The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  During the first quarter of the nineteenth century the other national Churches (Bulgarian and Serb) gradually assumed an equal importance to the Greek-dominated patriarchy in Constantinople. Greek domination of Orthodox affairs, including education and the courts, was unacceptable to many Slavs, who looked increasingly to their own Churches for their national identity and leadership against the Turks. Nationalism was a potent force among the different groups of Balkan Christians – Serbs, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Wallachians and Greeks – who united on the basis of their language, culture and religion to break free from Ottoman control. The Serbs were the first to win their liberation, by means of Russian-sponsored uprisings between 1804 and 1817, leading to the Turkish recognition of Serb autonomy and eventually to the establishment of a principality of Serbia with its own constitution and a parliament headed by the Obrenovi dynasty. But such was the weakness of the Ottoman Empire that its collapse in the rest of the Balkans appeared to be only a question of time.

  Long before the Tsar described the Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe’, on the eve of the Crimean War, the idea that it was about to crumble had become a commonplace. ‘Turkey cannot stand, she is falling of herself,’ the Prince of Serbia told the British consul in Belgrade in 1838; ‘the revolt of her misgoverned provinces will destroy her.’8

  That misgovernment was rooted in the empire’s failure to adapt to the modern world. The domination of the Muslim clergy (the mufti and the ulema) acted as a powerful brake on reform. ‘Meddle not with things established, borrow nothing from the infidels, for the law forbids it’ was the motto of the Muslim Institution, which made sure that the sultan’s laws conformed to the Koran. Western ideas and technologies were slow to penetrate the Islamic parts of the empire: trades and commerce were dominated by the non-Muslims (the Christians and Jews); there was no Turkish printing press until the 1720s; and as late as 1853 there were five times as many boys studying traditional Islamic law and theology in Constantinople as there were in the city’s modern schools with a secular curriculum.9

  The stagnation of the economy was matched by the proliferation of corrupt bureaucracy. The purchasing of offices for the lucrative business of tax-farming was almost universal in the provinces. Powerful pashas and military governors ruled whole regions as their personal fiefdoms, squeezing from them as many taxes as they could. As long as they passed on a share of their revenues to the Porte, and paid off their own financial backers, no one questioned or cared much about the arbitrary violence they employed. The lion’s share of the empire’s taxes was extracted from the non-Muslims, who had no legal protection or means of redress in the Muslim courts, where the testimony of a Christian counted for nothing. It is estimated that by the early nineteenth century the average Christian farmer and trader in the Ottoman Empire was paying half his earnings in taxes.10

  But the key to the decline of the Ottoman Empire was its military backwardness. Turkey had a large army in the early nineteenth century, and it accounted for as much as 70 per cent of treasury expenditure, but it was technically inferior to the modern conscript armies of Europe. It lacked their centralized administration, command structures and military schools, was poorly trained and was still dependent on the recruitment of mercenaries, irregulars and tribal forces from the periphery of the empire. Military reform was essential, and recognized as such by reformist sultans and their ministers, particularly after the repeated defeats by Russia, followed by the loss of Egypt to Napoleon. But to build a modern conscript army was impossible without a fundamental transformation of the empire to centralize control of the provinces and overcome the vested interests of the 40,000 janizaries, the sultan’s salaried household infantry, who represented the outmoded traditions of the military establishment and resisted all reforms.11

  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. Selim’s concept of Westernization was similar to the Westernization of Russia’s institutions carried out by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, and the Turks were conscious of this parallel. It involved little more than the borrowing of new technologies and practices from foreigners, and certainly not the adoption of Western cultural principles that might challenge the dominant position of Islam in the empire. The Turks had invited the French to advise them, partly because they assumed they were the least religious of the European nations and therefore the least likely to threaten Islam – an impression gained from the anti-clerical policies of the Jacobins.

  Selim’s reforms were defeated by the janizaries and the Muslim clergy, who were opposed to any change. But they were continued by Mahmud II (1808–39), who built up the military schools established by Selim to undermine the janizaries’ domination of the army by promoting officers on a meritocratic basis. He pushed through reforms of military dress, introduced Western equipment, and abolished the janizaries’ fiefdoms in an effort to create a centralized European-style army into which the Sultan’s household guards would eventually be merged. When the janizaries rebelled against the reforms, in 1826, they were put down, with several thousand killed by the Sultan’s new army, and then liquidated by imperial decree.

  As the Sultan’s empire weakened to the point where it seemed in danger of imminent collapse, the great powers intervened increasingly in its affairs – ostensibly to protect the Christian minorities but in reality to advance their own ambitions in the area. 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. To advance their country’s trade they developed direct links with merchants and financiers and established consuls in the major trading towns. They also began to issue passports to Ottoman subjects. By the middle of the nineteenth century as many as one million inhabitants of the Sultan’s empire were using the protective powers of the European legations to escape the jurisdiction and taxes of the Turkish authorities. Russia was the most active in this respect, developing its Black Sea commerce by granting passports to large numbers of the Sultan’s Greeks and allowing them to sail under the Russian flag.12

  For the Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire, Russia was their protector against the Turks. 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. In its early stages it was led by Greek-born Russian politicians who had never even been to mainland Greece (a ‘geographical expression’ if ever there was one) but who dreamed of uniting all the Greeks through a series of uprisings against the Turks, which they planned to begin in the Danubian principalities. In 1814 a Society of Friends (Philiki Etaireia) was set up by Greek nationalists and students in Odessa, with affiliated branches established soon thereafter in all the major areas where the Greeks lived – Moldavia, Wallachia, the Ionian islands, Constantinople, the Peloponnese – as well as in other Russian cities where the Greeks were strong. It was the Society that organized the Greek uprising in Moldavia in 1821 – an uprising led by Alexander Ypsilantis, a senior officer in the Russian cavalry and the son of a prominent Phanariot family in Moldavia that had fled to St Petersburg on the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war in 1806. Ypsilantis had close connections to the Russian court, where he had received the patronage of the Empress Maria Fedorovna (the widow of
Paul I) from the age of 15. Tsar Alexander I had appointed him his aide-de-camp in 1816.

  There was a powerful Greek lobby in the ruling circles of St Petersburg. The Foreign Ministry contained a number of Greek-born diplomats and activists of the Greek cause. None was more important than Alexandru Sturdza from Moldavia, a Phanariot on his mother’s side, who became the first Russian governor of Bessarabia, or Ioannis Kapodistrias, a Corfu nobleman who was appointed Russia’s Foreign Minister jointly with Karl Nesselrode in 1815. The Greek Gymnasium in St Petersburg had been training Greek-born youths for military and diplomatic service since the 1770s, and many of its graduates had fought in the Russian army against the Turks in the war of 1806–12 (as did thousands of Greek volunteers from the Ottoman Empire, who fled to Russia at the war’s end). By the time Ypsilantis planned his uprising in Moldavia, there was a large cohort of Russian-trained, experienced Greek fighters on which he could count.

  The plan was to start the uprising in Moldavia and then move to Wallachia. The insurgents would combine their attacks with the pandur (guerrilla) militia led by the Wallachian revolutionary Tudor Vladimirescu, another veteran of the Tsar’s army in the Russo-Turkish war of 1806–12, whose peasant followers were in practice more opposed to their Phanariot rulers and landlords than they were to the distant Ottomans. The Treaty of Bucharest had placed the principalities under the joint sovereignty of Russia and the Ottoman Empire. They did not have any Turkish garrisons but the local hospodars were allowed to maintain small armies, which Ypsilantis expected to join the uprising as soon as his army of Greek volunteers from Russia crossed the River Pruth. Ypsilantis hoped that the revolt would spark a Russian intervention to defend the Greeks once the Turks took repressive measures against them. In the Moldavian capital of Iai he appeared in a Russian uniform and announced to the local boyars that he had ‘the support of a great power’. There was certainly a great deal of support in the élite circles of St Petersburg, where philhellenic sentiment ran high, as well as among military and Church leaders. The Russian consulates in the principalities even became recruiting centres for the revolt. But neither Kapodistrias nor the Tsar knew anything about the preparations for the uprising, and both men denounced it as soon as it began. However much they might have sympathized with the Greek cause, Russia was the founder of the Holy Alliance, the conservative union formed with the Austrians and Prussians in 1815, whose raison d’être was to combat revolutionary and nationalist movements on the European continent.

  Without Russian support, the Greek uprising in the principalities was soon crushed by 30,000 Turkish troops. The Wallachian peasant army retreated to the mountains, and Ypsilantis fled to Transylvania, where he was arrested by the Austrian authorities. The Turks occupied Moldavia and Wallachia, and carried out reprisals against the Christian population there. 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.

  As news spread of the atrocities, causing ever-stronger Russian sympathy for the Greek cause, the Tsar felt increasingly obliged to intervene, despite his commitment to the principles of the Holy Alliance. As Alexander saw it, the actions of the Turks had gone well beyond the legitimate defence of Ottoman sovereignty; they were in a religious war against the Greeks, whose religious rights the Russians had a duty to protect, according to their interpretation of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji. The Tsar issued an ultimatum calling on the Turks to evacuate the principalities, restore the damaged churches, and acknowledge Russia’s treaty rights to protect the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects. This was the first time any of the powers had spoken out on behalf of the Greeks. The Turks responded by seizing Russian ships, confiscating their grain, and imprisoning their sailors in Constantinople.

  Russia broke off diplomatic relations. Many of the Tsar’s advisers favoured war. The Greek revolt had spread to central Greece, the Peloponnese, Macedonia and Crete. Unless the Russians intervened, they feared that in these regions it would be repressed with similar atrocities to those in the principalities. 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, whose horrors were depicted by the French painter Eugène Delacroix in his great masterpiece The Massacre of Chios (1824). In the Russian Foreign Ministry, Kapodistrias and Sturdza argued for military intervention on religious grounds. In a rehearsal of the arguments employed in 1853 for Russia’s invasion of the principalities, they reasoned that the defence of Christians against Muslim violence should outweigh any considerations about the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. To support revolts in, say, Spain or Austria, they maintained, would be a betrayal of the principles of the Holy Alliance, because these two nations were both ruled by lawful Christian sovereigns; but no Muslim power could be recognized as lawful or legitimate, so the same principles did not apply to the Greek uprising against the Ottomans. 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. There was talk of ‘crossing the Danube and delivering the Greeks from the cruelties of Muslim rule’. One leader in the southern army called for a war against the Turks to unite the Balkan Christians in a ‘Greek Kingdom’. The pro-war lobby also had supporters at the court, where the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance were more strictly recognized. 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 was far too committed to the Concert of Europe to give serious consideration to the idea of unilateral Russian intervention to liberate the Greeks. 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.

  Alexander called for the creation of a large autonomous Greek state under Russian protection, much like Moldavia and Wallachia. However, Britain feared that this would be a means for Russia to advance its own interests and intervene in Ottoman affairs on the pretext of protecting its co-religionists. Austria was equally afraid that a successful Greek revolt would set off uprisings in parts of central Europe under its control. Since Alexander prized the Austrian alliance above all, he held back assistance to the Greeks, while continuing to urge collective European action to help them. None of the powers would support the Greeks. But two things happened in 1825 to change their minds: first, the Sultan called in Mehmet Ali, his powerful vassal in Egypt, to put down the Greeks, which the Egyptians did with new atrocities, giving rise to an ever-growing wave of pro-Greek sympathy and ever-louder calls for intervention in liberal Europe;
and then Alexander died.

  The new tsar – the man responsible, more than anyone, for the Crimean War – was 29 when he succeeded his brother to the Russian throne. Tall and imposing, with a large, balding head, long sideburns and an officer’s moustache, Nicholas I was every inch a ‘military man’. From an early age he had developed an obsessive interest in military affairs, learning all the names of his brother’s generals, designing uniforms, and attending with excitement military parades and manoeuvres. Having missed out on his boyhood dream of fighting in the war against Napoleon, he prepared himself for a soldier’s life. In 1817 he received his first appointment, Inspector-General of Engineers, from which he derived a lifelong interest in army engineering and artillery (the strongest elements of the Russian military during the Crimean War). He loved the routines and discipline of army life: they appealed to his strict and pedantic character as well as to his spartan tastes (throughout his life he insisted on sleeping on a military campbed). Courteous and charming to those in his intimate circle, to others Nicholas was cold and stern. 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 1825.14

  More than Alexander, Nicholas placed the defence of Orthodoxy at the centre of his foreign policy. Throughout his reign he was governed by an absolute conviction in his divine mission to save Orthodox Europe from the Western heresies of liberalism, rationalism and revolution. During his last years he was led by this calling to fantastic dreams of a religious war against the Turks to liberate the Balkan Christians and unite them with Russia in an Orthodox empire with its spiritual centres in Constantinople and Jerusalem. Anna Tiutcheva, who was at his court from 1853, described Nicholas as ‘the Don Quixote of autocrats – terrible in his chivalry and power to subordinate everything to his futile struggle against History’.15