Crimean War

The Crimean War lasted from October 1853 to February 1856. It was a war fought primarily on the Crimean Peninsula between the Russians on one side, and the British, French, and the Ottoman Empire on the other.

The beginnings of the war can be traced to 1851, when Napoleon III(France) demanded that the Ottomans acknowledge France as the 'sovereign authority' of the Holy Land.

However, this flew in the face of two earlier treaties between the Russians and the Ottomans, and so the Ottomans renounced the treaty. Napoleon III responded by sending a warship, the Charlemagne to the Black Sea. This show of force, along with some diplomacy and money, led to the Sultan Abd-ul-Mejid I to reversing his decision, and a new treaty confirmed France and the Catholic Church as the supreme Christian Organization in the Holy Land. It also gave the keys to the Church of the Nativity, previously in the hands of the Greek Orthodox Church, to the Catholic Church.

Napoleon appeared to misjudge the religious convictions of Tsar Nicholas I. Angry over losing the diplomatic war to France , the Russian Tsar had his 4th and 5th Army Corps mobilized and deployed along the River Danube and had Count Karl Nesselrode, his foreign minister, begin a diplomatic war to regain Russian prestige with the Ottomans.

Prince Menshikov attempted to negotiate a new treaty, under which Russia would be allowed to interfere whenever it deemed the Sultan's protection inadequate. The British embassy in Istanbul at the time was being run by Hugh Rose. Rose gathered intelligence on Russian troop movements along the Danube frontier, and became concerned about the extent of Menshikov's mission. Rose used his powers as the British representative to the Ottomans, and ordered a British squadron of warships to depart and head for Istanbul. However, Rose's actions were not backed by the British admiral in command of the squadron, only the French sent a naval task force.

At the same time, however, the British Prime Minister Aberdeen sent Lord Stratford who, through skillful diplomacy, convinced the Sultan to reject the treaty. Benjamin Disraeli blamed Aberdeen and Stratford's actions for making war inevitable, starting the process by which Aberdeen would be forced to resign. Shortly after he learned of the failure of Menshikov's diplomacy, the Tsar marched his armies into Moldavia and Wallachia (Ottoman principalities in which Russia was acknowledged as a special guardian of the Orthodox Church), using the Sultan's failure to resolve the issue of the Holy Places as a pretext. Nicholas believed that the European powers would not object strongly to the annexation of a few Ottoman provinces.

In 1853, after Russia ignored an Anglo-French ultimatum to withdraw from the Danubian Principalities, Great Britain and France declared war.