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But the war of 1859 and everything that happened afterwards – the Garibaldi expedition to the south, the conquest of Naples, the annexation of Venetia from the Austrians during the war of 1866 and the final unification of Italy with the capture of Rome in 1870 – soon overshadowed the Crimean War.
In Turkey the Crimean War has been not so much forgotten as obliterated from the nation’s historical memory, even though it was there that the war began and Turkish casualties were as many as 120,000 soldiers, almost half the troops involved, according to official statistics.
Until very recently the war was almost totally ignored by Turkish historiography. It did not fit the nationalist version of Turkish history, and fell between the earlier ‘golden age’ of the Ottoman Empire and the later history of Atatürk and the birth of the modern Turkish state.
The effect of the war in Britain was matched only by its impact in Russia, where the events played a significant role in shaping the national identity. But that role was contradictory. The war was of course experienced as a terrible humiliation, inflaming profound feelings of resentment against the West for siding with the Turks. But it also fuelled a sense of national pride in the defenders of Sevastopol, a feeling that the sacrifices they made and the Christian motives for which they had fought had turned their defeat into a moral victory.
