The Crimean War

MAR 28 1854 · 12:00

Roger Fenton, 'Valley of the Shadow of Death', Crimea, April 1855, an early war photograph. Place: the Black Sea, Sevastopol, the Baltic; the Congress of Paris at the Quai d'Orsay Figures: Tsar Nicholas I, dying mid-war · Napoleon III of France · Lord Aberdeen and then Palmerston, Britain · Sultan Abdulmejid I of the Ottomans · Count Cavour of Piedmont-Sardinia, joining for diplomatic reasons A Quarrel Over the Holy Places The proximate cause is a dispute between Catholic France and Orthodox Russia over custody of the Holy Places at Jerusalem and Bethlehem, both within Ottoman territory. The structural cause is the question of what happens as Ottoman power declines. Tsar Nicholas I has been calling Turkey the sick man of Europe in private since 1844 and proposes to Britain in 1853 a partition of its inheritance. Britain refuses. Russia occupies the Danubian Principalities in July 1853. The Ottomans declare war in October. The Russian fleet destroys the Ottoman one at Sinope in November. Britain and France declare war on Russia on 28 March 1854. The war is fought principally in the Crimea around the great Russian naval base at Sevastopol, besieged from October 1854 to September 1855. Florence Nightingale arrives at Scutari in November 1854 with thirty-eight nurses; the death rate in her wards falls from forty-two percent to two percent in six months. The telegraph and the steam press produce, for the first time, a war the home publics read about within days rather than months. Total deaths approach 750,000, most from cholera, typhus, and dysentery. The End of the Concert The Treaty of Paris (30 March 1856) is the first major peace congress since Vienna (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]). Russia loses the right to maintain a Black Sea fleet (a clause renounced unilaterally in 1870). The Danubian Principalities are placed under collective European guarantee, beginning the path to Romanian unification. The Ottoman Empire is formally admitted to the Concert of Europe and to the public law of Europe. The significance, however, is what the war ends rather than what the treaty creates. The 1815-to-1853 stretch had been the longest period without a Great Power war in Europe since 1648. The Concert's premise (that the great monarchies cooperate through congresses to maintain equilibrium and suppress revolution) does not survive a war among them. Russia, humiliated, withdraws from the European balance for fifteen years and turns inward; Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs (see [[emancipation-of-the-serfs-1861]]) follows from this withdrawal. Napoleon III, having broken the Holy Alliance's hold on Italian affairs, will assist Cavour against Austria in 1859. Bismarck, watching from Frankfurt, draws the operational lesson: the Concert no longer constrains a Video: Real Time History on the first great-power war since 1815, the war that ended the Concert of Europe as a working method.