The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

But at the heart of the conflict that eventually led to the Crimean War was Russia’s own religious claim to lead and protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire, a demand that centred on its aspiration to reclaim Hagia Sophia as the Mother Church and Constantinople as the capital of a vast Orthodox imperium connecting Moscow to Jerusalem.

In the Sultan’s European territories, which had been largely conquered from Byzantium, the majority of his subjects were Orthodox Christians.6

From its origins in the fourteenth century, the empire’s ruling Osman dynasty had drawn its legitimacy from the ideal of a continuous holy war to extend the frontiers of Islam.

But the Ottomans were pragmatists, not religious fundamentalists, and in their Christian lands, the richest and most populous in the empire, they tempered their ideological animosity towards the infidels with a practical approach to their exploitation for imperial interests. They levied extra taxes on the non-Muslims, looked down on them as inferior ‘beasts’ (rayah), and treated them unequally in various humiliating ways (in Damascus, for example, Christians were forbidden to ride animals of any kind).7 But they let them keep their religion, did not generally persecute or try to convert them, and, through the millet system of religiou...

As long as they submitted to Ottoman authority, ecclesiastical leaders were allowed to exercise a limited control over education, public order and justice, tax collection, charity and Church affairs, subject to the approval of the Sultan’s Muslim officials (even for such matters, for example, as the repair of a church roof). In this sense, the millet system not only served to reinforce the ethnic and religious hierarchy of the Ottoman Empire – with the Muslims at the top and all the other millets (Orthodox, Gregorian Armenian, Catholic and Jewish) below them – which encouraged Muslim prejudice against the Christians and the Jews; it also encouraged these minorities to express their grievances and organize their struggle against Muslim rule through their national Churches, which was a major source of instability in the empire.

The patriarch in Constantinople was the highest Orthodox authority in the Ottoman Empire.

The patriarchate was controlled by the Phanariots, a powerful caste of Greek (and Hellenized Romanian and Albanian) merchant families originally from the Phanar district of Constantinople (from which they derived their name).

The Phanariots saw themselves as the heirs of the Byzantine Empire and dreamed of restoring it with Russian help. But they were hostile to the influence of the Russian Church, which had promoted the Bulgarian clergy as a Slavic rival to Greek control of the patriarchate, and they were afraid of Russia’s own ambitions in Ottoman Europe.

The Serbs were the first to win their liberation, by means of Russian-sponsored uprisings between 1804 and 1817,

Selim III (1789–1807) was the first sultan to recognize the need to Westernize the Ottoman army and navy. His military reforms were guided by the French, the major foreign influence on the Ottomans in the final decades of the eighteenth century, mainly because their enemies (Austria and Russia) were also the enemies of the Ottoman Empire.

European embassies were no longer content to limit their contacts to the Ottoman administration, as they had done previously, but took a hand directly in the empire’s politics, supporting nationalities, religious groups, political parties and factions, and even interfering in the Sultan’s appointment of individual ministers to promote their own imperial interests.

Russian troops had helped the Serbs to gain autonomy. They had brought Moldavia and Wallachia under Russian protection, and liberated the Moldavians from Turkish rule in Bessarabia. But the Russians’ part in the Greek independence movement showed how far they were prepared to go in their support of their co-religionists to exert their hold over Turkey’s European territories. The Greek revolution really began in Russia.

Turkish soldiers looted churches, murdered priests, men, women and children and mutilated their bodies, cutting off their noses, ears and heads, while their officers looked on. Thousands of terrified civilians fled into neighbouring Bessarabia, presenting the Russian authorities with a massive refugee problem. The violence even spread to Constantinople, where the patriarch and several bishops were publicly hanged by a group of janizaries on Easter Sunday 1821.

In 1822 Ottoman troops brutally crushed a Greek uprising on the island of Chios, hanging 20,000 islanders and deporting into slavery almost all the surviving population of 70,000 Greeks. Europe was outraged by the massacre,

The rhetoric of Holy Russia’s duty to its co-religionists was also employed by Pozzo di Borgo, the Tsar’s ambassador to France, though he was more interested in promoting Russia’s strategic ambitions, calling for a war to expel the Turks from Europe and establish a new Byzantine Empire under Russian protection. Such ideas were widely shared by high officials, army officers and intellectuals, who were increasingly united in the early 1820s by their Russian nationalism and at times by an almost messianic commitment to the Orthodox cause.

One leader in the southern army called for a war against the Turks to unite the Balkan Christians in a ‘Greek Kingdom’.

The most enthusiastic was Baroness von Krüdener, a religious mystic who encouraged Tsar Alexander to believe in his messianic role and campaigned for an Orthodox crusade to drive the Muslims out of Europe and raise the cross in Constantinople and Jerusalem. She was dismissed from the court and ordered by the Tsar to leave St Petersburg.13

Alexander

He stood firmly by the Congress System established at Vienna by which the great powers had agreed to resolve major crises through international negotiation, and realized that any action in the Greek crisis was bound to be opposed. By October 1821 a European policy of international mediation over Greece had already been coordinated by Prince Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister and chief conductor of the Concert of Europe, together with the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh. So when the Tsar appealed to them for support against Turkey, in February 1822, it was agreed to convene an international congress to resolve the crisis.

In later life he grew increasingly irritable and impatient, inclined to rash behaviour and angry rages, as he succumbed to the hereditary mental illness that troubled Alexander and Nicholas’s other older brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, who renounced the throne in 1825.

Lord Heytesbury, the British ambassador in St Petersburg, declared (without any intended irony) that the Sultan would soon become as ‘submissive to the orders of the Tsar as any of the Princes of India to those of the [East India] Company’.

The events of 1833 were a turning point in British policy towards Russia and Turkey. Until then, Britain’s main concern in the Ottoman Empire had been to preserve the status quo, mainly from fears that its breakup would affect the balance of power in Europe and possibly lead to a European war, rather than from any firm commitment to the sovereignty of the Sultan (their support for Greece had not demonstrated much of that). But once the British woke up to the danger that the Ottoman Empire might be taken over by the Egyptians at the head of a powerful Muslim revival, or, even worse, that it might become a Russian protectorate, they took an active interest in Turkey. They increasingly intervened in Ottoman affairs, encouraging economic and political reforms by which the British hoped to restore the health of the Ottoman Empire and expand their influence.

But while few in official British circles thought that Russia was a serious threat to India, this did not prevent the Russophobic British press from whipping up that fear, emphasizing the potential danger posed by Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus and its ‘underhand activities’ in Persia and Afghanistan.29

de Lacy Evans conjured up a nightmare fantasy of Russian aggression and expansion, leading to the conquest of the whole of Asia Minor and the collapse of British trade with India.

The view that Russia, by its very nature, was a threat to India became widespread among the British broadsheet-reading classes. It was expressed by the anonymous author of a widely read pamphlet of 1838 called India, Great Britain, and Russia, in a passage that is reminiscent of the domino theory of the Cold War:

In 1838 they occupied Afghanistan. Officially, their aim was to reinstall the recently deposed Emir Shah Shuja on the Afghan throne, but after that had been achieved, in 1839, they maintained their occupation to support his puppet government – ultimately as a means of moving towards British rule – until they were forced to withdraw by tribal rebellions and disastrous military reverses in 1842.

It did not take them long to realize that by ignoring the Sultan’s call for help against the Egyptian invasion they had missed a golden opportunity to secure their position as the dominant foreign power in the Ottoman Empire. Palmerston said it was ‘the greatest miscalculation in the field of foreign affairs ever made by a British cabinet’.

But the motives of the British in promoting liberal reforms were not just to secure the independence of the Ottoman Empire against Russia. They were also to promote the influence of Britain in Turkey: to make the Turks dependent on the British for political advice and financial loans, and to bring them under the protection of the British military; to ‘civilize’ the Turks under British tutelage, teaching them the virtues of British liberal principles, religious toleration and administrative practices (though stopping short of parliaments and constitutions, for which the Turks were deemed to lack the necessary ‘European’ qualities); to promote British free-trade interests (which may have sounded splendid but was arguably damaging to the Ottoman Empire); and to secure the route to India (where Britain’s free-trade policies were not of course pursued).

The slave trade continued, most of it involving the capture of Christian boys and girls from the Caucasus for sale in Constantinople. The Turks continued to regard the Christians as inferior, and thought that Muslim privileges should not be given up.

The Ottoman government in Constantinople was far too distant and too weak to force through laws in a society without railways, post offices, telegraphs or newspapers.

Convinced that all that mattered was the viewpoint of the Queen and her senior ministers, Nicholas failed to appreciate the influence of Parliament, opposition parties, public opinion and the press on the foreign policy of the British government. This misunderstanding was to play a crucial role in the diplomatic blunders made by Nicholas on the eve of the Crimean War.

Throughout Europe, attitudes to Russia were mostly formed by fears and fantasies, and Britain in this sense was no exception to the rule.

The rapid territorial expansion of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century and the demonstration of its military might against Napoleon had left a deep impression on the European mind.

The ‘Testament’ was a forgery. It was created sometime in the early eighteenth century by various Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian figures connected to France and the Ottomans, and it went through several drafts before the finished version ended up in the French Foreign Ministry archives during the 1760s.

The belief that the ‘Testament’ reflected Russia’s aims formed the basis of France’s foreign policy throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.12 Napoleon I was particularly influenced by the ‘Testament’.

The ‘Testament’ was published by the French in 1812, the year of their invasion of Russia, and from that point on was widely reproduced and cited throughout Europe as conclusive evidence of Russia’s expansionist foreign policy. It was republished on the eve of every war involving Russia on the European continent – in 1854, 1878, 1914 and 1941 – and was cited during the Cold War to explain the aggressive intentions of the Soviet Union. On the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 it was cited in the Christian Science Monitor, Time magazine and the British House of Commons as an explanation of the origins of Moscow’s aims.14

On the Designs of Russia, previously discussed, by the future Crimean War commander George de Lacy Evans, which first laid out the danger posed by Russia’s activities in Asia Minor.

He advocated a preventive war against Russia to block its aggressive intentions. He proposed attacking Russia in Poland, Finland, the Black Sea and the Caucasus, where it was most vulnerable. His eight-point plan reads almost like a blueprint of the larger British aims against Russia during the Crimean War:

Finance revolutionaries to ‘create insurrections and a serf war’.

In 1834 he visited the Circassian tribes, pledging British support for their war against the Russian occupation, an act of provocation against Russia that obliged Palmerston to recall him to London.

Once again, Urquhart took up the Circassian cause and attempted to stir up a conflict between Russia and Britain. In his most brazen act yet, Urquhart conspired to send a British schooner, the Vixen, to Circassia in deliberate contravention of the Russian embargo against foreign shipping on the eastern Black Sea coast imposed as part of the Treaty of Adrianople. The Vixen belonged to a shipping company, George and James Bell of Glasgow and London, that had already clashed with the Russians over their obstructive quarantine regulations on the Danube. Officially, the Vixen was transporting salt, but in fact it was loaded with a large supply of weapons for the Circassians. Ponsonby in Constantinople had been informed of the ship’s intended journey and did nothing to discourage it; nor did he reply to the Bells’ enquiries about whether the Foreign Office recognized the embargo and whether Britain would defend their shipping rights, as Urquhart had assured them that it would. The Russians were aware of Urquhart’s plans:

Urquhart’s backing for free trade (the major reform issue of the 1840s) won him a broad following among Midlands and northern businessmen, who were persuaded by his frequent public speeches that Russian tariffs were a major cause of Britain’s economic depression.

hostility to Russia was rapidly becoming a central reference point in a political discourse about liberty, civilization and progress that helped shape the national identity.

Throughout the 1820s the Russians violated the terms of the treaty – rolling back the freedoms of the press, imposing taxes without the consent of the Polish parliament, and using special powers to persecute the liberals opposed to tsarist rule. The final straw came in November 1830 when the viceroy of Poland, the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Constantine, issued an order to conscript Polish troops for the suppression of revolutions in France and Belgium.

in particular, a love of liberty and the commitment to defend the ‘little man’ against ‘bullies’

The presence of Prince Czartoryski, ‘Poland’s uncrowned king’, in London increased British sympathy for the Polish cause. The fact that the exiled Pole was a former Russian foreign minister gave his warnings about Russia’s menace to Europe even greater credibility.

The image of Poland as a martyred nation was firmly established in the French Catholic imagination by a series of works on Polish history and culture in the 1830s, none more influential than Mickiewicz’s Livre des pèlerins polonais (Book of Polish Pilgrims),

In 1839, the Synod of Polotsk, in Belarus, had proclaimed the dissolution of the Greek Catholic Church, whose pro-Latin clergy had actively supported the Polish insurrection of 1831, and ordered all its property to be transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The perception of Russian aggression and threat was amplified in France by the Marquis de Custine, whose entertaining travelogue La Russie en 1839 did more than any other publication to shape European attitudes towards Russia in the nineteenth century.

He had previously tried his hand at novels, plays and dramas without much success, so travel literature was his last chance to make a reputation for himself.