By the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire, straddling Europe, Asia and Africa, had reached enormous proportions. However, its strength had been waning, unlike the push of Western countries such as France and, above all, Great Britain, which had become colonial empires. Russia, for its part, had been pursuing an exit to the Mediterranean Sea since Peter the Great, 150 years earlier, sought to turn the country into a naval power. He had already fought the Turks, without great results.
The Crimean War, initially between the Russian and Turkish empires, began formally on July 2, 1853, when the former crossed the Pruth River and entered Moldavia and Wallachia with the objective, officially, of liberating its Christian population from Ottoman yoke. Obviously, behind the invasion was the decomposition of the Turkish Empire, as well as the old Russian pretensions that we have mentioned to open a passage to the Mediterranean.
France and England feared that the Russians would reach Constantinople, which they could not allow, so they sent an expeditionary force in order to protect the Ottoman capital and the Bosphorus Straits. His forces were positioned south of the Danube, ready to intervene if the tsar's troops crossed it. It was not necessary, because the Turkish army was enough to stop the enemy advance.
The skillful general Omar Pacha gained strength on the southern bank of the Danube, although he did not give up maintaining several powerful bridgeheads on the other bank, from which he threatened to envelop his enemies if they dared to force a crossing of the river. This tactic not only prevented the advance of the Russians, but also brought victory to Pasha in the Battle of Oltenitza.
It was the beginning of a series of setbacks for the tsarist arms that forced them, at the end of the year, to retreat to their starting bases, which led to their defeat on the Danubian front.
The conflict also spread to other points, such as the Baltic, East Asia, the Caucasus – where the Russians won their most important victories – and, above all, the Black Sea. In this last scenario, the war took place on land and sea. Here, in the Battle of Sinop, the Russian navy inflicted a severe defeat on the Ottoman navy, which opened the doors to a possible and dangerous landing in the straits.
Faced with the risk of Russian victory, in 1854, France and England declared themselves allies of Turkey and sent their fleets, which, much more modern, forced the Russians to take refuge in their bases in the Crimea. But the allies (which were later joined symbolically by the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia), to completely disrupt the naval power of their enemy, had to occupy the main Russian base, Sevastopol. This gave rise to the longest, most ambitious and bloodiest episode of the war.
In September 1854, the Allies landed on the Crimean peninsula, about 50 kilometers from the naval base. The intervention was initially limited to just over 50,000 men. They had to increase it to more than 400,000 (300,000 French and 100,000 English), who joined the Turkish forces.
In their advance towards Sevastopol they defeated the Russians in the Battle of Alma, managing to surpass their lines. The French troops demonstrated their good quality and the experience acquired in the fights in Algeria, something that did not happen with the British forces, absent from the battlefields since Waterloo. The subsequent battles of Balaclava and Inkerman ultimately trapped the Russians in the city.
Despite Alma's victory, it took the Allies more than a month to reach Sevastopol, giving its defenders time to organize. During those weeks, more than 100,000 cars requisitioned from peasants supplied the city with ammunition and food. It was almost exclusively the Russian navy, some 30,000 men, that took on the resistance, under the command of Admiral Nakimov and Colonel Todleben.
He, a Prussian engineer in the service of the tsar, laid out an excellent network of trenches, forts and parapets against which the attackers crashed. Seeing, on the other hand, how inferior their fleet was compared to that of the allies, they decided to take advantage of their ships in an unconventional way: they sank seven of them at the mouth of the port to prevent the entry of the enemy and dismantled their artillery pieces, that they located in their land defenses.
During the following year military operations centered around the besieged city. It was a typical siege action, with mines, ditches, trenches and parapets, where day after day, in a bloody battle of attrition, both sides fought for control of positions. As in any battle of this type, victory ended up going to whoever had the most troops and reserves.
The defenders suffered 60% fatal casualties, including six admirals and their commander-in-chief, which was a severe blow to their morale. The attackers, well supplied with ammunition, fired 52,000 cannon shots a day on the city. In the end, after almost a year of siege, and seeing that the square was irremediably lost, the Russians undertook an orderly retreat over a bridge of boats that they had built.
With the fall of Sevastopol, the war, in fact, came to an end, although Russia was still able to conquer the Armenian city of Kars and other nearby territories.
Despite these slight advances in the Caucasus, the Slavic power had been forced to renounce its Danubian conquests and its ambitions for the Sublime Porte. The allies were also terribly exhausted by the large number of casualties they had suffered, which made the path towards an armistice much easier.
The neutral powers of Prussia and Austria presented a peace proposal that was accepted by the new tsar, Alexander II, much more liberal than his father, Nicholas I. The agreement included the independence of Wallachia and Moldavia, freedom of navigation on the Danube and by the Black Sea, which was declared a neutral sea, as well as European protection over Christians and their religious practices throughout the territory of the Ottoman Empire.
The geostrategic result was that, from then on, France and Great Britain became the gendarmes of the East, defending the Turks from the expansionist desires of the Russians and Austrians.
This text is part of an article published in number 462 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
