The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  Faced with the prospect of this sort of violence almost anywhere, the Ottoman authorities dragged their heels over implementing the new laws of religious toleration in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Stratford Canning was increasingly frustrated with the Porte. ‘Turkish ministers are very little disposed to meet the demands of Her Majesty’s Government on the subject of religious persecution,’ he wrote to Clarendon. ‘They pretend to entertain apprehensions of popular discontent among the Mussulmans, if they were to give way.’ Turkish participation in the Crimean War had led to a resurgence of ‘Muslim triumphalism’, Stratford reported. As a result of the war, the Turks had become more protective of their sovereignty, and more resentful of Western intervention into their affairs. There was a new generation of Tanzimat reformers at the head of the Turkish government who were more secure in their personal position and less dependent on the patronage of foreign powers and ambassadors than Reshid’s generation of reformers had been before the Crimean War; they could afford to be more cautious and more practical in their implementation of reforms, carrying out the economic and political requirements of the Western powers but not hurrying to fulfil the religious promises contained in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Throughout his last year as ambassador, Stratford urged the Turkish leaders to be more serious about the protection of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire: it was the price, he told them, that Turkey had to pay for British and French help in the Crimean War. He was particularly exercised by the continued execution of Muslims for converting to Christianity, despite the Sultan’s promises to secure the Christians from religious persecution and abolish the ‘barbarous practice of putting seceders to death’. Citing numerous cases of Christian converts being driven from their homes and killed, Stratford wrote to the Porte on 23 December 1856:

  The great European powers can never consent to perpetuate by the triumphs of their fleets and armies the enforcement in Turkey of a law [apostasy], which is not only a standing insult to them, but a source of cruel persecution to their fellow Christians. They are entitled to demand, the British Government distinctly demands, that the Mohamedean who turns Christian shall be as free from every kind of punishment on that account as the Christian who embraces the Mohamodean faith.24

  Yet by the time of his return to London the next year, very little had been done by the Porte to satisfy the demands of the European governments. ‘Among the Christians,’ Finn reported in July 1857, ‘a strong feeling of discontent is on the increase because of the slowness of the Turkish government to implement religious toleration.’

  The Christians complain that they are insulted in the streets, that they are not placed in equal rank at public courts with Muslim fellow subjects, that they are ousted from almost every office of government employment, and that they are not allowed the honour of military service but instead of it have the old military tax doubled upon them.

  In the rural areas of Palestine, according to Finn, the Hatt-i Hümayun remained unobserved for many years. Local governors were corrupt, ill-disciplined and closely linked to the Muslim notables, clerics and officials, who kept the Christians in their place, while the Porte was too remote and weak to curb their excesses, let alone to force them to uphold the new laws of equality.25

  But it was in the Balkans that the failure of the Porte to carry out reforms would have the most lasting consequences for the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the Balkan region, Christian peasants would rise up against their Muslim landlords and officials, beginning in Bosnia in 1858. The continuation of the millet system would give rise to nationalist movements that would involve the Ottomans and the European powers in a long series of Balkan wars, culminating in the conflicts that would bring about the First World War.

  The Paris Treaty did not make any major territorial changes to the map of Europe. To many at the time, the outcome did not appear worthy of a war in which so many people died. Russia ceded southern Bessarabia to Moldavia. But otherwise the treaty’s articles were statements of principle: the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire were confirmed and guaranteed by the great powers (the first time a Muslim state was recognized by international law, the Congress of Vienna having specifically excluded Turkey from the European powers regulated by its international laws); the protection of the non-Muslim subjects of the Sultan was guaranteed by the signatory powers, thereby annulling Russia’s claims to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire; Russia’s protectorate over the Danubian principalities was negated by an article confirming the autonomy of these two states under Ottoman sovereignty; and, most humiliating of all for the Russians, Article XI declared the Black Sea to be a neutral zone, open to commercial shipping but closed to all warships in peacetime, thus depriving Russia of its naval ports and arsenals on this crucial southern coastal frontier.26

  But if the Paris Treaty made few immediate changes to the European map, it marked a crucial watershed for international relations and politics, effectively ending the old balance of power, in which Austria and Russia had controlled the Continent between themselves, and forging new alignments that would pave the way for the emergence of nation states in Italy, Romania and Germany.

  Although it was Russia that was punished by the Paris Treaty, in the longer term it was Austria that would lose the most from the Crimean War, despite having barely taken part in it. Without its conservative alliance with Russia, which never quite forgave it for its armed neutrality in favour of the allies in 1854, and equally mistrusted by the liberal Western powers for its reactionary politics and ‘soft-on-Russia’ peace initiatives during the war, Austria found itself increasingly isolated on the Continent after 1856. Consequently it would lose out in Italy (in the war against the French and Piedmontese in 1859), in Germany (in the war against the Prussians in 1866) and in the Balkans (where it steadily retreated from the 1870s until 1914).

  None of that was yet apparent in April 1856, when Austria joined France and Britain in a Triple Alliance to defend the Paris settlement. The three powers signed an agreement that any breach of the Paris Treaty would become a cause of war. Palmerston saw it as a ‘good additional Security and Bond of Union’ against Russia, which he fully expected to re-emerge in due course as a major threat to the Continent. He wanted to expand the entente into an anti-Russian league of European states.27 Napoleon was not so sure. Since the fall of Sevastopol, there had been a growing rapprochement between the French and the Russians. Napoleon needed Russia for his plans against the Austrians in Italy. Meanwhile, for the Russians, and in particular for their new Foreign Minister, Alexander Gorchakov, who replaced Nesselrode in 1856, France represented the most likely power to support their efforts to remove the humiliating Black Sea clauses of the Paris Treaty. Both France and Russia were revisionist powers: where Russia wanted revisions to the treaty of 1856, France wanted to remove the remnants of the 1815 settlement. A deal between them could be made.

  Unlike Nesselrode, a firm supporter of the Holy Alliance and its legitimist principles, Gorchakov took a pragmatic view of Russia’s role on the Continent. In his opinion, Russia should not form alliances that committed it to general principles, such as the defence of legitimate monarchies, as it had done before the Crimean War. The war had shown that Russia could not rely in any way on the solidarity of legitimate European monarchies. Nesselrode’s policy had made Russia vulnerable to the failings of other governments, Austria in particular, a power Gorchakov despised from his time as ambassador in Vienna. Instead, Gorchakov believed Russia should focus its diplomacy on its own national interests, and ally with other powers regardless of their ideology to further those interests. Here was a new type of diplomacy, the realpolitik later practised by Bismarck.

  The Russians tested the Paris Treaty from the start, focusing on minor issues which they could exploit to open up divisions in the Crimean alliance. In May 1856 they claimed ownership of a lighthouse on tiny Serpent Island, in Turkish waters near the mouth of the Danube delta, and landed seven men with an officer to take up residence in the lighthouse. Walews
ki was inclined to let the Russians have the insignificant island, but Palmerston was adamant that they had to be ejected, on the grounds that they were infringing Turkish sovereignty. When the captain of a British ship made contact with the Turks on Serpent Island, he was told that they did not mind the Russians being there: they saw them as guests and were happy to sell them their supplies. Palmerston put his foot down. ‘We must avoid the fatal mistake made by Aberdeen in permitting the early movements and indications of Russian aggression to go on unnoticed and unrepressed,’ he wrote to Clarendon on 7 August. Orders were prepared to send the gunboats in to remove the Russians physically, but John Wodehouse, the British envoy in St Petersburg, was doubtful whether Britain had the right to do this, and the Queen shared these doubts, so Palmerston backed down and diplomatic pressure was used instead. Gorchakov insisted that the island had been owned by the Russians since 1833, and appealed to the French, who were thus manoeuvred into a position of international mediation between Britain and Russia.28

  Meanwhile, the Russians launched a second challenge to the Paris Treaty in connection with the border between Russian Bessarabia and Turkish-controlled Moldavia. By an accident of mapping and confusion over names, the allies had drawn the border running to the south of an old village called Bolgrad, 3 kilometres to the north of New Bolgrad, a market town situated on the shores of Lake Yalpuk, which runs into the Danube. The Russians made use of the lack of clarity, claiming that they should be given both Bolgrads, and thus joint ownership of Lake Yalpuk. Palmerston insisted that the border should remain at the old village – the intention of the treaty having been to deprive the Russians of access to the Danube. He urged the French to remain firm and show a united front against the Russians, who would otherwise exploit their differences. But the French were happy to concede the Russian claim as a matter of good faith, though they then proposed that the boundary should run along a narrow strip of land between the market town and Lake Yalpuk, thereby granting more territory to the Russians but depriving them of access to the lake. Once again, the French acted as intermediaries between Russia and Britain.

  By mid-November the Duc de Morny had persuaded Gorchakov to give up Russia’s claim to Serpent Island, provided Russia was given New Bolgrad, without access to the lake, and territorial compensation for their loss in a form decided by the French Emperor. The deal was linked to a proposal by the Tsar and Gorchakov (drawn up with the help of Morny in St Petersburg) for a Franco-Russian convention for the protection of the neutrality of the Black Sea and the Danubian principalities, as set out in the Paris Treaty, but now necessitated, it was claimed by the Russians, ‘by the fact that the treaty has been violated by England and Austria’, who had ‘tried to cheat’ the Russians of legitimate possessions in the Danube area. Morny recommended the Russian proposal to Napoleon and passed on to the French Emperor a promise made to him by Gorchakov: Russia would support French acquisitions on the European continent if France signed the convention. ‘Mark well,’ Morny wrote, ‘Russia is the only power that will ratify the territorial gains of France. I have already been assured of that. Try and get the same from the English! And who knows, with our demanding and capricious people, one day we might have to come to Russia for their satisfaction.’ Details of the Russian attitude to French territorial acquisitions had been outlined in a secret instruction to Count Kiselev, the former governor of the Danubian principalities who became ambassador to France after the Crimean War: protocol required that a senior statesman represent the Tsar’s new policy of friendship towards France. Should Napoleon direct his attention to the Italian peninsula, Kiselev was told, Russia ‘would consent in advance to the reunion of Nice and Savoy with France, as well as to the union of Lombardy with Sardinia’. If his ambitions were directed to the Rhine, Russia would ‘use its good offices’ to help the French, while continuing to honour its commitments to Prussia.29

  A conference of the powers’ representatives in Paris brought about a speedy resolution of the two disputes in January 1857: Turkish ownership of Serpent Island was confirmed with an international commission to control the lighthouse; and New Bolgrad was given to Moldavia, with Russia compensated by a boundary change elsewhere in Bessarabia. On the face of it, the Russians had been forced to back down on both issues, but they had scored a political victory by weakening the bonds of the Crimean alliance. The French had made it clear that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was of secondary significance to them, and they were ready to enter into a deal with the Russians to redraw the European map.

  Over the next eighteen months a number of high-level Russian visitors appeared in France. In 1857, the Grand Duke Constantine, the Tsar’s younger brother and the admiral in charge of the much-needed reform of the Russian navy after the Crimean War, made a trip to Paris, having decided that a partnership with France was the best way to get the technical assistance Russia needed to modernize its backward fleet (he gave to French firms all the orders that could not be fulfilled by Russian shipbuilders). On his way, he stopped at the Bay of Villafranca, near Nice, where he negotiated an agreement with Cavour for the Odessa Shipping Company to rent a coaling station from the Turin government, thereby providing Russia with a foothold in the Mediterranean.bd Napoleon gave a splendid reception to the Grand Duke in Paris, and drew him into private conversations about the future of Europe. The French Emperor knew that the Grand Duke was trying to assert himself as a force in Russian foreign policy, and that he had pan-Slav views at odds with those of Gorchakov, so he played to his political ambitions. Napoleon referred specifically to the possibility of an Italian uprising against the Austrians and the eventual unification of Italy under Piedmont’s leadership, and talked about the likelihood of Christian uprisings in the Ottoman Empire, a subject of great interest to Constantine, suggesting that in both cases it would suit their interests to encourage the formation of smaller nation states.30

  Encouraged by the Grand Duke, Napoleon entered into direct contact with the Tsar with the aim of securing his support for a French-Piedmontese war against the Austrians in Italy. Having met the Tsar at Stuttgart in September 1857, Napoleon became so confident of his support that when he met Cavour the following July at Plombières to draw up war plans he assured the Piedmontese Prime Minister that he had Alexander’s solemn promise to back their plans in Italy: after the defeat of the Austrians in Lombardy-Venetia, an enlarged Piedmont would form a Kingdom of Northern Italy (as had emerged briefly in 1848–9) and become united with Tuscany, a reduced Papal State and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in an Italian Confederation; and for his efforts on behalf of the Italian cause, Napoleon would be rewarded with the return of Nice and Savoy to France. Cavour had pinned his hopes for Italy on the Franco-British alliance. That was why he had committed his Sardinian troops to the Crimean War. At the Paris congress he had won the sympathies of the British and the French through his influence behind the scenes, and although he had gained nothing tangible, no firm promise of support for the idea of Italy, he continued to believe that the Western powers were his only hope. Hardly believing that a Russian tsar would give his blessing to a national revolution, Cavour rushed to the nearby spa resort of Baden-Baden, where the ‘run-down kings and princes’ of Europe congregated, to consult with the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (Alexander’s influential liberal aunt), who confirmed that Russia could be counted on. ‘The Grand Duchess told me’, Cavour wrote to General Marmora, ‘that if France were to unite with us, public opinion would force the Russian government to participate.’31

  But in truth, the Tsar was not keen to get involved in any war. In return for French commitments to cancel their support for the Black Sea clauses of the Paris Treaty, Alexander promised only armed neutrality, mobilizing a large Russian force on the border with Galicia to prevent the Austrians from sending troops to Italy. The Austrians had used armed neutrality in favour of the allies during the Crimean War, and Alexander’s decision to follow the same tactic let him take revenge on Austria for its betrayal. Napoleon, for
his part, was unwilling to give a firm pledge on the Black Sea clauses, fearing it would damage his relations with Britain, so no formal treaty with the Russians could be reached. But there was a gentlemen’s agreement between the emperors, signed in March 1859, by which the Russians would adopt a stance of ‘benevolent neutrality’ in the event of a Franco-Austrian war in exchange for French ‘good offices’ at a ‘future date’.32

  It was on this basis that the French and Piedmontese began their war against Austria in April 1859, in the knowledge that the Russians would advance 300,000 troops towards the Austrian frontier while they attacked in Italy. Only a few years before, Russia would have given military support to Austria against any French attempts to revise the Vienna treaty. The Crimean War had changed everything.

  Under the command of Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel, the Franco-Piedmontese army won a series of rapid victories, destroying the Austrian forces under the command of Emperor Franz Joseph at the battle of Solferino on 24 June, the last major battle in history in which all the armies were under the personal command of their monarchs. By this time, Napoleon was afraid that the German states might take up arms in support of Austria; therefore, without telling the Piedmontese, he signed an armistice with the Austrians at Villafranca, by which most of Lombardy, including its capital, Milan, was transferred to the French, who immediately gave it to Piedmont, as agreed by Napoleon and Cavour at Plombières. The Villafranca deal restored the monarchs of the central Italian states (Parma, Modena and Tuscany) who had been unseated by the popular revolts that broke out at the beginning of the war – a deal that enraged the Piedmontese, though it pleased the Russians, who had deep concerns about the way the Italian movement was taking a revolutionary turn. The Piedmontese army proceeded to annex the central states. Savoy and Nice were transferred to France, its agreed reward for helping the Italian cause. Their cession was opposed by the revolutionary general Giuseppe Garibaldi, a hero of the war against the Austrians, who had been born in Nice. In the spring of 1860, he led his thousand Redshirts on an expedition to conquer Sicily and Naples and unite them with the rest of Italy under Piedmont’s leadership.