The Crimean War

Tsar’s awe of the Sultan’ – an idea that encouraged nationalist feelings of Muslim superiority. Rumours circulated that the Sultan was paying the British and French navies to fight for Turkey; that Europe had been chosen by Allah to defend the Muslims; that the Tsar had sent his wife to Constantinople to beg for peace and had offered to repay Turkey for the invasion of the principalities by giving up the Crimea. Many of these rumours were engineered or promoted by the recently dimissed Grand Vizier Mehmet Ali to undermine Reshid. By the end of August, Mehmet Ali had emerged as the head of a ‘war party’, which had gained the ascendancy within the Grand Council. Backed by Muslim leaders, he enjoyed the support of a large group of younger Turkish officials, who were nationalist and religious, and opposed to Western intervention in Ottoman affairs, but calculated, nonetheless, that if they could involve the British and the French on their side in a war against Russia, this would be hugely to their advantage and might even reverse a hundred years of military defeats by the Russians. To secure the support of the Western fleets, they were prepared to promise sound administration to interfering Europeans like Stratford, but they rejected the Tanzimat reforms, because they saw the granting of more civil rights to Christians as a potential threat to Muslim rule.³⁹

The war mood in the Turkish capital reached fever pitch during the second week of September, when there was a series of pro-war demonstrations and a mass petition with 60,000 signatures calling on the government to launch a ‘holy war’ against Russia. The theological schools (medrese) and mosques were the organizing centres of the protests, and their influence was clearly marked in the religious language of the posters that appeared throughout the capital:

O Glorious Padishah! All your subjects are ready to sacrifice their lives, property and children for the sake of your majesty. You too have now incurred the duty of unsheathing the sword of Muhammad that you girded in the mosque of Eyyub-i Ansari like your grandfathers and predecessors. The hesitations of your ministers on this question stem from their addiction to the disease of vanity and this situation has the possibility (God forbid) of leading us all into a great danger. Therefore your victorious soldiers and your praying servants want war for the defence of their clear rights, O My Padishah!

There were 45,000 religious students in the medrese of the Turkish capital. They were discontented as a group – the Tanzimat reforms had reduced their status and career prospects by promoting graduates of the new secular schools – and this social grievance gave a cutting edge to their protests. The Turkish government was terrified of the possibility of an Islamic revolution if it failed to declare war against Russia.⁴⁰

On 10 September, thirty-five religious leaders submitted a petition to the Grand Council, which discussed it the next day. According to the London Times:

The petition was principally composed of numerous quotations from the Koran, enjoining war on the enemies of Islam, and contained covert threats of disturbance were it not listened to and complied with. The tone of the petition is exceedingly bold, and bordering on the insolent. Some of the principal Ministers endeavoured to reason with those who presented it, but the answers they obtained were short and to the point. ‘Here are the words of the Koran: if you are Mussulmans you are bound to obey. You are now listening to foreign and infidel ambassadors who are the enemies of the Faith; we are the children of the Prophet; we have an army and that army cries out with us for war, to avenge the insults which the Giaours have heaped upon us.’ It is said that on each attempt to reason with these fanatics, the Ministers were met by the answer ‘These are the words of the Koran.’ The present Ministers are undoubtedly in a state of alarm, since they look upon the present circumstance (a very unusual event in Turkey) as but the commencement of a revolution, and fear to be forced at the present inopportune juncture into a war.

On 12 September the religious leaders gained an audience with the Sultan. They gave him an ultimatum: either declare war or abdicate. Abdulmecid turned for help to Stratford and the French ambassador, Edmond de Lacour, who both agreed to bring up their fleets if they were needed to put down a revolution in the Turkish capital.⁴¹

That evening, the Sultan called a meeting of his ministers. They agreed to declare war against Russia, although not until the Porte had time to firm up the support of the Western fleets and put down the religious protests in Constantinople. The policy was formally agreed at an enlarged session of the Grand Council on 26–7 September attended by the Sultan’s ministers, leading Muslim clerics and the military establishment. It was the religious leaders who insisted on the need to fight, despite the hesitations of the military commanders, who had their doubts about the capacity of the Turkish forces to win a war against Russia. Omer Pasha thought that 40,000 more troops would be needed on the Danube, where it would require several months to prepare the forts and bridges for a war against Russia. Mehmet Ali, who had recently been appointed commander-in-chief of the army, would not say whether it was possible to win against Russia, despite his association with the ‘war party’. Nor would Mahmud Pasha, the grand admiral of the navy, who said the Turks could match the Russian fleet but would not take responsibility for these words if later called to account for a defeat. In the end, it was Reshid who came round to the viewpoint of the Muslim leaders, perhaps sensing that to oppose war at this late stage would spark a religious revolution and destroy the Tanzimat reforms, upon which the support of the Western powers in any war with Russia would depend. ‘Better to die fighting than not to fight at all,’ declared Reshid. ‘God willing, we will be victorious.’⁴²

5

Phoney War

The Turkish declaration of war appeared in the official newspaper Takvim-i Vekayi on 4 October. It was quickly followed by a ‘Manifesto of the Sublime Porte’ stating that the government had been forced to declare war because of Russia’s refusal to evacuate the principalities but adding that, as a sign of its peaceful intentions, the commander of the Rumelian army, Omer Pasha, would give the Russian forces an extra fifteen days to carry out the evacuation before the commencement of hostilities.¹

Even at this stage there were hopes for a diplomatic settlement. The Turkish declaration was a means of buying time for one to work by calming the war fever of the religious crowds in Constantinople and placing pressure on the Western governments to intervene. Unprepared for a real war against Russia, the Ottomans began a phoney one to avert the threat of an Islamic revolution in the Turkish capital and to force the West to send their fleets to make the Russians back down.

On 19 October the Turkish ultimatum expired. Against the advice of the British and the French, who tried to hold them back, the Turks went on the attack in the principalities, calculating that the Western press would drum up public support for their cause against Russia. The Turkish government was very conscious of the power of the British press in particular, perhaps even thinking that it was the same as the government, and tried very hard to win it over to its side. Throughout the autumn of 1853 the Porte directed considerable funds to its London embassy so that it could ‘pay for and organize in secret a series of public demonstrations and newspaper articles’ calling on the British government to intervene against Russia.²

Ordered by the Porte to commence hostilities, on 23 October Omer Pasha’s forces crossed the Danube at Kalafat and took the town from the Cossacks in the first skirmish of the war. The villagers of the Kalafat region – an anti-Russian stronghold of the 1848 Wallachian revolution – armed themselves with hunting guns and joined the fight against the Cossack troops. The Turks also crossed the river at Oltenitsa, where they engaged in heavier but indecisive fighting with the Russians, both sides claiming victory.³

These initial skirmishes made up the Tsar’s mind to launch a major offensive against the Turks, as he had outlined in his letter to Paskevich on 29 May. But his chief commander had become even more opposed to the idea than he had been in the spring. Paskevich thought the Turks too strong and the Western fleets too close for the Russians to attack the Turkish capital. On 24 September he had sent a memo to the Tsar, urging him to adopt a