with Austria

Central Asia, Russian conquests

Cetty, Antoine (quartermaster of French Army)

Champoiseau, Charles, French agent in the Caucasus

Charlemagne (French steam warship)

Charles X, King of France

Chartists, solidarity with Poland

Chavchavadze, Prince, wife and her sister carried off by Shamil’s forces

Chechnya see also Caucasus

Chekhova, Ergenia (mother of Anton Chekhov)

Chenery, Thomas (Times correspondent)

Chernaia river, battle (August 1855)

Cherniaev, Gen Mikhail G.: conquest of Turkestan pan-Slavism with Serbian army

Chernyshevsky, Nikolai (editor: Voennyi sbornik) What Is to Be Done

Chesney, General Francis

Chikhachev, Pyotr, report on the Turkish army

Chimkent

China: Anglo-French expedition (1857) Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing (1860) see also Opium Wars

Chios, massacre of Greeks

Chodasiewicz, Lt (later Capt) Robert Adolph (Tarutinsky Regt), at Inkerman

cholera: after Alma victory after Evpatoria landings cholera nursing cholera victims in the ship Kangaroo in Danube delta inside Sevastopol at Varna winter (1854 – 55) see also medical treatment

Chopin, Frederic

Christian Science Monitor (newspaper)

Christie, Captain Peter RN (principal agent for transports)

Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Jerusalem): conflict over roof repair Easter 1854 Orthodox and Catholic rivalry Paris Peace Congress (1856) and pilgrims presents from Catholic governments

Church of the Nativity (Bethlehem): Catholics given right to hold a key 104; Paris Peace Congress (1856) and squabbles between Catholic and Orthodox

Churchill, Winston S. (later Sir Winston), war correspondent

Circassia British gun-running debated at Paris Peace Congress (1856) French mission to Sukhumi Palmerston’s plans for rebels ask for British military help Russians eject Muslims Urquhart and see also Caucasus

Clarendon, Lord George council of war with allied leaders (1855) in favour of war with Russia and the Franco-Austrian peace ultimatum instructions from the Queen Napoleon III and Palmerston and Paris Peace Congress (1856)

Cler, Col Jean (2nd Zouave Regt): examples of combat stress at Inkerman

Clifford, Henry (Staff off. Light Div) drinking culture in allied camps letter home opinion of William Russell second attack on the Redan

Cobden, Richard

Cocks, Col Charles (Coldstream Gds), letters home

Codrington, Admiral Edward

Codrington, Maj-Gen Sir William John (Light Division, later C-in-C) suspends action at the Redan departure and hand over to Russians Tatars ask for help in leaving Crimea

Cold War (1945 – 91)

Colquhoun, Robert (British consul in Bucharest)

combat stress

Community of the Holy Cross (Orthodox nursing order)

Concert of Europe Russia humiliated Tsar Nicholas and

Congress of Berlin (1878)

Congress of Paris (1856) Article V and Crimean Tatars European commission to settle Russian-Ottoman border

Congress Poland: Czartoryski and persecution of Catholics under protection of Tsar Alexander I see also Poland

Congress System, in Europe see Concert of Europe

Connolly, Lt Arthur, the Russian threat to India

Constantine Pavlovich, Grand Duke (briefly Tsar Constantine I) visit to France (1857)

Constantinople: almost reached by Russian army (1878) atrocities against Greeks (1821) attempts at Westernization of dress and domestic culture capital of an Orthodox empire? costume balls attended by the Sultan fall of to Turks (1453) pro-war demonstrations religious riots over Vienna peace terms Russian dream of ‘Tsargrad’ Russians build an Orthodox church to be a free city

Constantinople University, built by Fossati brothers

Contemporary (Russian journal)

Convention of Kütahya (1833)

Convention of London: (1832) (1840 & 1841) see also London, Treaty of (1827)

Corn Laws, Repeal of (1846)

Coronini[-Cronberg], General Johann (Austrian army)

Le Correspondant (newspaper)

Cossack Mountain see Mount Inkerman

Cowley, Henry R. C. Wellesley, Lord Cowley (British ambassador in Paris)

Crete, to go to France

Crimea: allied invasion planned (1854) a badly planned campaign becomes part of Ukraine (1954) Christianization of civilian panic after Alma conflicting views about invasion conquest and annexation by Russia forced emigration of Tatars Palmerston’s plans for post-war Russian policies religious significance resettlement with Christians urban planning war graves see also Sevastopol; Tatars

Crimean khanate: Ottomans lose control of Tatar tribes

Croatia, ties with Serbia

Crusades

Cuba, American plans to invade

Cullet, [Marie] Octave (officer of Zouaves)

Cundall, Joseph, photographs of wounded soldiers

Curzon, Nathaniel, 3rd Baron

Custine, Marquis de, La Russie en 1839 anti-Russian travelogue

Cyprus, to go to Britain

Cyprus Convention (1878)

Czartoryski, Prince Adam: earlier career plan for a new map of Europe Polish uprisings in Britain the French and and the ‘Sultan’s Cossacks’

Daghestanis

Damas, André (French army chaplain): demoralized soldiers at Inkerman Malakhov battle

Dannenberg, General P. A., at Inkerman

Danube delta cholera outbreak Palmerston’s plans for Polish refugees Serpent Island

Danube, river: Austrian interest British trade Russian army withdraws to (1878) Turkish defensive line (1853)

Danubian front, Silistria offensive and siege (1854)

Danubian principalities cereal exports to Britain constitution introduced by Russia (1829 – 34) debated at Paris Peace Congress (1856) Greek uprisings hospodars ordered to reject Turkish rule Napoleon III’s plan occupation of by Russia (1853) Palmerston’s plans for Russian partition plans (1852) see also European Turkey; Moldavia; Romania; Wallachia

de Lacy Evans, Colonel (later General) George at Alma at Inkerman resignation

de Morny see Morny

De Ros, General William Lennox, Lord De Ros, diary of Crimean travels

Decembrists

Delacroix, Eugène, The Massacre of Chios

Delane, John (Times editor) resists attempted censorship

Denmark, war with Prussia (1864)

Derzhavin, Gavril

Dessaint, Lt-Col (French army)

Dickens, Charles: Household Words ‘The True Story of the Nuns of Minsk’

Disraeli, Benjamin: Congress of Berlin secret alliance with Ottomans

Dniepropetrovsk see Ekaterinoslav

Dobrudja, French expeditionary force

Dolgorukov, Prince Vasily Andreievich (Minister of War)

Don Pacifico affair (1850)

Doré, Gustav, Histoire pittoresque… de la Sainte Russie

Dostoevsky, Fedor Russia to turn Eastwards Russo-Turkish War (1877–8) support for Bulgarians

Doyle, Pvt John (8th Kings Royal Irish Hussars)

Drouyn de Lhuys, Edouard (French Foreign Minister)

Drummond, Maj Hugh (Scots Fslr Gds), letters home

drunkenness: among troops at Sevastopol among troops at Varna

du Picq, Ardant (French Army Captain), military theorist

Duberly, Fanny: outside Sevastopol spectator at Balaklava battle description of Balaklava town with General Bosquet in the hurricane readership on superiority of French organization

Duberly, Henry (8th Hussars)

Duhamel, General Alexander

Dunbar (troop transport)

Dundas, Vice-Admiral Sir James

Dundas, Rear-Admiral Sir Richard, fresh Baltic campaign (1855)

Eardly, Sir Culling, Balaklava railway

Eastern Question British policy Dostoevsky’s solution Ignat’ev and Russian ‘weak neighbour’ policy Russia’s gains forfeited Tsar Nicholas’s solution unsolved

Edinburgh Review (quarterly journal): British commerce and on the Russian ‘threat’

Edirne see Adrianople (Edirne)

Egerton, Col Thomas (77th Foot)

Egypt: challenge to Ottoman Sultan lost to Napoleon to go to Britain

Egyptian troops

Ekaterinoslav

Elena Pavlovna, Grand Duchess: encourages Cavour organizes nurses for the Crimea

Ellenborough, Lord, president of the Board of Control for India (1828 – 30)

Erivan (Yerevan): proposed attack by Indian Army resettled with Armenians debated at Paris Peace Congress (1856)

Ermak Timofeevich, conquest of Siberia

Ermolov, General Alexander

Ernest Leopold, Prince of Leiningen, letter to Queen Victoria

Ershov, Evgeny (Russian artillery), in Sevastopol

Estcourt, Maj-Gen James Bucknall (Adjutant General)

Esterhazy, Count (Austrian envoy to Russia)

Estonians, new settlers in the Crimea

Euphrates Valley Railway

European Turkey, to become a Russian protectorate

Evpatoria: population make up flight of Russians and Greeks allied occupation of allies find Tatar humanitarian crisis (1855) battle of (1855) key to an allied field campaign

Eyre, Maj Gen Sir William (3rd Division)

Failly, Gen Pierre Louis de

Fatima Khanum (Kurdish leader)

Fedorov, Colonel, first Inkerman attacks

Fenton, Roger (war photographer) Men of the 68th Regiment in Winter Dress (1855) Valley of the Shadow of Death

Fergusson, Robert Cutlar

Fet, Afanasy

Finland, Palmerston’s plans for

Finn, James (British consul in Jerusalem)

First World War

Flagstaff Bastion (Sevastopol)

Fliedner, Pastor Theodor, nursing principles

food supply: British and French compared cantinières Soyer and British army catering

Foreign Quarterly Review (journal)

Forrest, Maj William (4th Dragoons)

Fort Nicholas (Sevastopol), destroyed by French

Fossati, Gaspare & Giuseppe (architects): attempt to interest Tsar Nicholas in mosaics Byzantine mozaics Hagia Sophia renovation

Fould, Achille

Four Points for Peace: agreed by Western powers as defined in Franco-Austrian peace ultimatum Napoleon’s alternatives Paris Peace Congress (1856) and secret fifth point

France: advisers to the Ottomans agrees to invasion of the Crimea anti-Russian propaganda anti-war feelings among people backs down and signs London Convention (1841) Bessarabia/ Moldavia border dispute the ‘clerical (Ultramontane) party’ concerns about the war (1855) conquest of Algeria contact with St Petersburg (Nov. 1855) counter-revolution preparedness crushes Roman Republic (1849) Czartoryski and Polish émigrés decision to send fleet to Turkey (1853) declaration of War on Russia (1854) direct talks with Russians dispute with Russia over the Holy Land fall of Sevastopol Falloux Law (1850) fleet moved to Besika Bay (Dardanelles) fleet on war footing (1853) the Four Points and Franco-Austrian peace ultimatum to Russia help to modernize Russian fleet humiliation by Russia (1812) remembered influence of the ‘Testament of Peter the Great’ investment in Egypt Jerusalem consulate July Monarchy (Louis Philippe) ‘Malakoff’ remembered national consciousness and the Crimea negotiations with Austria network of informers no help to Ottomans against Egypt (1833) Paris Peace Congress (1856) peace initiative (1853) a possible threat to peace (1851) pre-eminent power in Europe proposes Continental war to liberate Poland protests regarding the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi rapprochement with Russia reactions to the war (winter 1854 – 55) response to Sinope (1853) returns the Pope to Rome revolution (1848) Russian grievances search for peace with Russia Second Empire (1852) Second Republic established secret treaty with Austria seeks alliance with Britain seeks alliance with Britain and Russia seen as enemy by Tsar Nicholas Serpent Island incident suffering as result of the war support for Mehmet Ali’s insurrection against the Sultan (1839) support for Poland territorial ambitions (Nice and Savoy) Third Republic trains Mehmet Ali’s army and navy Triple Alliance (1856) Tsar Nicholas’ plans for containment ultimatum to Tsar Nicholas unable to help Ottomans (1783) unhappy with Palmerston’s plans war with Austria (1859) war memorials war with Prussia (1870) see also Anglo-French alliance

Franco- British ultimatum to Russia (1854)

Franks, Sgt-Maj Henry (5th Dragoons)

Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary

Fratja (Romanian secret society)

Frederick William IV, King of Prussia

French army: at Varna mutiny at Varna camp opinion of the British opinion of Turkish soldiers atrocities alleged in Kerch cholera, scurvy and typhus drinking entertainments expeditionary force to Dubrudja food and equipment for sea travel Generals not ready to press on to Sevastopol medical auxiliaries (soldats panseurs) medical facilities and treatment officers and men question the war officers (winter 1854 – 55) other ranks letters home senior partner in Crimea training and experience uniforms Varna to Evpatoria march to Alma at Alma looting siege of Sevastopol at Balaklava at Inkerman desecration of church of St Vladimir de Lourmel’s Brigade in Sevastopol cost of victory at Inkerman desertions better provided for than British in winter (1854 – 55) fraternization with Russian troops rumours of strikes and revolution attacks on Mamelon and Malakhov bastion examples of low morale and combat stress Chernaia river battle Malakhov victory

French army, regiments: 1st (General Canrobert’s) Division 2nd (General Bosquet’s) Division 3rd (Prince Napoleon’s) Division Chasseurs d’Afrique Spahis d’Orient 20th Regiment 22nd Regiment 95th Regiment 97th Regiment surprise attacks on Russian outworkings Zouave regiments

French navy: advanced to the Aegean (1853) compared to Russian and Turkish navies fleet moved to Besika Bay (1849) Kerch raid (1855) on war footing (1853)

Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia

Friends of Poland, Associations, in Britain

Froment, François-Marie de, Observations sur la Russie

Fuad Efendi (Ottoman commissioner in Bucharest)

Fuad Pasha (Tanzimat reformer), and the Paris Peace Congress (1856)

Gage, Capt (later Lt-Col) Edward RA (Raglan’s Staff): at Alma at Sevastopol

Gallipoli, first landing of Allied force

Ganja khanate (Elizavetopol)

Garibaldi, Giuseppe: conquest of Naples Polish uprising (1861) and Redshirts

Gaskell, Elizabeth, North and South

Gaza, riots and attacks on Christians

Gazi Muhammed (son of Imam Shamil)

Georgia British gun-running campaign against Muslims debated at Paris Peace Congress (1856) Imam Shamil’s attacks Palmerston’s plans for proposed attack by Indian Army see also Caucasus

Germans, new settlers in the Crimea

Germany: Czartoryski’s plan for 1848 revolutions source of mercenary soldiers Three Emperors’ League (1873) united by Bismarck Verney’s plan

Ghazi Muhammad, Imam

Ghica, Alexander, Prince of Wallachia

Giffard, Captain Henry Wells RN

Gilbert, John Her Majesty the Queen Inspecting the Wounded Coldstream Guards…

Gilbert, Michel (French officer)

Ginka, Gen V. A., supply system reforms

Giray dynasty (Crimean Khanate)

Giubbenet, Khristian (professor of surgery)

Giurgevo, Turkish atrocity

Gladstone, William Ewart campaigns for intervention in the Balkans problems with defence of Muslims resignation (1855)

Gleichen, Admiral Victor, Count Gleichen

Golden Horde

Golev, General (Russian infantry), in the Redan

Gorchakov, Prince Alexander becomes Foreign Minister Black Sea clauses of Paris Treaty annulled objects to Piedmont based revolution realpolitik Serpent Island incident and other claims support for Serbs uncertain about Central Asia expansion warns Serbia not to interfere in Balkan revolts

Gorchakov, General Mikhail: Danubian front raises siege of Silistria response to refugee problem withdrawal from Bucharest soldiers song siege of Sevastopol at Inkerman fearful of Austrian invasion secret memorandum on National Resistance major offensive ordered by Tsar attacks French and Sardinians at Chernaia river evacuation of Sevastopol orders destruction of Sevastopol state commemoration of

Gordon, Lt (later Gen) Charles

Gosse, Sir Edmund, recalls impact of war news

Gowing, Sgt Timothy (7th Royal Fuslrs)

Gözleve

Grach, Colonel, Silistria forts

Graham, Sir James (First Lord of the Admiralty): naval strategy resignation

Grantham, Thomas Robinson, 2nd Baron Grantham (British Foreign Secretary)

Great Britain: attitudes towards soldiers (other ranks) pre and post War backs independent Greece bravery medals instituted for other ranks (1857) cabinet decisions over war aims Caucasus attack considered class divisions, possible end to conflicting views about invasion of the Crimea Congress of Berlin consulates in Belgrade, Braila and Iaşi creation of buffer states Cyprus Convention day of fasting and prayer (1854) decides to attack Crimea and Sevastopol Don Pacifico affair (1850) effect of Bulgarian atrocities English national identity in aftermath of war extension of franchise fears of Napoleonic revival in France fears regarding the ‘Russian threat’ Foreign Enlistment Bill (1855) Foreign Office experts warn against use of Muslim forces against Christians free press and public opinion government brought down by press and public criticism (1855) middle class ideals and professionalism negotiations with Austria not ready for peace after Sevastopol and Kars Paris Peace Congress (1856) peace initiative (1853) in Persia protest at Russian invasion of Turkestan public support for Hungarians reaction to fall of Sevastopol reaction to Franco-Austrian peace ultimatum reaction to Sinope news reactions to the death of the Tsar reasons for war relations with Ottoman Empire relations with the United States repudiates San Stefano Treaty response to Russo-Turkish war (1878) Romanian exiles Romanian revolution and (1848) Russian foreign policy and and Russian plans for Greece (1820s) Russian rivalry in Asia secret gun-running to the Caucasus seeks recognition for Victor Emmanuel sympathy for the Polish cause Triple Alliance (1856) Tsar Nicholas I visit to London (1844) ultimatum to Tsar Nicholas (1854) unhappy with Crimean Peace war memorials the ‘war party’ see also Anglo-French alliance; British Army; Crimean War; Palmerston; Royal Navy; Russophobia

The Great Exhibition (London 1851)

The Great Game

Greece: autonomy recognized by Ottomans Catherine the Great and military alliance with Serbia Russian partition plans (1852) war dead Western powers unwilling to help

Greek independence: Russia’s part in see also Nationalism

‘Greek-Slavonic Legion’: in the Russian army

Greeks: nationalism new settlers in the Crimea in Odessa in Thessaly and Epirus

Gregory XVI, Pope

Griffith, Lt (23rd (Royal Welsh) Fuslrs), storming the Redan

Grimm, Baron Friedrich, Catherine the Great and

Guizot, François

gunboat diplomacy: British French

Gurowski, Adam, Count, Russland und die Zivilisation

Hagia Sophia mosque (Constantinople) Byzantine mozaics discovered significance for Russia

Hall, Dr John (Principal medical officer), cautions against chloroform use

Harrowby, Dudley Ryder, 1st Earl

Hatt-i Hümayun decree (1856) drafted by Stratford Canning and Thouvenal violent opposition to

Hatt-i Sharif (1839)

Hauterive, Alexandre’

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, English Notebooks

Henri Quatre (French battleship), lost in hurricane (1854)

Herald (newspaper)

Herat (Afghanistan)

Herbé, Capt Jean-Jules: abandoned horses and mules assault on the Malakhov Bastion letter from hospital letters home wounded at Chernaia river

Herbert, Elizabeth, Baroness (wife of Sidney Herbert)

Herbert, General George, Earl of Pembroke

Herbert, Pvt Harry (5th Dragoons)

Herbert, Sidney (Secretary of State for War) bronze statue added to Guards’ Memorial

Herzegovina pan-Slav movement and promised to Austria-Hungary revolts by Christians

Herzen, Alexander, publishes ‘Tolstoy’s’ song

Heytesbury, William à Court, 1st Baron Heytesbury

Higginson, Capt (later Gen) George (Grenadier Gds), at Inkerman

Holy Alliance (Russia, Austria & Prussia)

Holy Land: an extension of Holy Russia French dispute with Russia pilgrims rivalry between Catholic and Orthodox Christians Tsar Nicholas I and

Holy Places: commencement of war and Paris Peace Congress (1856) and religious rights for Catholics religious rights for Orthodox Christians

Hornby, Lady Emily

Howlett, Robert, photographs of wounded soldiers

Hübner, Joseph Alexander, Baron

Hudson, Sir James

Hughes, Thomas: Tom Brown at Oxford Tom Brown’s Schooldays

Hungarian army, Polish officers

Hungarians, in Kars

Hungary, 1848 – 49 revolution

Hyde, Pvt Edward, at Inkerman

Hyder Pasha Hospital

Iaşi: Fratja meetings (1848) Treaty of (1792)

Ibrahim Pasha (son of Mehmet Ali), in Syria

Ignat’ev, Nikolai: Eastern Question solution encourages Serbs to expect Russian help pan-Slavism of San Stefano Treaty strategic memorandum on Central Asia and India Tsar’s envoy in Constantinople

Illustrated London News (journal)

l’Impartial (newspaper)

India, perceived Russian threat

India, Great Britain and Russia (pamphlet)

Indian Army see British Indian Army

Indian Mutiny (1857)

Induno, Gerolamo, Crimean War paintings

Ingush

Inkerman, reserve hospital

Inkerman, battle of (1854) arguments over whom to blame for defeat Sandbag Battery a ‘soldiers battle’ see also Mount Inkerman (Little Inkerman)

Inkerman Heights

Innokentii, Orthodox Archbishop: allied invasion a holy war Christianizing the Crimea

Ireland, lives lost

Islam: executions of Muslims who become Christians Islamic fundamentalists in Shamil’s movement Mehmet Ali’s Islamist aspirations opposition to Tanzimat reforms Western romantic ideas of see also Muslims

Istomin, Admiral Vladimir, commemoration

Italians, in Kars

Italy Czartoryski’s plan for little to commemorate Crimea Napoleon III’s plans Palmerston’s plans for Risorgimento unification union of Lombardy and Sardinia

janizaries

Japy, Frederic (3rd Zouave Regt), letter home

Jemaleddin (son of Imam Shamil), exchanged for Georgian princesses

Jerusalem: Easter 1846 riot fights between Greeks and Armenians Franciscan printing press (Austrian) religious rivalries Russian Ecclesiastical Mission

jihad: called for against Russians (1853) declared by Ottomans after Navarino (1827) General Yusuf’s incentive

jingoism, in Britain

Jomini, Antoine-Henri, Baron

Joseph II, Emperor of Austria

Journal des débats

Kacha, river, Russian dressing stations

Kadikoi (British base) traders and sutlers

Kalafat, Omer Pasha crosses the Danube

Kalamita Bay

Kamchatka Lunette (Sevastopol) see Mamelon

Kamiesh, French supply base

Kangaroo (troop transort): carries supplies to Shamil used for cholera victims

Kapodistrias, Ioannis

Kars: cession of demanded by Stalin relieving force under Omer Pasha relieving force under Selim Pasha Russian bargaining card at Paris (1856) Russian siege

Kaufman, Konstantin P., Governor-General of Turkestan

Kazan (Mongol khanate)

Kaznacheev, Nikolai Ivanovich, governor of Evpatoria

Kerch: allied raid aborted (April 1855) allied raid (May 1855)

Khanum, Fatima Khanum

Kharkov, Sevastopol wounded

Kherson (new city)

Khersoneses (ancient Greek city) Church of St Vladimir desecrated by French

Khiva khanate

Khlopotina, Elizaveta (nurse)

Khomyakov, Alexei (Slavophile poet)

Khrulev, Lt-Gen Stepan: Evpatoria attack fails (1855) suicidal attack suggestion

Khrushchev, Nikita, transfers Crimea to Ukraine

Kiev, defence of

Kievan Rus’

Kinglake, Alexander on declaring war embarcation for Crimea

Kingscote, Capt. (later Maj & Col Sir) Nigel (Scots Fuslr Gds & ADC): letters from Varna outraged by other officers letters

Kingsley, Charles: Two Years Ago Westward Ho!

Kingsley, Henry, Ravenshoe

Kiriakov, Lt-Gen V. I. (17th Division): at Alma at Inkerman

Kiselev, Gen Pavel (Minister of State Domains)

Klemm, Teofil (Russian soldier)

Kokand khanate

Kondratov, Ivan (Russian infantryman), dines on French and British food

Korda, Sir Alexander, Lady Hamilton (film)

Kornilov, Admiral Vladimir defence of Sevastopol death of commemoration

Koshka, Pyotr (seaman) raids allied trenches

Kossuth, Lajos

Kostaki Musurus (Turkish ambassador in London)

Kozhukov, Stepan (Russian artillery), At Balaklava

Krasinski, Valerian, Count

Krasovsky, Lt (ADC to Gorchakov), ‘time to start’ message

Kronstadt (Russian naval base)

Krüdener, Baroness Barbara Juliane von

Kuban, Slavic settlers

Kuchuk Kainarji, Treaty of (1774)

Kulali, military hospital (British)

La Valette, Charles, Marquis de, provocative behaviour towards Ottomans

Lacour, Edmond de (French ambassador the the Porte)

Lamartine, Alphonse de

Lambert, Gen Karl, Polish uprising (1863)

Lamennais, Félicité de

Latas, Mihailo see Omer Pasha

Lawson, George (army surgeon): at Alma letters home

Layard, Sir Henry

Lebanon, riots and attacks on Christians

Lemprière, Capt Audley (77th Foot)

Lenin, Vladimir Iliich

Leopold I, King of Belgium

Lieven, Princess Dorothea von

Lipkin, Capt Nikolai (Russian navy), letters from Sevastopol

Liprandi, Lt-Gen Pavel (12th Inf Div): at Balaklava at Inkerman Chernaia river battle

lithographs: images from the war Her Majesty the Queen Inspecting the Wounded Coldstream Guards… (Gilbert) see also photography

Loizillon, Henri (army engineer): inside the Mamelon worried about continuing war writes of dead friends writes of rumours

Lombardy, transferred to France and to Piedmont

Lombardy-Venetia, Italo-Austrian contention

London, Treaty of (1827) see also Convention of London

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, translation of verse by Jorge Manrique

Longworth, John: British government agent in the Caucasus rejects support for Shamil movement warns Britain to oppose Ottomans in Caucasus

Louis Napoleon, President of France (later Napoleon III): asserts French interests in Europe coup d’état (1851) courts Catholic opinion see also Napoleon III, Emperor of France

Louis-Napoleon, French Prince Imperial, birth of

Lucan, Lt-Gen George Bingham, 3rd earl failure to take opportunities at Balaklava Charge of the Light Brigade letters to Raglan tents unfit for habitation recalled

Lyde, Revd. Samuel, focus of Muslim riot

Lyons, Rear Admiral Sir Edward, Sevastopol invasion fleet

Macintosh, Maj-Gen Alexander, Journal of the Crimea

Mackenzie Heights, reserve hospital

Mackenzie’s Farm

MacMahon, Gen Patrice de, taking of the Malakhov Bastion

Magna Carta, influence on Ottoman parliament

Mahmud II, Sultan: appeals for help against Mehmet Ali of Egypt continues Selim’s [Westernizing] reforms declares jihad after Navarino

Mahmud Pasha, grand admiral Turkish navy

Mahmud Bek (governor of Nablus)

Malakhov Bastion (Sevastopol) assault (June 6, 1855) battle (June 18, 1855) taken by the French (Sept. 1855) remembered in France

Malmesbury, James Howard Harris, 3rd Earl, complains of La Valette

Mamelon (Sevastopol)

Manchester Times (newspaper)

Mandt Dr Martin Wilhelm von, physician to Tsar Nicholas I

Manrique, Jorge

Maria Alexandrovna, Grand Duchess

Maria Fedorovna, Empress [Dowager], Ypsilantis and

Mariupol see Kerch, allied raid (1855)

La Marmora, General Alfonso (Piedmont-Sardinia)

Maronite Christians, massacred by Druzes and Muslims (1860)

Marsh, Catherine, Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars, Ninety-Seventh Regiment

Martineau, Harriet

Marx, Karl: the Anglo-French ‘anticlimax’ on Anglo-Turkish trade campaigns against Russia comment on the Russian army

Mayran, General, leads Malakhov assault

Mazzini, Giuseppe

McClellan, George B., US General

medals: Nakhimov Medal Victoria Cross

medical supplies, left at Varna by British

medical treatment: American help for Russians British hospitals conditions for British troops in the field French hospitals French standards drop nurses and nursing Russian hospitals shell shock/combat stress at Sinope triage see also anaesthetics; cholera, Scutari military hospital

Mehmet Pasha (governor of Jerusalem)

Mehmet Ali Pasha, Grand Vizier becomes head of the ‘war party’ Commander-in-Chief Turkish army

Mehmet Ali, ruler of Egypt: challenge to both Ottomans and Russia Convention of Kütahya (1833) Islamist aspirations quells Greek uprising recognized as hereditary ruler of Egypt second insurrection against the Sultan (1839 – 40)

Mehmet Hüsrev, Grand Vizier (1839 – 41)

Melbourne, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount

Menshikov, Prince Alexander Sergeyevich, commander-in-chief Crimea mission to Constantinople (1853) counsels caution to the Tsar at Alma inadequate defences in Sevastopol leaves Sevastopol for Bakhchiserai at the Belbek river reinforcements from Danubian front opposed to new offensive after Balaklava receives reinforcements from Bessarabia at Inkerman explains Inkerman atrocities refuses truce to clear dead and wounded recommends abandonment of Sevastopol dismissed after Evpatoria battle (1855)

Mérimée, Prosper

Metternich, Klemens Wenzel, Prince von

Mexico, French invasion

Meyendorff, Baron (Russian ambassador in Vienna)

Mickiewicz, Adam Livre des pèlerins polonais

Mieczyslawska, Mother Makrena (Abbess)

Mihailo Obrenović Prince, of Serbia

Mikhail Nikolaevich, Grand Duke rebuke for Tolstoy

Mikhailova, Daria (Dasha Sevastopolskaia)

Mikhno, Nikolai

‘The Military Gazette’, Tolstoy’s magazine

Miliutin, Dmitry: army reforms mission to Serbia

millet system Balkan nationalist movements and Hatt-i Hümayun reforms

Milosevich, Nikolai, comment on aftermath of Chernaia

Minié rifles: at Alma artillery ineffective against at Balaklava with Circassian tribes at Inkerman loss of 10 million rounds in hurricane Polish ‘Zouaves’

Minsk, persecution of Catholic nuns

Mismer, Charles (French dragoon): on French rations living with shelling

missions: Anglican in Ottoman Empire Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem

Modena, monarch restored

Moldavia autonomy granted (1829) cereal exports to Britain debated at Paris Peace Congress (1856) Greek uprising (1821) hospodar ordered to reject Turkish rule preliminaries to Crimean War (1853) Russian occupation of (1829 – 34) Russian response to 1848 revolution see also Romania

Molènes, Paul de (Spahi officer): at Evpatoria observations at Varna

Monsell, Revd J.S.B., ‘What will they say in England…’

Montalembert, Charles

Montefiore, Moses, Balaklava railway

Montenegrins

Montenegro: pan-Slav movement and revolts by Christians

Montreux Convention (1936), revision demanded by Soviets

morale: allied camps after Malakhov and Redan failure crucial element in battle decline of in British Army Russians at Inkerman in Sevastopol after Balaklava in Sevastopol from June 1855

Morley, Cpl Thomas (17th Lancers)

Morning Advertiser (newspaper)

Morning Chronicle (newspaper)

Morning Courier (newspaper)

Morning Herald (newspaper)

Morny, Charles-Auguste, Duc de: contact with Russians diplomacy over Black Sea and Danubian principalities

Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee

Moskvitianin (Moscow journal)

Mosley, Godfrey (paymaster 20th Regt of Foot)

mosques, converted to churches by Russians

Mount Athos

Mount Inkerman (Little Inkerman): Russian attack see also Inkerman, battle of

Muhammed Emin (Shamil’s emissary)

Mundy, Lt-Col George V. (33rd Foot), letter home

Munro, Sgt (93rd Highland Bde)

Muraviev, General, siege of Kars

Muridism, in the Caucasus

Musa Pasha, commandent of Silistria

Muslims: exodus of from Russian territory post-War expelled from conquered teritory Mehmet Ali revival opposition to Hatt-i Hümayun opposition to Tanzimat reforms reaction to Danubian principalities occupations resentment against Christians rumours about European allies and about Russia Russo-Turkish War revenge attacks see also Islam

Mussad Giray

Mustafa Pasha, virtual governor-general of Circassia

Mustafa Reshid Pasha agrees to war option endeavour to prevent escalation of war (1853) n opposition to Hatt-i Hümayun rivalry with Mehmet Ali Pasha stalls Menshikov threatened by religious students

Nablus, riots and attacks on Christians

Nakhichevan khanate

Nakhimov, Vice-Admiral Pavel: at Sinope (1853) defence of Sevastopol death of commemoration

Nakhimov Medal

Nanking, Treaty of (1842)

Napier, Admiral Sir Charles RN: Baltic campaign (1854) attack on Bomarsund

Napier, Francis, Lord (British ambassador in St Petersburg)

Napoleon I, Emperor of France: conquest of Egypt (1798) India expedition considered influence of the ‘Testament of Peter the Great’ Polish hopes thwarted

Napoleon III, Emperor of France aims of for the Crimea Alushta ‘Emperor’s plan’ ambivalent about a pan-European war arouses fears in Europe’s capitals censorship and control of the press control of Canrobert council of war with allied leaders (1855) Danubian principalities for Austria de Morny’s Russian diplomacy decides to visit the Crimea and take charge direct discussions with Tsar Alexander II enthusiasm for war not shared by the public in exile Franco-Austrian peace ultimatum and Grand Duke Constantine and importance of alliance with Britain Italian independence/unification Kerch raid and letter to Queen Victoria looks for ways to bring troops home no firm pledge on Black Sea clauses on-off support for Poles opinion of Turks Palmerston and Paris Peace Congress (1856) peace celebrations peaceful intentions public opinion and purpose of capturing Sevastopol rapprochement with Russia rumours of a plot against search for peace with Russia secret armistice with Austria seeks diplomatic resolution with Russia (1854) ships sent to Aegean suggests broad revolutionary war in Europe supports second Malakhov attack terms for peace with Russia terrified of revolutionary violence (1855) threatens to act alone over Sinope Vienna Conference decisions (1855) see also Louis Napoleon, President of France (later Napoleon III)

Napoleon, Prince Napoleon, General (3rd Division), accused of ‘cowardice’

Napoleon (French steam warship)

Naqshbandiya (Sufi) sect

Nasmyth, Lt Charles (Bombay Artillery), at Silistria

nationalism: in the Balkans Greek Italian Russian Turkish see also Greek independence

NATO, and Warsaw Pact tensions

Naval and Military Bible Society

naval warfare, use of explosive shells

Navarino, battle of (1827)

Nelidov, Barbette, pan-Slav ideas at court

Nepokoichitsky, General

Nesselrode, Karl (Russian Foreign Minister) Alexander II amenable to negotiations blamed for retreat decision (1854) European diplomacy and Franco-Austrian peace terms replaced by Gorchakov sceptical of Tsar Nicholas’s strategy

New Jerusalem Monastery, Tsar Nicholas I and

New Ottomans (Yeni Osmanlilar)

New York Times (newspaper), article by Marx

New York Tribune (newspaper), article by Marx

Newcastle, Henry Pelham Pelham-Clinton, 5th Duke (Secretary of State for War) Raglan requests sanctions against The Times and Russell urges Raglan to dismiss Generals

Newcastle Guardian (newspaper)

Nice: Napoleon III and union with France

Nicholas I, Tsar: afraid of Austrian invasion Austria rebuffs approaches (1854) Austrian Empire Slavs encouraged Austrian Four Points accepted Balkan strategy believes Austria will join war with Ottomans blamed for the War commends the defenders of Sevastopol compared to Attila deep depression after Inkerman early military interests Evpatoria defeat and (1855) excessive faith in link with Franz Joseph fear of assassination by Poles fears collapse of Russian Empire feelings of betrayal by Austrians final ultimatum to Turks (1853) grievances against Western powers hereditary mental illness Holy Land religious rights and intransigent response to Western negotiations learns of Balaklava success legitimist principles letter to Gen Gorchakov in London (1844) loss of confidence after Inkerman and Evpatoria meets Pope Gregory XVI (1845) misconceptions about British government and monarchy mobilizes army without consulting ministers (1852) objects to British warships in Dardanelles opposition to French July revolution (1830) orders last assault on Silistria orders offensive against Evpatoria (1855) Orthodox uprisings hoped for overlooked strategic danger in Sevastopol pan-Slavism and Paskevich’s plans persecution of Catholics plans for containment of France with Britain plans partition of Ottoman Empire Polish alienation prepared to stir up Italy and Spain relations with Napoleon III reputation restored in Putin’s Russia Russia’s religious destiny and the crusade for Orthodoxy trust in ‘Generals January and February’ wants major offensive against Ottomans (1853) warning to Wallachian deserters death of

Niel, Gen Adolphe (French military engineer)

Nightingale, Florence: early life asked to provide nursing help for soldiers chooses her nurses Alexis Soyer and at Scutari rejects help from Seacole bronze statue added to Guards’ Memorial the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ legend post war celebrity ‘The True Story of the Nuns of Minsk

Nikitenko, Alexander, despair over state of Russia

Nikolaev

Nikolai Nikolaevich, Grand Duke army withdrawal to Danube comment on Menshikov Russo-Turkish War (1877 – 8)

Nikon, Orthodox Patriarch

Nogai nomads (Crimea)

Noir, Louis, Zouave officer: examples of combat stress impressions of British troops with Yusuf’s Bashi Bazouks at Alma at Inkerman trench digging at Sevastopol winter (1854 – 55)

Nolan, Capt Louis (15th Hussars)

Northern Liberator (Chartist newspaper)

Norway, Palmerston’s plans and

Novorossiia (New Russia): new cities Russian military build up Tatars and Count Stroganov

nurses and nursing Alexandra Stakhova sees Sevastopol burning in Britain after Crimea Dasha Sevastopolskaia high-born Russians nuns in French military hospitals at Scutari see also Nightingale, Florence; women

Obrenović dynasty (Serbia)

Obrenović, Prince Alexander

Obrenović, Prince Mihailo

Obrenović, Prince Milos

Ochakov

Odessa

Odessa Bulletin (Russian newspaper), reports of the battle of Alma

Odessa Shipping Company, in Villafranca Bay

Oliphant, Laurence, The Russian Shores of the Black Sea…

Omer Pasha, Ottoman General assessment of military needs in Bucharest (1854) in Bulgaria commencement of hostilities against Russia defence of Serbia (1853) in Evpatoria at Giurgevo pleads for force to relieve Kars supports Circassia campaign

Opium Wars: 1st (1839 – 42) 2nd (1857) see also China

O’Reilly, Lt. RN, view of the Bay of Sinope

Organic Statutes (Règlements organique), Serbia and Romania

Orlov, Count, chief of the Third Section attempt to contain rumours failed mission to Austria Paris Peace Congress (1856)

Orthodox Christianity (Eastern): Bessarabia ceremony of Holy Fire (Jerusalem) Christians settled in conquered territories Church of the Nativity Grotto in fear of Tatar bands Greek clergy wary of Russian religious ambitions Greek patriarch in Jerusalem opposition to Tanzimat reforms persecution of Catholics rivalry with Catholics in the Holy Land and Russian national identity

Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople

Osten-Sacken, General Dmitri: counsels against further offensives (August 1855) governor of Odessa in Sevastopol Tolstoy’s Plan for the Reform of the Army

Otto, prince of Bavaria and King of Greece

Ottoman army: make up of atrocities alleged in Kerch drinking European officers ill-treatment by British language a major problem pursuit of retreating Russians religious nature of reprisals Silistria and Danubian front terror tactics at Varna at Alma at Balaklava in Kars

Ottoman Empire: border line with Orthodox Russia British commercial interests (1830s) British foreign policy and Congress of Berlin resolutions corrupt bureaucracy Crimea obliterated from national memory Crimean War casualties cultural and religious make up customs and permissions in the Holy Land declaration of war on Russia (1853) declares jihad after Navarino effect on of Crimean War exposure to Western culture foreign capital investment France and fudges issue of Holy Sepulchre roof repairs Grand Council agrees to accept Vienna peace terms (1853) Grand Council refuses Menshikov’s demands and Greek independence Hatt-i Hümayun decree Holy Land religious rights and hostility to interference from Britain lack of communications infrastructure liberal political reform in loss of the Crimea military backwardness Muslim institutions a brake on progress organizes support in Britain (1853) Orthodox subjects Palmerston’s plans Paris Peace Congress (1856) parliament established (1876) peace negotiations (1853) plan to meet further incursions by Russia planned to be a vassal state at point of collapse (1829) political asylum offered to Hungarian Poles reaction to Greek uprising in Moldavia and Wallachia resentment against Christians response to Tsar Alexander I’s ultimatum Romanian revolution 1848 and Russia invades and takes Kars Russian annexation of Crimea recognized (1792) Russian plans to partition San Stefano Treaty secular Ottomanism seeks help from Britain and France against Russians the ‘sick man of Europe’ signs Act of Balta Liman (1849) Slav subjects and Tsar Nicholas Tanzimat reforms see Tanzimat reforms; treatment/ persecution of Christians unaffected by Sinope war with Russia (1787 – 92; 1806 – 12; 1828 – 29) war with Russia (1853 – 6) war with Russia (1877 – 8) war with Serbia (1876) weakness of Westernizing liberal reforms see also Eastern Question; millet system; Ottoman army; Ottoman navy

Ottoman navy, at Sinope (1853)

Oudinot, General Charles Nicolas

pacifists, vilified by Russophobes

paintings, Crimean War subjects

Palestine, riots and attacks on Christians

Palgrave, William Gifford (British consul in Abkhazia)

Palmerston, Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Aberdeen’s foreign policies and aggressive campaign wanted anti-Russian league of states becomes Prime Minister (1855) belligerent reactions to Russian occupations Bessarabia/Moldavia border dispute council of war with allied leaders (1855) defends failure to support Poles the Four Points and and the Franco-Austrian peace ultimatum hated in Russia and much of Europe influence of Czartoryski keeps France on track for war Napoleon III and no action to support Hungarians plan for dismemberment of Russian Empire populist foreign policy the Press and punitive conditions at the Paris Peace Congress (1856) recruits mercenaries rejects French plan for Poland rejects peace initiatives returns to Cabinet (1853) sends Fleet to Besika Bay and Dardanelles Serpent Island incident (1856) Triple Alliance and Urquhart and Vienna Conference (1855) and ‘war of nationalities’ warns Serbs against supporting Russia

pan-Slavism Alexander II and and the Balkans Congress of Berlin (1878) and Grand Duke Constantine and Kiev Committee Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee ruin of Russia St Petersburg Committee support for the war Tsar Nicholas and Tsar Nicholas legitimist policies attacked see also Slavs

Panmure, Fox Maule-Ramsay, Lord Panmure (Secretary of State for War): allows new assault on the Redan council of war with allied leaders (1855) field campaign memorandum rejected by Raglan intermediary for Raglan with the French Victoria Cross investiture warns Codrington of effects of drinking in the soldiery

Pardoe, Julia, The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks (1836)

Paris, Henry (‘Anglicus’)

Paris: Exposition Universelle (1855) new buildings and tarmacadamed streets official peace declaration (1856)

Paris Peace Congress (1856)

Paris Treaty (1857)

Parma, monarch restored

Parus (pan-Slav journal)

Paskevich, General Ivan Bulgarian strategy retires hurt sceptical of Tsar’s strategy advice sought after Inkerman warns of Austrian threat

Paul I, Tsar

Pavlov, Lt-Gen P. Ya. (11th Division), at Inkerman

Paxton, Joseph, huts for soldiers

peace initiatives: opportunity rejected by France and Britain (1854) Vienna Note (1853)

Peel, Sir Robert (1788 – 1850)

Peel, Sir Robert (1822 – 95), Times Crimean Fund… patron

Peelites, British peace party

Pélissier, General Aimable (French commander-in-chief) commits to combined attack on Mamelon and Quarry Pits first Malakhov assault and second Malakhov assault and

Pénaud, Admiral, Baltic campaign (1855)

Pennefather, General Sir John Lysaght (2nd Division)

Persia: Anglo-Persian War (1856 – 7) British diplomacy loss of Erivan and Nakhichevan khanates (1828) occupation of Herat (1837 – 57) Russian advisers

Persigny, Jean Gilbert Fialin, duc de

Pestel’, Vladimir (governor of Simferopol)

Peter I the Great, Tsar: demands Greek rights at Holy Sepulchre ‘Testament of….’

Peto, Samuel, Balaklava railway

Petrashevsky circle

Pflug, Ferdinand (doctor in Tsarist army)

Phanariots

Philiki Etaireia (Society of Friends)

photography: from the war zone wounded in military hospitals see also lithographs

Piedmont-Sardinia: annexation of Naples central Italian states annexed leads movement for Italian unification offers troops for Crimea war with Austria (1859) see also Sardinian army

Pine, Pvt John (Rifle Bde), death from scurvy and other conditions

Pirogov, Nikolai (military surgeon) work with nurses

Pius IX, Pope

Pluton (French steam corvette), lost in hurricane (1854)

Podpalov, Prokofii (orderly to Gen Golev)

Pogodin, Mikhail, pan-Slavism of

Poland Napoleon III’s plan Polish Legion to the allies (Sultan’s Cossacks) Palmerston’s plans for Paris Peace Conference (1856) and Polish officers in Hungarian army provisional Polish government revolutionary ‘Zouaves of Death’ seeks help from Napoleon Bonaparte struggle for freedom from Russia support in Britain support in France Warsaw uprising put down by Russia (1831) see also Congress Poland

Polar Star magazine

Polish army: disperses to Prussia and Western Europe (1831) joins the uprising (1830)

Polish exiles in Kars

Polotsk, Synod of (1839)

Poltava, battle of (1709)

Polusky, Russian General, truce after Mamelon fight

Ponsonby, John, 1st Viscount Hatt-i Sharif reforms and Vixen incident and

Popandul, Capt. (Russian artillery)

Portal, Robert (British cavalry officer), letters home

the Porte see Ottoman Empire

Porter, Maj (later Maj Gen) Whitworth RE race meeting Russian night raids spade work not appreciated

The Portfolio (Urquhart periodical)

Potemkin, Prince Grigorii

Pradt, Dominique-Georges-Frédéric de, Parallèle de la puissance anglaise et russe relativement à l’Europe

Press, the: and British public opinion campaign against Prince Albert censorship in France censorship free in Britain censorship in Russia effect of abolishing stamp duty in Britain false news reports influence of on British Politics influence on French foreign policy middle classes and in Britain and public opinion in Turkey reports of sufferings of troops war correspondents see also journalism; war correspondents by name (Chenery, Russell, Woods)

Priestley, Sgt (13th Lt Dragoons), first casualty of Crimea campaign

Prince, SS (supply ship), sunk in hurricane

Pristovoitov, Colonel, shortlived command of Soimonov’s Division

Protestants: the British character and church leaders and declaration of war Evangelicals with romantic views of Islam granted millet status by the Sultan missionary work in Ottoman Empire reaction to Orthodox rituals in Jerusalem see also Anglicans

Prussia: more reliable ally for Russia and Palmerston’s plans peace initiative (1853) war with Austrian Empire (1866) war with Denmark (1864) war with France (1870)

Pudovkin, Vsevolod, Admiral Nakhimov (film)

Pushkin, Alexander

Putiatin, Admiral Yevfimy Vasilyevich

Putin, Vladimir

Quarantine Battery (Sevastopol)

Quarry pits (Sevastopol)

Quarterly Review (journal)

Radcliffe, Capt William (20th Regt of Foot), letters home

Raglan, FitzRoy Somerset, Lord Raglan, C-in-C Crimea plans defence of London (1852) insistence on impractical uniform instructed to invade the Crimea (1854) refuses to carry out order to take Sevastopol and Perekop pre-landing conference with Saint-Arnaud at Alma unable to press on to Sevastopol wants immediate assault on Sevastopol advises against speaking to William Russell at Balaklava council of war with Canrobert and Omer Pasha initiates Light Brigade blunder warnings of weakness of British defences letter to Panmure about a Mamelon attack protests to Menshikov about Inkerman atrocities rejects encirclement of Sevastopol rejects Napoleon III’s field campaign Redan aftermath and death

railways: Balaklava Railway Euphrates Valley Railway in Russia

Rawlinson, Sir Henry, in Baghdad

Read, General, Chernaia river battle (1855)

Redan (Sevastopol) first British attack second British attack

Reeve, Henry

Reform Act (Great Britain 1832)

refugees: Orthodox Bulgarians Orthodox Christians from Bessarabia Polish Russians and Greeks in the Crimea Tatars

religion: British Protestantism clerical views of war in Britain importance of in Russia muscular Christianity Muslim troops at Silistria role of in fuelling wars Russian ‘weak neighbour’ policy and

religious toleration, in Turkey

religious wars: Nicholas I and Russia and Muslim neighbours see also Russo-Turkish wars

Resolute (supply ship), sunk in hurricane

Retribution, HMS (steam-frigate)

Rhodes, to go to Britain

Richelieu, Armand du Plessis, Duc de, Odessa

Ridiger, Gen Fedor, Count, on need for military reforms

Rifaat Pasha (Ottoman Foreign Minister)

Robertson, James (war photographer)

Rochebrune, François, ‘Zouaves of Death’

Roebuck, John MP, calls for a select committee to investigate the army

Romaine, William (Deputy Judge Advocate)

Romania Crimean War beginnings debated at Paris Peace Congress (1856) Organic Statute (Règlement organique) Russian response to 1848 revolution see also Danubian principalities; Moldavia; Wallachia

Romanian exiles, in Britain

Rose, Colonel Sir Hugh calls for naval support endorses Pélissier

Rosetti, Constantine (Romanian exile)

Roubaud, Franz, The Defence of Sevastopol (panorama)

Rowe, John, Storekeeper (army commisariat), brings in wounded

Rowlands, Capt Hugh (Derbys Regt)

Royal Marines, at Balaklava

Royal Navy: ability to threaten Russia attack on Odessa (1854) Baltic campaign (1854) Baltic campaign (1855) at Beykoz Bomarsund bombardment bombardment, of Sevastopol defence of invasion convoy fleet moved to Besika Bay (1833; 1849 & 1853) forces Russo-Turkish armistice (1878) helps quieten Constantinople demonstrations Kerch raid (1855) Naval Brigade, on shore artillery put on war footing (1853) sails to Alexandria (1840) see also Great Britain

Royal Patriotic Fund for the relief of soldiers wives

Rumelia (Bulgaria), massacre of Christians

Rumelian army (Ottoman): commencement of hostilities against Russia Stara Zagora (1853) strengthen’s Turkish forts on the Danube border terror tactics

Rumiantsev Library and Museum

Russell, Lord John alternative plan for Turkey represents Britain at Vienna Conference (1855)

Russell, William (Times war correspondent) report on the Kerch raid reports draw attention to bravery in the field upsets military establishment visits military cemeteries wounded found in Sevastopol

Russia: aims to be a southern power Anglophobia armed forces discredited by Crimean defeat Austrian Four Points accepted autocracy failure Bessarabia loss a national tragedy Black Sea fleet recommissioned boundary dispute in Bessarabia brink of war with Britain over the Vixen (1836) British plans to break up the Russian Empire calls for war against Turks (1820s) campaigns for return of Crimea from Ukraine ‘conflicting memories of 1812 Congress of Berlin resolutions conquest of khanates in Central Asia corruption and incompetence Cossack traditions Danubian principalities and declares war on Turkey (1828) defences thinly spread demands extradition of Polish refugees from Ottomans demands new Orthodox Church protection treaty dependence on a serf economy diplomatic relations with Britain and France broken (1854) dispute with France over the Holy Land drops France as an ally ecclesiastical mission in Jerusalem economics of serf emancipation expansionist aims see ‘Testament of Peter the Great’; feelings of betrayal by Western Christians forced to give up Kars Foreign Ministry free passage through Dardanelles for shipping and French territorial ambitions (Nice and Savoy) gains from Adrianople Treaty (1829) gains territory in the Far East (1860) gives up privileges vis-à-vis Ottomans (1841) Greeks lobby for help at Tsarist Court and Holy Sepulchre roof dispute humiliation and pride from Sevastopol imperial rivalry with Great Britain importance of cereal exports influence on other Orthodox communities insists on Hatt-i Hümayun clause in Paris Congress invasion and siege of Kars liberal circles critical of war Ministry of Education Ministry of Finance Ministry of the Interior Ministry of War national myth of Sevastopol need for modern infrastucture need to modernize defences an Orthodox Crusade Paris Peace Congress (1856) peace feelers to Austrians and French (1855) perceived threat to India plans for a partisan war and Poland possibility of revolutionary disturbances preparedness for war (1853) pressures Ottomans over French demands railways rapprochement with France reaction to Bulgarian atrocities reactions to the War reformist spirit relations with America religious destiny of resentment against Europe response to defeat at Inkerman response to Franco-Austrian proposals for peace (1855) response to loss of Sevastopol response to 1848 revolutions in Europe rumours about death of Tsar Nicholas rumours about freedom for serfs who enlist rumours of international events and actions San Stefano Treaty seen as enemy of liberty by France serf emancipation serf illiteracy serf uprisings Serpent Island occupied state commemorations of Sevastopol struggle to control buffer zones support for France over Austrian War (1859) support for Ottomans against Egypt (1833) support for Prussia support for Serbia tests the Paris Peace Treaty (1856) thought of as semi-Asiatic uncivilized Three Emperors’ League (1873) tight press censorship trade competition with Britain Treaty with Great Britain and France (1827) Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi and wars with Muslim neighbours ‘weak neighbour’ policy see also Alexander II, Tsar; Nicholas I, Tsar; pan-Slavism; Soviet Union

Russian army: forced to withdraw from Warsaw (1830) defeats the Poles (1831) army reforms dead and wounded defeats Hungarians (1849) defences thinly spread desertions in Bucharest desertions at Chernaia river desertions from Sevastopol diet in Danube delta drinking entertainments harsh treatment of serf soldiers (Tolstoy) indecisive skirmishes with Ottomans (1853) losses due to disease in campaigns medical help from the USA medical treatment before Pirogov military justice system mobilized to attack Turks (1852) preparedness for war (1853) punishments reinforcements from Danubian front revenge attacks on Bulgarian Muslims rumours about freedom for serfs who enlist Russo-Turkish War (1877 – 8) satirical song a soldiers comment on the death of the Tsar soldiers letters home technologically backward uniforms universal conscription victory in the Caucasus withdrawal from San Stefano to Danube

Russian army, Crimean timeline: transferred from Caucasus to Danubian front Silistria offensive and siege retreat from Silistria and Danube at Alma looting after Alma rearguard escapes Nolan’s Hussars defence of Sevastopol at Balaklava reinforcements from Bessarabia at Inkerman atrocities after Inkerman fails to press home advantage in winter of 1854 – 55 supply problems because of siege night raids on allied trenches fraternization with allied troops allied bombardment of Sevastopol defence of Mamelon and Quarry Pits defence of Malakhov and the Redan rumours of mutiny council of war discusses possible attacks (August 1855) attack on French and Sardinians at Chernaia river Balaklava hand over (July 1856)

Russian army, units and regiments: 4th Corps 5th Division 10th Division 11th Division 12th Infantry Division 15th Reserve Infantry Division Borodinsky Regiment Cossack cavalry Ekaterinburg Regiment Kamchatka Regiment Kazan Regiment Kiev Hussars Kolyvansky Regiment Minsk Regiment Moscow Regiment Okhotsky Regiment Polish Lancers Selenginsky Regiment Tarutinsky Regiment Tomsky Regiment Ukrainsky Regiment Vladimirsky Regiment Yakutsky Regiment American volunteers ‘Greek-Slavonic Legion’

Russian Invalid (army magazine)

Russian navy: mobilized to seize Constantinople seizure of the Vixen at Sinope (1853) ships blown up to block harbour service in the bastions defence of Sevastopol pontoon bridge built sailors refuse to leave Sevastopol last of Black Sea Fleet sunk French help to modernize fleet Black sea fleet recommissioned (1872)

Russians, new settlers in the Crimea

Russkii mir (pan-Slav journal)

Russo-Turkish wars (1787 – 92) (1806 – 12) (1828 – 9) (1877 – 8) see also religious wars

Russophobia: in Britain Europe wide in France

Rustem Pasha (i/c Turkish troops Balaklava)

Ruthenian (Uniate) Catholics

Ryzhov, General (Russian cavalry)

Şagin Giray, Khan of Crimea

Saint-Arnaud, Jacques Leroy de, French C-in-C Army of the East reservations about Sevastopol plan pre-landing conference with Raglan ill with stomach cancer comment on British at Evpatoria compares Sevastopol to 1812 Moscow looting and dies of heart-attack

Saint-Cyr, École spéciale militaire

Salzenberg, Wilhelm, drawings of Hagia Sophia mosaics

Samarkand

Samuel Colt (U.S. arms manufacturer)

San Stefano Treaty (1878)

sanitation, cholera and

Sardinian army: Chernaia river battle Malakhov assault see also Piedmont-Sardinia

Savoy: Napoleon III and union with France

Scott, Capt (9th Foot)

scurvy: British army French troops at Kars

Scutari military hospital poor medical conditions Florence Nightingale takes charge escalating death rate inspected by government sanitary commission see also medical treatment

Seacole, Mary

Seebach, Baron von (Saxon Minister in Paris) intermediary with Russia

Selim III, Sultan, military reforms

Semashko, Joseph, Bishop, and the nuns of Minsk

Serbia: Austrians ready to invade (1854) Britain and closer ties with Bulgaria and Balkan Slavs national church (Orthodox) Omer Pasha’s defence of Organic Statute pact with Romanian leadership possible support for Russians (1853) Russia and Russian partition plans (1852) the ‘Russian Party’ Turkish garrisons removed war dead war with Turkey (1876) warned not to interfere in Balkan revolts warning from Britain

Serpent Island, occupied by Russia

Serzhputovsky, General, siege of Silistria

Sevastopol: British naval strategy prime target of allies siege of (1854 – 1855) fortifications inadequate (1854) ships blown up to block harbour liquor store breached water supply cut civilians defence of celebrates the victory at Balaklava conditions in the town naval bombardment Lourmel’s Brigade soldiers walk in allied assault plans postponed til spring 1855 allied siege strategy rethought (1855) allied bombardment (Easter 1855) allied blockade takes hold (1855) allied bombardment (August-September 1855) armistices to collect dead and wounded encirclement rejected by Raglan Fifth Bastion fortified bastions and lunettes Fourth Bastion fraternization in ceasefires intelligence from allied deserters evacuation considered evacuation blown up and destroyed (Sept. 1855) Bukhmeier’s pontoon bridge allied armies in possession peace declaration port and fort installations destroyed by allies evacuation from and disposal of war matériel national humiliation and pride national shrine state commemorations The Defence of Sevastopol (panorama) (Roubaud) see also Crimea; Malakhov; Mamelon; Quarry pits; Redan; trench warfare

Seymour, Sir George Hamilton (British ambassador in St Petersburg) on Menshikov and Tsar Nicholas

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl

Shah Shuja, reinstatement of (1839)

Shamil, Imam: revolt in Chechnya infiltrated by Islamic fundamentalists Turkish military help western planned assault and Russian campaign against final defeat by Russian army

Shchegolov, Ensign Alexander, capture of HMS Tiger

Sheffield and Rotherham Independent (newspaper)

Sheik ül-Islam, re-consecration of Hagia Sophia mosque

shell shock

Shil’der, Gen Karl A., at Silistria (1854)

Shil’der, Nikolai, biography of Tsar Nicholas

Shuja Shah Durrani

Siberia: conquest of by Russia Pacific coast theatre of war

Silistria: allied reinforcements Arab Tabia redoubt Russian advance (1853) siege of (1854)

Simferopol the Napoleon III’s field plan Sevastopol wounded

Simpson, Gen Sir James: on French supply organization takes over as C-in-C Crimea

Sinope, battle of (1853): destruction of Turkish fleet response in France view of in Britain

Slade, Adolphus, RN (naval advisor to the Porte) comment on French soldiery

slave trade, after Tanzimat reforms

Slavophile movement support for Bulgarian rebels support for War

Slavs: national identities settlers in conquered areas see also pan-Slavism

Snow, John, prevention of cholera

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK)

Soimonov, Lt-Gen F. I. (10th Division), at Inkerman

Solferino, battle of (1859)

Solovetsky Monastery, bombarded by Royal Navy

Soviet Union: Cold War and Afghanistan commemoration of Sevastopol heroes tensions with NATO dissolution (1991) see also Russia

Soyer, Alexis

Spectateur de Dijon (newspaper)

spectators: at Alma at Balaklava see also war tourism

St George, Lt Col RA, storming of the Malakhov

St Nicholas fortress (Georgia), taken by Bashi Bazouks

St Petersburg, blockade called for

St Vincent de Paul, nuns in French military hospitals

Stakhova, Alexandra (nurse)

Stalin, Joseph: demands changes to Pudovkin’s film demands joint Soviet – Turkish control of Dardanelles

The Standard (newspaper)

Stanley, Edward, Lord Stanley (14th Earl of Derby)

Star Fort (Sevastopol)

Star of the South (ship), lodgings for British officers and wives

steamships, enable fast movement of news

Steevens, Capt Nathaniel (88th Foot): ceasefire fraternization death of Col Egerton

Sterling, Lt-Col Anthony (93rd Highland Bde)

Stockmar, Christian Friedrich, Baron

Straits Convention (1841) see Convention of London

Stroganov, Count, governor-general of New Russia

Sturdza, Alexandru

Sturdza, Michael, Prince of Moldavia

Sukhozanet, Gen Nikolai reports on British threat in Central Asia

Sukhumi

Suleiman Pasha (Ottoman commissioner in Bucharest)

Sulivan, Captain Bartholomew, reports on Baltic fortresses

Sunni Muslims, the Caucasus

supply ships, destroyed by the hurricane (1854)

Sveaborg (Baltic fortress)

Sweden: Baltic sea war and military treaty with Western powers Palmerston’s plans and

Switzerland, source of mercenary soldiers

Sylvester, Henry (Asst. Surgeon)

Syria, riots and attacks on Christians

Taganrog, destruction of part of allied Kerch raid

Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de

Tanzimat reforms cost of Hatt-i Sharif and opposition to support for questioned in Britain

Tarle, Evgeny (Stalin era historian)

Tashkent

Tatars submit to Catherine the Great in Bulgaria exodus from the Crimea misinform allies about Sevastopol defences plan to involve in open field war refugees in Evpatoria reprisals by Russians resettled in Bessarabia revenge attacks in Kerch rise up against Russians upon arrival of allies Russian policy towards

Tatischev, Vasily

Taylor, Sir Herbert, Urquhart and

telegraph: speeds reception of news from the front underwater cable (Balaklava to Varna)

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Maud ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’

‘Testament of Peter the Great’

Theodosia (Kefe)

Thiers, Adolphe

Third Section (Russian secret police) attempt to contain rumours reports on more educated classes

Thompson, Elizabeth see Butler, Elizabeth (née Thompson)

Thoumas, Capt Charles (French army), letters home

Thouvenal, Édouard-Antoine de (French ambassador to the Porte) Hatt-i Hümayun decree

Three Emperors’ League (1873)

Thunderer (Russian steam frigate)

Tiger, HMS, aground and captured at Odessa

The Times (newspaper) ‘Anglicus’ articles attacked by Raglan comment on the death of the Tsar draws attention to poor medical conditions in Crimea influence on politics Islamic petition in Constantinople letters from officers and soldiers reaction to Sinope readers’ letters readers’ response to escalating Scutari deaths report on Light Brigade charge

Times Crimean Fund for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded

Timm, Vasily, The Death of Admiral Nakhimov

Titov, Vladimir (Russian ambassador in Constantinople)

Tiutchev, Anna: pan-Slav ideas at court on Tsar Nicholas

Tiutchev, Fedor, pan-Slavism of

Tolstoy, Leo at Silistria attachment of to serfs Plan for the Reform of the Army reformist ideas response to Inkerman defeat in Sevastopol suggests a duel to decide outcome of war transferred to Esky-Ord watches destruction of Sevastopol ‘The Military Gazette’ Anna Karenina A Landowner’s Morning ‘Sevastopol in August’ (short story) ‘Sevastopol in December’ (short story) Sevastopol Sketches War and Peace Youth a memoir

Tolycheva, Tatyana, escape from Sevastopol

Tomkinson, Capt (Light Bde), winter (1854 – 55)

Topal Umer Pasha (allied governor of Evpatoria)

Torrens, Gen Sir Arthur Wellesley (4th Division)

Totleben, Eduard (military engineer) comment on the French army defence of Sevastopol retires wounded

travelogues, impressions of Russia and the East

Trebizond, import of British manufactured goods

trench warfare allied armies after Malakhov and Redan failure daily shelling in allied trenches fraternization with Russians night raids on allied trenches shooting games trench digging trench fatigue/madness see also Sevastopol

Triple Alliance (1856)

Tunisian troops

Turco-Russian War see Crimean War

Turgenev, Ivan: support for Bulgarians Tolstoy and

Turkestan

Turkey see Ottoman Empire

Turks, a minority in the Ottoman Empire

Tuscany, monarch restored

typhus: French army inside Sevastopol

Ukraine: in possession of Crimea (1954) Russia gains possession of Ruthenian (Uniate) Catholics

Ultramontane (Clerical) party (France)

uniforms, belligerant armies

Union franc-comtoise (newspaper)

United States of America: relations with Great Britain relations with Russia sends warships to Eastern Mediterranean (1946)

Unkiar-Skelessi, Treaty of (1833), secret clause

Urquhart, David: anti-Russian agitation in Constantinople free trade speeches member of parliament Palmerston and Polish sympathies sympathy for Turkey and Islam trade mission to Turkey England, France, Russia and Turkey Turkey and Its Resources

Urusov, Prince S. S. (adjutant to Gen Osten-Sacken)

Uspensky, Porfiry, Archimandrite

Uvarov, Sergei

Uvazhnov-Aleksandrov, Colonel, shortlived command of Soimonov’s Division

Vaillant, Marshal (French Minister of War) council of war with allied leaders (1855)

Vanson, Lt, ‘souvenirs’ of Sevastopol

Vantini, Giuseppe see Yusuf, General

Varna: British and French troops cholera outbreak drunkenness among troops fire caused by arsonists Turkish army

Verney, Sir Harry, Our Quarrel with Russia

Viazmitinov, Anatoly, in the Zherve battery

Vicars, Capt Hedley (Ninety-Seventh Regiment)

Victor Emmanuel: King of Piedmont-Sardinia war with Austria (1859) King of Italy Crimean War paintings

Victoria, Queen of Great Britain: Tsar Nicholas and description of Napoleon III political judgement of attitude to Russian invasion of Turkey comment on Clarendon abdication threat religious sympathies with Greeks sees necessity of war declaration of War on Russia (1854) knitting for soldiers calls Palmerston to form a government (1855) comments on the death of Tsar Nicholas does not trust Russian diplomatic moves not ready to end war and the Franco-Austrian peace ultimatum Napoleon III writes on alternative plans for war Serpent Island incident (1856) unhappy with the Crimean peace first Victoria Cross investiture collector of photographic memorabilia buys The Roll Call

Victoria Cross, institution of

Viel-Castel, Horace de, on France as a great power

Vienna Conference (1853), peace terms offered to Russia

Vienna Conference (1855)

Vienna, Congress of (1815)

Villafranca, secret deal (France/Austria)

Ville de France (French ship)

Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Karl Friedrich, Count (Saxon Minister to London)

Vixen (British schooner), gun-running to Circassia

Vladimir, Saint, Grand Prince of Kiev desecration of church of

Vladimirescu, Tudor

Vladivostok

Voennyi sbornik (military journal)

Volkonsky, Sergei

Voltaire, Catherine the Great and

Vorntsov, Count Semyon

Vorontsov, Prince Mikhail and Franco-Austrian peace proposals as governor-general in the Crimea palace hit by naval shells

Vyazemsky, Prince Pyotr, criticisms of the war

Walewski, Alexandre Joseph, Count (French Foreign Minister); council of war with allied leaders (1855) and Napoleon’s threat of revolutionary war Paris Peace Congress (1856) Polish independence possible peace talks with Russia Serpent Island incident (1856)

Wallachia autonomy granted (1829) cereal exports to Britain debated at Paris Peace Congress (1856) hospodar ordered to reject Turkish rule preliminaries to Crimean War (1853) repressive occupation by Russians Russian occupation of (1829 – 34) Russian response to 1848 revolution see also Romania

Wallachian volunteers, desert from Russian army

war graves, Sevastopol

war memorials: in Britain in France in Sevastopol

war tourism see also Duberly, Fanny; spectators

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of

White, Charles, Turcophile pamphlets

White Sea, theatre of war

White Works redoubts (Sevastopol)

Wightman, Trooper (17th Lancers)

Williams, General William, in command in Kars

Wilson, Capt (Coldstream Gds), at Inkerman

Wilson, Sir Robert, Sketch of the Military and Political Power of Russia in the Year 1817

winter (1854 – 5); in prospect in actuality the hurricane

Wodehouse, John (British ambassador in St Petersburg)

women: attempts to Westernize Turkish womens dress by the Sultan British army wives cantinières Dasha Sevastopolskaia (the heroine of Sevastopol) leaving Sevastopol in Sevastopol spectators at Alma spectators at Balaklava see also nurses and nursing

Wood, Midshipman Evelyn, letters home

Woods, Nicholas (war correspondent), report on Inkerman dead

Wrangel, Lt-Gen Baron (cavalry commander), at Evpatoria

Yalta Conference (1945)

Yenikale see Kerch, allied raid (1855)

Ye ilköy see San Stefano

York, Prince Frederick, Duke of, memorial column

Young, William (British consul)

Young Turks

Ypsilantis, Alexander

Yusuf, General, of Spahis d’Orient

Zamoyski, Wladislav: Czartoryski’s agent in London the ‘Sultan’s Cossacks’

Zherve Battery, fight for possession

Zhukovsky, Vasily, tutor to Alexander II