Crimean War
Fought from 1853 to 1856, the Crimean War set Russia against an unlikely coalition of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire, later joined by Piedmont-Sardinia. It began in a quarrel over the rights of Orthodox and Catholic Christians in the Holy Land and over Russian pressure on the failing Ottoman Empire, but at root it was about stopping Russian expansion toward the Mediterranean and the Turkish Straits. Most of the fighting centred on the long Anglo-French siege of the great Russian naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea. The war became a byword for military mismanagement — the doomed charge of the Light Brigade, armies wasted more by cholera and exposure than by battle — even as it introduced railways, the telegraph and shell-firing warships to war and prompted Florence Nightingale's reform of military nursing. Russia was defeated and, by the 1856 Treaty of Paris, forced to accept the neutralisation of the Black Sea. Its deeper significance was diplomatic: by turning the great powers against one another it shattered the conservative solidarity that had preserved the 1815 settlement and estranged Russia from Austria — clearing the path for the wars of Italian and German unification.
- Year: 1853 CE
- Category: Military
