What the original Crimean war was all about

Mar 18th 2014

By C.R.

ON MARCH 16th Crimeans voted in a deeply flawed referendum to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. The crisis on the peninsula has pitted Russia against America and the EU, in the worst diplomatic spat in Europe since the cold war. But it is not the first time that Crimea, on the edge of the Black Sea, has been contested by Russia and the West. On March 28th 1854—160 years ago this month—Britain, the superpower of the day, declared war on Russia. The resulting conflict was mainly fought in Crimea as British forces and their allies laid siege to the main Russian naval base in the Black Sea at Sebastopol. What was the original Crimean war all about?

It began against a backdrop of Russian expansionism as the Ottoman Empire declined. The spark was a religious dispute over who should be the guardian of the Ottoman Empire’s Christian minority, especially in the Holy Land: Orthodox Russia or Catholic France. Napoleon III sent his best ship, Charlemagne, to the Black Sea to defend France’s claim. That, together with aggressive diplomatic and financial inducements, sharpened the minds of Ottoman leaders, who declared in favour of France. Russia responded by invading the Ottoman-controlled territories of Moldavia and Wallachia (roughly, parts of modern day Moldova and Romania) and sinking the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Sinope in 1853. That inflamed public opinion in Britain and France, which feared that Russian domination in the Black Sea region would threaten their trade routes to India via Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. After some diplomatic dithering, which misled Russia into believing that it could continue its aggression against the Ottomans without consequences, Britain and France declared war in March 1854. The Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont (which later became Italy) joined in the war against Russia the next year.

Although Britain and its allies eventually won the war in 1856, the conflict was disastrously planned and poorly executed. Invasion fleets from Britain and France set off ill-prepared; military planning was so bad that their commanders had not yet decided which part of the Black Sea they were heading for. When they landed in Crimea, military disasters followed, including the famous charge of the light brigade, in which vulnerable British cavalry attacked Russian artillery head-on during the Battle of Balaclava. Support services such as care for the wounded were disorganised. Four times as many British soldiers died of disease during the conflict as in combat. In the end, it took a year-long siege to take the naval base at Sebastopol.

Historians blame the mistakes that led to the war on a lack of strategic planning, in diplomatic or military terms, on the part of Britain and France. Similar accusations have been levied at the cautious steps taken so far by America and the EU. But although some commentators have attempted to draw comparisons between that conflict and the current crisis in the Crimea, this time it does not yet look as if things are going the same way. Modern America and 19th-century Britain, though the dominant superpowers of their days, are worlds apart in terms of diplomatic strategy. But few, even in the 1850s, would have thought Russia and the West would still be contesting the same small peninsula a century and a half later. If history does not repeat itself, it has a strange way of rhyming.

Dig deeper:
Why the Kremlin's belligerence in Ukraine will ultimately weaken Russia (March 2014)
How Florence Nightingale helped to invent the modern infographic (December 2007)
Parsing the legalities of Crimea's secession "referendum" (March 2014)

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What the original Crimean war was all about

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