The Crimean War
Hoping to please opinion at home, the French Emperor pressured the Turks into new outrages against their Christian population, and Russia hit back.
1854-1856
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
By William Simpson (1823-1899), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
William Simpson sketched this scene in 1855, showing the railway at Balaclava during the Crimean War. The 14-mile standard-gauge (probably) and steam-hauled ‘Grand Crimean Central Railway’ ran between between Balaclava and the besieged Russian port at Sevastopol, and was engineered by Samuel Peto and Thomas Brassey. The initiative came from Peto, prompted by reading of the problems suffered by the besieging army during a Crimean winter, and was completed in just seven weeks. Sevastopol fell in September 1855, and Peto was created Sir Samuel Morton Peto, 1st Baronet for his efforts.
Introduction
The Crimean War of 1853-1856 cost over 600,000 lives, and in the short term changed very little for those involved. It all started because the French Emperor, Napoleon III, wanted to curry favour with Roman Catholic opinion in Europe, but in no time at all France, Russia and Britain had committed themselves to positions from which they could not back down.
IN February 1853, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia rode to the rescue of the Ottoman Empire’s beleaguered Orthodox Christians. The Turks had humiliated them for generations, but now France’s Napoleon III was demanding that Constantinople hand over Greek Orthodox churches in the Holy Land to the Roman Catholics. A French warship arrived in the Black Sea to concentrate the Sultan’s mind.
Nicholas responded by calling for the Empire’s twelve million Greek Orthodox,* plus Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia,* to be placed under his personal protection. When Constantinople refused, Nicholas ordered troops into Romania, and in October Turkey declared war.
Over in London, Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen’s cabinet cared little for Turkey but was convinced that Nicholas had designs on India, and the sinking of a Turkish flotilla at Sinope on the Black Sea, portrayed as a war crime by the excitable British press, was the last straw. Britain joined France on Turkey’s side on March 28th, 1854. Austria, not liking the Tsar’s intervention in the Balkans, followed suit.
Strictly speaking, at this time what we now call Romania was the duchies of Wallachia and Moldavia, under Ottoman rule since 1417. Assisted by Russia’s intervention, they united to become Romania in 1866, and then the Kingdom of Romania in 1881.
When the Turks captured Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, in 1453, the Greek-speaking, Greek-culture, predominantly Orthodox Christian inhabitants of Anatolia (Asia Minor) and Greece came under its control. Greece itself achieved independence following the revolution of 1821.
