Crimean War
Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire fought Russia between 1853 and 1856 over the holy places in Palestine and something else entirely. The stated dispute was about which church held the keys to the Church of the Nativity, and the real one was about what would happen to the Ottoman Empire when it collapsed — Nicholas I called it the sick man of Europe and proposed a partition to the British, who did not want Russia in Constantinople or on the Turkish straits. Russia occupied the Danubian principalities in July 1853 and destroyed an Ottoman squadron at Sinope in November, which the British press made into a massacre. The allies landed in the Crimea in September 1854 with the object of taking Sevastopol, expecting a campaign of weeks; the siege lasted eleven months. It was the first war reported by telegraph and photographed, and the first in which the public read about its own army's failures within days — the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, delivered into the wrong valley by an ambiguous order; the winter of 1854 in which the army outside Sevastopol had no shelter, fuel or medical supplies; and the hospital at Scutari, where Florence Nightingale found men dying of cholera, typhus and dysentery at a rate far exceeding the battlefield. Around three-quarters of the some 750,000 deaths were from disease. The peace barred warships from the Black Sea, which Russia repudiated in 1870. The concert of Europe never quite recovered. The war also produced modern nursing, modern war reporting, and the Victoria Cross. Russia's defeat convinced Alexander II that a serf economy could not fight an industrial one, which is a substantial part of why serfdom was abolished in 1861.
- Year: 1853 CE
- Category: Military
