March 1853, Shamil, the imam of the rebel tribesmen, had appealed to the Ottomans for help in his war against the Tsar. ‘We your subjects’, he had written to the Sultan, ‘have lost our strength, having fought the enemies of our Faith for a long time … . We have lost all our means and now stand in a disastrous position.’ Shamil’s army had been squeezed out of its guerrilla bases in Chechnya and Daghestan by the Russian forces, which had steadily increased their numbers since 1845, when Mikhail Vorontsov, the governor-general of New Russia and the Crimea, was appointed commander-in-chief and viceroy of the Caucasus.o Instead of attacking the rebel strongholds directly, Vorontsov had encircled them and starved them out of existence by burning crops and villages; his troops had cut down forests to flush the rebels out and built roads into the insurgent areas. By 1853, the strategy was showing signs of real success: hundreds of Chechen villages had gone over to the Russian side in the hope of being left alone to farm their land; and the rebels had become demoralized. Thinking they had contained the insurgency, the Russians started to reduce their forces in the Caucasus, transferring most of them to the Danubian front. They closed down many of their smaller forts along the Circassian coast.20
This was the opportunity the Turks now decided to exploit. A successful war against the Russians in the Caucasus would encourage the Persians and Muslims throughout the Black Sea area, perhaps even leading to the downfall of the Russian Empire in the region. It was also bound to attract the support of the British, who for several years had secretly been running guns and money to the rebels in Circassia and Georgia, and had long been planning to link up with Shamil.21
Before 1853, the Turks had not dared support Shamil. By the Treaty of Adrianople (1829), the Porte had agreed to give up all its claims on Russian territories in the Caucasus; and since then the Russians had protected it from Mehmet Ali of Egypt (who had good relations with Shamil). But everything was changed by the Turkish declaration of war. On 9 October the Sultan answered Shamil’s appeal, calling on him to launch a ‘holy war’ for the defence of Islam and to attack the Russians in the Caucasus in collaboration with the Anatolian army under the command of Abdi Pasha. Anticipating this, Shamil had already marched with 10,000 men towards Tbilisi, and further volunteers were moved up from Circassia and Abkhazia for an assault on the Russian military capital. On 17 October the British consul in Erzurum told the Foreign Office in London that Shamil had placed 20,000 troops at the disposal of Abdi Pasha to fight against Russia. Eight days later the Turkish campaign in the Caucasus began when the Bashi Bazouks of Abdi Pasha’s army in Ardahan captured the important Russian fortress of St Nicholas (Shekvetili in Georgian), to the north of Batumi, killing up to a thousand Cossacks and, according to a report by Prince Menshikov, the commander-in-chief, torturing hundreds of civilians, raping women and taking shiploads of Georgian boys and girls to sell as slaves in Constantinople.22
To support their land offensive in the Caucasus the Turks depended on their Black Sea fleet to bring in supplies. The Turkish fleet had never fully recovered from its crushing defeat at Navarino in 1827. According to the British naval adviser to the Porte, Adolphus Slade, the Turkish navy in 1851 had 15,000 sailors and 68 vessels in more or less seaworthy condition, but it lacked good officers and most of its sailors were untrained. Although no match for the Russian fleet, the Turkish navy grew in confidence in late October, when the French and British fleets dropped anchor in Beykoz, a suburb of Constantinople in the Bosporus: with five line-of-battle ships (two- or three-decked vessels with at least seventy guns each), eleven twin-deckers, four frigates and thirteen steamers, their combined power was more than enough to keep the Russian fleet at bay. The Russian Black Sea Fleet was divided into two squadrons: one under Admiral Vladimir Kornilov patrolled the western half of the Black Sea; the other under Vice- Admiral Pavel Nakhimov patrolled the eastern half. Both had orders from Menshikov to destroy any Turkish ships carrying supplies to the Caucasus. The Turkish ministers and senior commanders were aware of the enemy’s patrols but resolved nonetheless to send a small fleet into the Black Sea. The Russians had every reason to believe that the Turkish ships were carrying arms and men to the Caucasus, as indeed they were. But the Turks were confident that if their ships were attacked by the Russians, the British and the French would come to their rescue. Perhaps that was indeed their aim – to provoke an attack by the Russians and thereby force the Western powers to become involved in a naval war in the Black Sea. They certainly seemed indifferent to the precarious situation of their fleet, which lay anchored in Sinope on the Anatolian coast, within easy range of Nakhimov’s larger and more powerful squadron (six modern battleships, two frigates and three steamers).23
On 30 November Nakhimov gave the order of attack. The heavy guns and explosive shells of his squadron obliterated the Turkish fleet. It was the first time explosive shells were used in a sea battle. The Russians had designed an advanced type of shell that penetrated into the wooden planking of the Turkish ships before releasing its explosive charge, ripping them apart from the inside. Slade was on the single Turkish ship that got away, a paddle steamer called
In one hour or one hour and a half, the action had virtually ceased, save dropping shot here and there from the want of means on one side to continue it, half the crews of the Turkish Ships were slain, their guns were mostly dismounted and their sides literally beaten in by the number and weight of the enemy’s shot. Some of the ships were on fire … . The Russians cheered, they had obtained the object for which they had come into the bay, the destruction of the Turkish Squadron, and on every consideration they should then have ceased firing, and had they done so, they would have avoided merited censure, but they reopened their fire on the stranded hulks, and in addition to the ships already engaged, their frigates came into the Bay to range close to them and complete their demolition. Many men thus lost their lives either by the shot or by drowning in their attempts to reach the shore … Together with the ships the Russians destroyed the Turkish quarter of Sinope with shells and carcasses, the ruin is complete, not a house is standing, the inhabitants having followed the Governor in their flights from the town at the first shot.
According to Slade, the Russian attack killed 2,700 Turkish sailors, out of a total of 4,200 at Sinope. In the town there was chaos and destruction everywhere. Cafes became makeshift hospitals. There were hundreds of wounded civilians but just three doctors in the town. Six days passed before the Russians ceased their bombardment and the wounded could be taken off in ships to Constantinople.24
A few days later Slade related the details of the battle to the Porte. He found the ministers strangely unaffected by the news – reinforcing the suspicion that the Turks had provoked the attack by the Russians to bring the Western powers into the war:
Their cheerful cushioned apartment and sleek fur-robed persons deepened in imagination, by the force of contrast, the gloom of the dingy cafes of Sinope with their writhing occupants. They listened, apparently unconcerned, to the woeful tale; they regarded composedly a panoramic view of the Bay of Sinope, taken a few days after the action by Lieutenant O’Reilly of the
In fact, the defeat gave new life to diplomatic efforts from the Porte. It was a sign of Reshid’s influence and his determination to prevent an escalation of the war. In his view, one last effort to involve the Western powers in a settlement was needed if they were to be won over to the Turkish side in the event of a general war.
On 5 December, Count Buol, the Austrian Foreign Minister, presented to the Russians a set of peace terms from the Porte which had been agreed by the four powers (Austria, Prussia, Britain and France) at the Vienna Conference. If the Tsar agreed to the immediate evacuation of the Danubian principalities, the Turks would send representatives to negotiate a peace directly with the Russians under international supervision. They promised to renew their treaties with Russia and accept her proposals regarding the Holy Lands. On 18 December the Grand Council resolved to accept peace on these conditions.
In Constantinople, there were angry demonstrations by religious students against the decision of the Grand Council. ‘For the last three days the Turkish capital has been in a state of insurrection,’ reported Stratford Canning on the 23rd. The students gathered in illegal assemblies and threatened Reshid Pasha and the other ministers. There were rumours of a massacre of Christians in the European quarters of the city. Stratford invited diplomats and their families to take shelter in the British embassy. He wrote to Reshid Pasha urging him to stand firm against the students, but Reshid, who was not known for his personal courage, had resigned and was hiding from the mob in his son’s house at Besiktas. Stratford was unable to reach him. Fearing a religious revolution, he brought up
