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BRITISH IMPERIALISM and ASIA, to 1900

Nicholas I

Queen Victoria. Click for a more youthful image.

European powers, led by Britain, were interested in stability between the Ottoman Empire and Russia, and in 1841 they signed a treaty that affirmed Ottoman control over the straits between the Mediterranean and Black Seas and forbade any power to send warships through the straits in time of peace. Nicholas I of Russia was a signatory to this agreement and was happy to cooperate with Britain. Britons had been afraid of Russian expansion southward, especially into Afghanistan, and some hostility toward Russia had been entertained. But Nicholas wanted to get along with Britain and visited there in 1844, leaving under the impression that his relations with Britain's leaders were good.

The revolutions in Europe in 1848 and 1849 strained relations between the liberal British and conservative Russia. Queen Victoria thought Tsar Nicholas not well educated. Nicholas (also the King of Poland) was disliked as an oppressor of the Poles, and his war against the Hungarians further damaged his image in Britain or France. In these countries Russia was still seen as a land of serfdom, the whip and knout.

Nicholas was head of the Russian Eastern Orthodox Church -- the state religion. His subjects knelt when he came into view. Everyone, including scholars, were expected to be devoted to the "sacred principles" that Nicholas stood for. And Nicholas was sincerely devout. He saw himself as the defender of God's order across Europe. He adhered to the motto of his family (the Romanovs): "orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality." Nicholas was for doing right. He favored peace with obedience domestically and peace with other nations if at all possible. But troublesome for Nicholas was conflict among Christians concerning Jerusalem. There a silver star placed by Roman Catholics at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was stolen, and Catholics described Orthodox Christian monks as the thieves. In Jerusalem, Orthodox monks and Catholic priests scuffled. France's president, Louis Napoleon, made a show of being a good Catholic and championed Roman Catholic control over Christianity's sites in the Holy Land. The Holy Land was part of the Ottoman Empire, and Sultan Abdul Mejid (1839-61) favored French control over the Christian sites. Nicholas saw this as a blow to Russia and to Orthodox Christianity, and he was forceful in demanding a reversal from the sultan.

Britain was still afraid of Russian expansion southward and gave the sultan surreptitious support. Backed by France and Britain, the sultan refused Nicholas. Blood was again to be shed over a religious dispute. In diplomatic maneuvers, Nicholas thought he neutralized European powers, including France and Britain, regarding his differences with the sultan. In February, 1853, he sent an ultimatum to the sultan demanding that the conflict in the Holy Land be settled in favor of the Orthodox Christians, Nicholas demanding that the sultan recognize the rights of Orthodox Christians living within his empire.

On April 19, 1853, while waiting for a response, Russia proclaimed the right to protect Christians in the Ottoman Empire. On May 21, the Ottomans rejected the Russian ultimatum. In July, Nicholas mobilized his armies and invaded neighboring vassal states of the Ottoman Empire - Moldavia and Walachia. Futile negotiations between Russia and the Ottomans followed, and the Ottomans declared war on October 4.

On November 30, at the port of Sinop on Black Sea coast of northern Turkey, the Russians attacked a small fleet of Ottoman warships and transports, which had chosen to remain at port under the protection of shore batteries. The Turks refused to surrender and were ordered by their superiors to fight to the last man. The wooden Turkish ships burned, and of the 4,400 Turkish seamen, 3,000 were killed. Then the guns of the Russian ships destroyed the port and its defensive installations. The Russians had performed efficient naval warfare, without violating any article of war, but, on December 12 and 13, British newspapers screamed of atrocities and massacre.

Anti-Russian fervor raged in Britain. After Russia's attack at Sinop it was widely believed in Britain that Turkey was unable to defend itself against the Russians and that the Russians had to be defeated. The anti-Russian fervor spread to parliament. Many liberals had been opposed to war because wars cost money, but their reluctance was overcome. The British saw the Russians as seeking to control the straits. They feared the Russian navy breaking out of the Black Sea and threatening their route on the Mediterranean Sea. And they were afraid of Russia dominating the Baltic Sea. Emotions and patriotism in Britain were aflame, and the British were confident in the power of their navy, believing that their navy was infinitely more powerful than the Turkish fleet at Sinop had been.

Amid the war fever, a rumor was passed around that Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, was a Russian agent. Prince Albert was German and the German state of Prussia was reluctant to join the British and French in a coalition against Russia, which was on Prussia's eastern border. Germans did not want their more powerful Russian neighbor overrunning their lands, but many in Britain saw German reluctance instead as supporting Russia and as making themselves tools of Russia's ambitions. A newspaper in Scotland circulated the treason charges, and a few other newspapers in Britain repeated the accusation. In London, thousands waited by the doors of the Tower to see Prince Albert escorted into that prison, and rumors were afloat that Queen Victoria intended to stand by her husband and go with him. Defenders of Prince Albert were able to squash the rumors, which Prince Albert labeled as the "stupidest trash." Publicly, Albert described himself as having the sentiments of the British, and, as if to prove his point, he described Nicholas I as "a tyrant and the enemy of all liberty on the continent." The Turk, he wrote, "is a fine fellow."

By January, 1854, a fleet of British and French warships had passed through the straits and into the Black Sea. In March, Britain, France and Turkey formalized an alliance, and, at the end of the month, Britain and France declared war. Following the declaration of war, Queen Victoria wrote of "the great sinfulness" of Russia as having "brought about this War." She spoke of the declaration of war as "very dignified" and added "May God give it his blessing and grant that as little blood as possible be shed." Later she wrote, "...our conduct has been throughout actuated by unselfishness and honesty."

On April 22, the British navy shelled the Russian port city of Odessa. And Queen Victoria relished the virtue of attacking only military targets. "The town," she wrote, "has not been touched."

In June, British and French warships sailed through the Gulf of Finland and reconnoitered the Russia navy base at the island of Kronstadt, near St. Petersburg. In August, 10,000 French troops and 1,000 British besieged and forced the surrender of Russian forts at Bomarsund, amid islands in the middle of the Baltic Sea. In August, a squadron of British warships bombarded Kola, near Murmansk, in Russia's far north. Austria seeking advantage for itself, threatened to enter the war on the side of the Ottoman Empire, and Russia responded by withdrawing from Walachia and Moldavia, allowing Austria to move its troops there with confronting them.

The British and French attacked at the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, on the Black Sea, which the British saw as a threat to their interests in the East. On September 14, 1854, a British and French force, already weakened by cholera, with a few thousand Turks landed thirty miles north of Sevastopol. On September 20, at the Alma River, a major battle was fought -- a battle that was more like a riot than military maneuvers. Many were lost on both sides, but the Allies held. News of the war traveled slowly, and, on October 3, Queen Victoria wrote to her uncle, Leopold of her "noble troops" having behaved "with a courage and desperation which was beautiful to behold." Twenty days later she added: "My heart bleeds for the many fallen, and I consider that there is no finer death for a man than on the battlefield!"

The Russians were not giving up as the British as expected. The British and French had better weapons, their rifles having a range of 1000 yards (an extreme distance for their marksmen) while the Russians were still using old-fashioned, smooth bore, flintlock muskets with a range of only 200 yards (a yard a little less than one meter) and, according to the British, taking little care to shoot straight. But the Russians, it is said, were willing to fight to the death for their faith and for Holy Russia, urged on by the priests who had accompanied them into battle.

The Russians believed that spirit counted, while economically and technologically, Britain and France -- the world's two most technologically advanced powers -- were in better shape than they. With their warships, the British and French dominated the Black Sea and transport to the Crimea was easier than Russian transport across land. Having few rail lines, the Russians were using horse drawn supply wagons, inefficient in that much of what was carried was feed for the horses. And during the rains of autumn the hundreds of miles of land they had to cross was mud.

On October 25, a few miles north of Sebastopol, at the Battle of Balaclava, was what became known as the "Charge of the Light Brigade," a charge of 600 cavalrymen with swords drawn, against Russian artillery and a well-defended position, a suicidal mission, the product of an inept command about which the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, including the words,

Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die.

The British had gone to war without foreseeing the need to supply its troops over a long period with food and medical assistance. Money was raised in Britain for medicines for the troops, and, in late October, Florence Nightingale left Britain with 38 nurses heading for the Crimea. Already, studying on her own, she had made herself an expert in hospital administration. At the front she organized care for the wounded, cleaned up the care areas and cut mortality rates. It was a beginning for the nursing profession in Europe.

The winter of 1854-55 was miserable for Russians and the Allies in the Crimea. British soldiers are described as having been "clothed in rags, cold, hungry and short of everything." In March Nicholas died, at almost fifty-nine years of age -- some researchers suspecting that he had poisoned himself after having receiving news of the disastrous Russian defeat at Evpatoria (Yevpatoriya), about forty miles north of Sebastopol. In the spring, for the Russians the route to the Crimea became again a sea of mud.

In September, the Russians abandoned its battle areas in the Crimea. The son of Nicholas, Alexander II, was ready to make peace, and so too were the Allies. The war -- the first to be photographed -- came to its formal end at a conference in Paris from late February to late March, 1856. The treaty produced by that conference, signed by Britain, France and Austria, attempted a new international order. It guaranteed Turkey's independence and territorial integrity. It moved Russia back from the mouth of the Danube River, gave Bessarabia to the Ottoman Empire and left "His Majesty the Sultan" with suzerainty over Walachia and Moldavia. The Black Sea was declared a neutral zone, open to all nations (through the straits) but not to warships, with Russia under instructions not to maintain a navy or coastal fortifications on its Black Sea shores. Russia was obliged to give up its claim of protector of Orthodox Christians within the Ottoman Empire. And an international commission was to assure safe navigation on the Danube River. 

The Russians are said to have lost 40,000 killed in action and 60,000 to disease. France is said to have lost 20,240 killed in action and 75,375 to disease. Britain's loss was 4,602 killed in action and 17,580 to disease. Figures for the Turks are unknown.

The British saw the war as a success in that the Russians had been stopped. Tsar Alexander II saw the war as having exposed Russia's backwardness. Russia, he believed, would have to modernize economically and socially if it were to be a great power.

And in Britain had come a minor cultural change. During the Crimean War smoking had come into fashion among upperclass men -- men who, before the war had looked upon smoking as vulgar, while common military men had been inclined to smoke as a demonstration of their worldliness and daredevil attitude. Beards had also come into fashion -- all this an imitation of Britain's military men in the Crimea, viewed by the nation as war heroes.

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Copyright © 2009 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.