Crimean War

The Crimean War was fought between 1853 and 1856, when Russia under Nicholas I confronted an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France and, from 1855, the Kingdom of Sardinia. The immediate cause was a dispute about the protection of Christian subjects in the Ottoman Empire and control of the holy sites in Palestine, which Russia used as a pretext to occupy the Danubian principalities. Britain and France intervened to preserve the balance of power. Fighting took place in the Black Sea, the Baltic and the Pacific, but the decisive theatre was the Crimean peninsula, where the allies besieged Sevastopol for eleven months in terrible conditions. The war exposed the incompetence of the old order: supply columns collapsed, cholera swept the camps, and the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava became a byword for futile courage. Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole reformed nursing care, and the war was among the first covered by photographers and telegraphic war correspondents. The Treaty of Paris in 1856 stripped Russia of a protectorate over the Ottoman Christians and demilitarised the Black Sea. Defeat prompted Alexander II to emancipate the serfs in 1861 and to sell Alaska, while the war weakened the Ottoman reform movement known as the Tanzimat.