The Crimean War and the Treaty of Paris

Date

October 1853 – March 1856

Category

Military & conflict

Region

Crimea, Black Sea and the Ottoman Empire

Era

Modern

Significance

The Crimean War (October 1853 – February 1856) pitted Russia against an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France and, from 1855, the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont.

Its proximate cause was a dispute over the rights of Christian churches in Ottoman Palestine and Tsar Nicholas I's demand to protect the Orthodox subjects of the sultan, but the deeper issue was the fate of the declining Ottoman Empire — the 'Eastern Question' — and Britain's determination to block Russian expansion toward the Mediterranean and the routes to India. The fighting centred on the Russian naval base of Sevastopol in the Crimea, where a prolonged and costly siege exposed staggering logistical failures and disease that killed far more soldiers than combat; the war is also remembered for Florence Nightingale's nursing reforms and early war photography and journalism. The Treaty of Paris, signed on 30 March 1856, guaranteed Ottoman integrity, neutralised the Black Sea by barring Russian and Ottoman warships and arsenals, and forced Russia to cede southern Bessarabia. The war shattered the post-1815 Concert of Europe, isolated Russia, and exposed its military and social backwardness — a humiliation that drove Tsar Alexander II toward sweeping domestic reform, above all the emancipation of the serfs. Sardinia's participation also won Piedmont diplomatic credit useful for the Italian cause.

Empires active in October 1853 – March 1856

• Russian Empire
  1721 CE – 1917 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE – 1912 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related military & conflict events

• The Taiping Rebellion
  1850–1864
• American Civil War and the abolition of slavery
  1861–1865 (Emancipation Proclamation 1 January 1863; 13th Amendment ratified 6 December 1865)
• First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking
  1839–1842 (Treaty of Nanking, 29 August 1842)
• The Franco-Prussian War, German unification and the Paris Commune
  19 July 1870 – 10 May 1871; German Empire proclaimed 18 January 1871
• Battle of Waterloo
  18 June 1815
• Napoleon's invasion of Russia
  June–December 1812

Also relevant

• Second Opium War and the burning of the Summer Palace
  1856–1860 (Convention of Peking, October 1860)

Further reading

Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire

The wider story

Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire

Caroline Finkel

The standard readable single-volume Ottoman history.

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