[CommanderSock]

$1:

Crimea: The Last Crusade. By Orlando Figes. Allen Lane; 575 pages; £30. To be published in America by Metropolitan in April as “The Crimean War: A History”; $35. Buy from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com

MODERN mechanised warfare, with soldiers and civilians alike struck down in huge numbers by industrial killing machines, is often said to have started in the fields of Flanders in 1914. But it can also be argued that it had its ghastly birth 60 years earlier, on the north coast of the Black Sea. For its protagonists—the leading European powers of the day—the Crimean war was certainly the most significant conflict of the second half of the 19th century. If deaths from disease are included, it cost at least 750,000 lives, two-thirds of them Russian, and it triggered big social and cultural changes in all the countries affected.

Its defining event, the year-long assault on the Russian fortress of Sebastopol (depicted above), was conducted with high-tech efficiency: the besiegers fired up to 75,000 artillery rounds a day in an early version of “shock and awe”. And the human consequences of war were relayed to the public at home with speed and unsparing honesty by journalists such as William Russell of the Times, who blazed a trail for generations of war reporters. When the Russians finally abandoned Sebastopol, they left about 3,000 wounded whose condition Russell described in horrific detail: injuries infested with maggots, broken limbs protruding through raw flesh.

Yet for all its modernity, the fighting was also a “holy war” for each belligerent power. Leaders used religious rhetoric and ordinary soldiers and sailors said their prayers as they tried to make sense of what they were doing. That, presumably, is the point Orlando Figes, a historian at Birkbeck College in London, is making with his British subtitle, “The Last Crusade”. His book reveals the strange mixture of meanings the war had for its combatants. He puts the conflict into its broader context: the determination of Britain (and with some reservations, France) to stem Russian expansion and to bolster Islam in its fight with eastern Christianity.

No, that last point is not a mistake. The great historical paradox of the Crimean war—and of the longer-term Russo-Turkish conflict of which it was one episode—is that Anglican England and Roman Catholic France were aligned with Islam’s sultan-caliph against the tsars who saw themselves as the world’s last truly Christian emperors. Above all, the western Christian powers were determined to avoid any reversal of the Muslim conquest of Istanbul: “The Russians shall not have Constantinople” chorused an English music-hall song.

How did the various players in this strange religious game explain themselves to their own pious subjects? For the theocracies of Russia and Turkey, and their God-fearing soldiers, things were fairly straightforward: they were fighting, respectively, for Christianity and Islam.

It was harder, you might think, for the Church of England and the Catholic establishment in France to explain their support of the caliphate. In fact, they found it easy enough to construct the necessary arguments. First, British and French clerics demonised Russian Orthodoxy as a semi-pagan creed. Second, they maintained that in some peculiar way the Ottoman empire was more friendly to its Christian subjects than the tsar was. (The Ottomans tolerated Protestant missionaries, so long as the evangelisers limited their search for souls to Orthodox Christians.)

In the spring of 1854, as the Crimean fighting began in earnest, an Anglican cleric declared that Russian Orthodoxy was as “impure, demoralising, and intolerant as popery itself”. What could be more natural, then, than to team up with Islam and popery to cleanse that terrible impurity? A French newspaper, meanwhile, gave warning that the Russians represented a special menace to all Catholics because “they hope to convert us to their heresy”.

As Mr Figes recalls, the tactical friendship between Western Christians and Ottoman Muslims had its limits. To be sure, British envoys to the Holy Land probably found more in common with lordly Ottoman administrators than with the exuberant faith of Orthodox Christian peasant-pilgrims. But not all Muslim Turks were overjoyed at being embraced, and hailed as Christian-friendly, by Western powers. When in 1856 the sultan yielded to Western pressure and granted Christians some equality, there was a backlash from the Islamic establishment across the empire.

It is a complex tale, told vividly by Mr Figes. Perhaps it should serve as a healthy cold shower for any modern civilisational warrior who sets out to present the course of history as a simple tug-of-war between Christianity and Islam.

Books and Arts

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/17145178

[Gunnair]

Not sure I buy into the Holy War. Britain was fighting against Russian expansion for several reasons, not the least was its concern that Russia had its eye on India. Russia was expanding on the Caucuses at the same time.

Both Britain and France were equally concerned with bolstering the Ottoman Empire (not Islam) - also known as the sick man of Europe - in order to keep Russian expansion out of the Balkans.

This strikes me as someone writing another book on the Crimean War but with a topical religious theme.

[CommanderSock]

Gunnair Gunnair:

Not sure I buy into the Holy War. Britain was fighting against Russian expansion for several reasons, not the least was its concern that Russia had its eye on India. Russia was expanding on the Caucuses at the same time.

Both Britain and France were equally concerned with bolstering the Ottoman Empire (not Islam) - also known as the sick man of Europe - in order to keep Russian expansion out of the Balkans.

This strikes me as someone writing another book on the Crimean War but with a topical religious theme.

Perhaps the British and French used propaganda of religion to justify entering the war, similar to how the British and Americans used WMD as an excuse to enter Iraq in 2003.

It could be a simple case of realpolitik.

[Mustang1]

Overreach - classic balance of power politics, especially for Europeans states.

[Gunnair]

CommanderSock CommanderSock:

Gunnair Gunnair:

Not sure I buy into the Holy War. Britain was fighting against Russian expansion for several reasons, not the least was its concern that Russia had its eye on India. Russia was expanding on the Caucuses at the same time.

Both Britain and France were equally concerned with bolstering the Ottoman Empire (not Islam) - also known as the sick man of Europe - in order to keep Russian expansion out of the Balkans.

This strikes me as someone writing another book on the Crimean War but with a topical religious theme.

Perhaps the British and French used propaganda of religion to justify entering the war, similar to how the British and Americans used WMD as an excuse to enter Iraq in 2003.

It could be a simple case of realpolitik.

That I do buy. There was lots of propaganda, and certainly the French concerns with holy sites in Palestine and their threats to occupy those places motivated the Russians to respond with threats to occupy areas in the Balkans. However, it was the underlying fears of expansion that was the true motivator.

[Gunnair]

Mustang1 Mustang1:

Overreach - classic balance of power politics, especially for Europeans states.

Exactly. Russian territorial ambitions in the east were contributing to the movements of the ongoing Great Game (Britain's disasterous invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 was one of the first moves on their part) Both Britain and France wanted to keep Russia out of the Balkans and support the failing Ottoman Empire.

[CommanderSock]

Gunnair Gunnair:

Mustang1 Mustang1:

Overreach - classic balance of power politics, especially for Europeans states.

Exactly. Russian territorial ambitions in the east were contributing to the movements of the ongoing Great Game (Britain's disasterous invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 was one of the first moves on their part) Both Britain and France wanted to keep Russia out of the Balkans and support the failing Ottoman Empire.

If Russia expanded southwards into Anatolia it would have presented a threat to Britain's trade route with its Indian colony. The British were protecting a vital interest. However, I am not sure what France had to gain from being involved in this war, especially since Prussia was a far bigger looming threat.

[EyeBrock]

Onward, onward rode the six-hundred, into the valley of death.

[BartSimpson]

The British and the French, when not at each other's throats, had no problem in cooperating to try to stem anyone else's rise to power. Both the British and the French sided with the Confederacy in the US civil war, the Brits because they feared the US Navy and US trade, the French because they had lingering territorial ambitions in the Americas that were being frustrated by the USA. World War One had less to do with some obscure assassination in the Balkans than it did with the opportunity to stem German power.

[Mustang1]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

The British and the French, when not at each other's throats, had no problem in cooperating to try to stem anyone else's rise to power. Both the British and the French sided with the Confederacy in the US civil war, the Brits because they feared the US Navy and US trade, the French because they had lingering territorial ambitions in the Americas that were being frustrated by the USA. World War One had less to do with some obscure assassination in the Balkans than it did with the opportunity to stem German power.

Britain was officially neutral and the Confederacy received no official recognition. Moreover, The Emancipation Proclamation coupled with the Battle of Antietam the British even further away from the South. Lastly, where's this primary evidence to suggest that the Royal Navy "feared the US Navy" (if that's the case, then the military actions of the Trent Affair seem to point to a lack of British fear regarding Union aggression as they went to an immediate war-footing and it was Lincoln that blinked).

[bootlegga]

I don't think the Brits really feared the USN, but it was true Britain was wary of the growing power of the USA. Things like the BNA Act (which created Canada) and Britain siding with the US over Canada in the Alaskan panhandle dispute were indicative of that wariness of course these two events were more than 30 years apart).

And I agree that the Crimean War was less about religion and more about checking Russian expansion, a focal point of which was a year round warm water port, which might have been gained at the Ottoman's expense had the Crimean War not been fought (AKA Russia may have gotten control of the Dardanelles at some point).

[EyeBrock]

Trying to portray the Crimean War as some kind of religious war is silly. The word 'Crusade' was in common usage until the PC crowd made it taboo lest we offend Muslims.

[BartSimpson]

Mustang1 Mustang1:

Britain was officially neutral and the Confederacy received no official recognition.

Britain's construction of the cruiser CSS Alabama and subsequent construction of the so-called Laird Rams were an extreme provocation. The Trent Affair had much to do with the Laird Rams and while Lincoln did apologize, Lord Palmerston was also doing a bit of blinking of his own when he got the sale of the Laird Rams to the Confederacy cancelled.

The UK (and France) essentially stuck its nose into the US civil war when it recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent and recognized the diplomatic credentials of the Confederate emissaries. That Trent Affair you cited was not just about a Mail packet being boarded, but about recognized diplomats being taken into US custody. The UK and France giving diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy and then receiving them, even while not granting formal recognition of the CSA, was still a provocation.

Mustang1 Mustang1:

Moreover, The Emancipation Proclamation coupled with the Battle of Antietam the British even further away from the South. Lastly, where's this primary evidence to suggest that the Royal Navy "feared the US Navy" (if that's the case, then the military actions of the Trent Affair seem to point to a lack of British fear regarding Union aggression as they went to an immediate war-footing and it was Lincoln that blinked).

The Royal Navy didn't exactly fear the US Navy, they feared the US Navy's Dahlgren guns and they also had a lingering institutional respect for US Naval gunnery from the War of 1812. At the time of the Trent Affair the US Navy was successfully casting and producing 15-inch rifles and had even successfully cast four 20-inch rifles. The Royal Navy may well have outnumbered the US Navy at the time, but the Royal Navy's ships of the line were outgunned by the American ironclads.

Even the Duke of Somerset was concerned about the US superiority on guns and was (needlessly, IMHO) concerned about an eventual US blockade of England. Myself, I think such a war between the US and Britain at the time would have mostly been a non-event. The Royal Navy was not going to be threat to the already dialed-up US Navy off the coast of the US and the US Navy was too busy to be much more than a pest to the Royal Navy in her home waters.

Things turned out for the best and the US & UK eventually became decent friends.

Here's to it.

[CommanderSock]

EyeBrock EyeBrock:

Trying to portray the Crimean War as some kind of religious war is silly. The word 'Crusade' was in common usage until the PC crowd made it taboo lest we offend Muslims.

The Russians were fighting a religiously motivated war. Russia under the Tsars was a theocracy. Russia's interest with the Ottomans was the mistreatment of Slavs and Christians within the Empire. It was Russia which freed the Slavic (Balkan countries) from the Ottomans.

For Britain and France it was mostly to check Russian expansion.

For Russia it was far more than that.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

EyeBrock EyeBrock:

Onward, onward rode the six-hundred, into the valley of death.