Theirs not to make reply,
theirs not to reason why,
theirs but to do and die.The Crimean War
The Crimean War, otherwise known as the Eastern Crisis and romantically as 'The Last Crusade', began in 1853 over the rights of the Christians who lived within the Holy Land. The Russians, attempting to force their influence over the decaying Ottoman Empire, the 'Sick Man of Europe,' sent a gunboat flotilla towards the Dardanelles to force a settlement with the Sublime Porte over the rights of the Eastern Orthodoxy to Jerusalem.
The French, fearing not only persecution of the Catholics in the Holy Land but also of a Russian superpower, pledged support for the Ottoman Empire against the Russian threat. Even the British, who traditionally opposed the French on all matters, threw their weight in with the French to counter Ottoman influence in Egypt. The French Navy sent forth their own flotilla towards Constantinople, and the British dispatched the Mediterranean Station from their home in Gibraltar.
The War began with the Russian naval forces engaging the Anglo-French forces in the harbor of Constantinople. Quickly routed from overwhelming firepower, the Russian Navy retreated into the Black Sea. With the first shots fired in this war, the forces of Europe mobilized against the Russian Empire. The Pope in Rome, who typically tended to his own affairs in the Italian Peninsula, called the entirety of Christendom - whether it be Protestant or Catholic - to arms in a Crusade against the heretical Orthodoxy, who he claimed to be seeking to exterminate the long-lasting Catholic pockets in the Ottoman territories. The Knights of Malta, long silent from the affairs of the world, opened their ports to the British Empire as the flood of men to Constantinople increased.
The Army of Our Lady of Victory, as it was named in the press, comprised of Norsemen, Italians, Hungarians, Germans, French, and Britons, landed in Crimea to initially little resistance from the Russians. However, as they marched to capture the port city of Sevastapol, the crusading army was quickly and rapidly attacked by Russian Army units, who had been laying in wait in the countryside around the city. They were forced to retreat to the beach-head, near Kerch, and it is where they made camp over the winter, facing dropping rations and plummeting morale as the Russian Navy interdicted convoys meant to relieve the force.
In the Caucasus, the Ottoman forces faced defeat after defeat at the hands of a superior-trained Russian Army. They were forced into the Pontic Alps where they put up a stubborn resistance against the Russians, who sought to make gains into Armenia. The only success in the first year of the War was the rapid seizure of Alyaska by North American forces, who expelled the native Russians in an act of barbarity suppressed by the British press.
As the situation in the Ottoman Empire looked grimmer and grimmer, the Greeks - known to the Ottomans and themselves as simply 'Romans' - rose up in open revolt across their peninsula and throughout their former homelands. What turned into a small insurgency soon boiled into a full insurgency against the Ottomans. The Greek revolutionaries fashioned themselves as oppressed Christians revolting against Islamic tyranny, and thus the crusading armies refused to intervene on the Ottomans' behalf.
The situation in the Crimea changed in mid-1855, with the destruction of the last of the Black Sea Fleet in the Battle of the Kerch Sea. With the sea lanes now free for convoys, the Army of Our Lady of Victory rapidly moved towards their original goal of Sevastapol. Facing heavy resistance at Inkerman and Balaclava, which saw the British contingent almost totally wiped out, the Army eventually reached the walls of Sevastapol and laid siege to her in January of 1856.
While the crusaders stood at the gates of Sevastapol, the Balkans was embroiled in an open revolt. The Greeks consolidated control in the Peloponnese, Thessalia, Macedonia, Crete and the other Aegean Islands, and were already making their way into Thrace and towards the holy city of Constantinople. The Hungarians, likewise, exploited the situation and moved to take control of Serbia and the Bosnian territories. The Bulgarians and Roumanians, long held under heel by the Sublime Porte, likewise rose up on the same grounds as the Greeks, and with little resistance left in the Balkans, proclaimed at the same time the Second Bulgarian Empire and the Principality of Roumania.
The Army of Our Lady of Victory pierced the walls of Sevastapol in late February of 1856, after almost two months of an intense siege. The defenders, starved and almost out of ammunition, surrendered en masse to the European armies. With this brutal and humiliating defeat, the Russian Army reported numerous mutinies along the Pontic Front, and the Tsar was forced to come to terms with the European powers.
But the Greek had their own ideas, for at the same time the Tsar's dignitaries presented the representatives of Western Europe with his terms of peace, the Greek revolutionaries marched into Constantinople after the Greeks inside the city opened the gates to the army marching to relieve them. In the Hagia Sophia, after centuries of Muslim control, the Basileía Rhōmaíōna - the Roman Empire - was resurrected from the ashes of history, with Alexandros Ypslantis - the leader of the Greek Army - proclaimed as Basileus; Emperor of the Romans.
The Treaty of Vienna was signed in late 1856 and formally repudiated Russia's position in the Levant. It also recognized that the Alaskan Territory was now a constituent territory of the Dominion of North America, and made arrangements for monetary sums to be paid to the victors in compensation for lost treasure. It also established a British Protectorate in Egypt, and a French Protectorate in the Holy Land. The Treaty, however, made no mention of the events in the Balkans.
The situation had rapidly gotten out of hand, and while the Army of Our Lady of Victory returned to their homelands in laurels of triumph, the Ottoman forces were in no position to wage war against the Balkan nations. They refused to recognize the loss of their European territories, but were powerless to stop it as they were forced to consolidate their power in the Middle East. Their Empire appears to be on the ropes, and the Great Powers are already looking to divide up the pieces of the Ottoman pie.
At home, though a seemingly minor event to all except those in military circles, the grave defeats of the British Army forced the military establishment to make a series of reforms known to history as Peel Reforms, named after the Secretary of State for War. This formally, although it took some time to fully implement, discarded the numbered regiments scheme, instead localizing the units to home recruiting counties and territories. Regiments were amalgamated to form up to four battalion units, which would rotate on foreign overseas service for up to a year at a time. It also reduced the terms of enlisted service from 21 to 12 years, with only half of that spent with the regulars. With the absorption of the Indian armies after the dissolution of the East India Company, it proved a plan grounded in foresight. The Peel Reforms not only affected the units of Great Britain and Ireland proper, but throughout the Dominions as well.
In foreign affairs circles, the Balkan Question, as it has become known in the British Parliament, has been answered largely on the ground. The freshly-independent Principality of Serbia, with acquisitions in Kosovo and Bosnia, fell under the influence of the Crown of St. Stephen, as did the Principality of Roumania. The Bulgarians and the Romans , however, found an ally in none of the Great Powers, not Russia for it is weak, and not the rest of the Great Powers for fighting their Orthodox cousins, but in each other. The strongest power in the wake of the Balkan Revolutions, the Romans, having dealt with the Turkish settlers in their lands, seek to reclaim their Empire in what is called the 'Megali Idea' - The Great Idea.
An unsteady peace reigns in the Balkans and Anatolia, but for how long is anyone's guess.
Gunther
