Europe in an Age of Nationalism, 1848–70 495most of northern Africa. His authority was weak in
many regions: Egypt had won autonomy in 1811, Ser-
bia in 1817, and the provinces of Moldavia and Wal-
lachia (the Danubian provinces) followed in 1829;
Greece won independence in 1830. The European
powers disagreed on the fate of the Ottoman Empire.
Russia, coveting further expansion, favored the dis-
memberment of the empire; the British, fearing Russian
ambitions, were determined to protect their naval supe-
riority in the Mediterranean and the land routes to In-
dia by keeping “the sick man” alive. These interests
defined the alliances of the Crimean War: Britain and
the Ottoman Empire (joined by France and later
Piedmont-Sardinia) fought Russia.
The immediate origins of the war were in the poli-
tics of 1848. A Russo-Ottoman dispute began when the
sultan accepted revolutionary refugees fleeing the Rus-
sian army. A Franco-Russian dispute followed when
Napoleon III tried to build his reputation as a defender
of the Catholic Church by obtaining from Abdul Mejid
the right to protect Catholic interests in Jerusalem.
Nicholas I wanted similar rights to protect Orthodox
interests, but the British and French blocked him. Such
conflicts came to a head in May 1853 when an angry
Nicholas instructed the Russian army to occupy Mol-
davia and Wallachia, provoking Britain and France to
send a joint fleet to protect the sultan.
Fighting began when the Russian navy destroyed
the Ottoman fleet off Sinope on the south shore of the
Black Sea in November 1853. The Anglo-French fleet
then entered the Black Sea (closed to warships by inter-
national convention) and declarations of war followed.
In the autumn of 1854 the western allies landed armies
on the Crimean peninsula. The French and British de-
feated the Russian army in several battles (including the
battle of Balaclava, made famous by Tennyson’s descrip-
tion of “the charge of the light brigade”) and forced
them to take refuge in the besieged city of Sebastapol.
More than 250,000 soldiers died in the Crimea, but
both sides suffered more from disease (especially
cholera) than from fighting.
Britain and France won the most important battles
of the Crimean War in part because their soldiers car-
ried weapons with a range of one thousand yards while
the Russian army still used smoothbore muskets with a
range of two hundred yards. The large-scale use of ri-
fles whose barrels were machined to close tolerances
marks the beginning of industrialized warfare. It was
made possible by the French invention of the Minié
ball (1849), a conical bullet for rifled barrels that could
be mass-produced. The next step in the industrializa-
tion of warfare came when an American, Samuel Colt,
used automatic milling machines to produce inter-
changeable parts for the firearms themselves. His dis-
play at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 convinced
the British to build an arms plant using mass-production
techniques at Enfield in suburban London. The Enfield
rifle and the Minié ball revolutionized warfare. The
Crimean War showed the need for modern transport as
well. Russian logistics depended upon 125,000 wooden
carts pulled by draft animals, and it soon became obvi-
ous that they could not provide enough fodder for their
support. The lesson was not lost on the more efficient
armies of the 1860s, which learned to use railroads to
transport both men and material.
The Crimean War was not fought to a decisive
conclusion. Several events brought it to a victorious
end for the allies: Piedmont-Sardinia (whose govern-
ment wanted the friendship of Britain and France)
joined the war against Russia; Austria (whose govern-
ment feared Russian advances in the Balkans) threat-
ened to do the same; and Nicholas I died. A peace
conference at Paris in early 1856 quickly settled mat-
ters: Russia conceded some Danubian territory, prom-
ised to respect the integrity of the Ottoman Empire,
and acquiesced in the neutralization of the Black Sea.Russia in the Alexandrine Age
The thirty-seven-year-old Czar Alexander II who came
to the throne of Russia in 1855 differed greatly from his
father. He had spent a happier childhood, raised by hu-
mane tutors without the military discipline imposed on
Nicholas. Alexander’s personality was complex. He was
an ascetic who sometimes slept on straw on stone
floors. He had high moral aspirations and once spent a
night locked in solitary confinement in one of his pris-
ons to understand the conditions there. As crown-
prince he joined the government commission studying
the “flogging gentry.” He seemed well suited to be the
man who freed more than twenty million people from
serfdom and earned the nickname “the czar liberator.”
Yet his morals permitted him to take young girls as mis-
tresses, and his reforms were insufficient to prevent six
assassination attempts in four years.
Alexander II assumed the throne in 1855, deter-
mined to emancipate the serfs (see table 25.1). One of
his first acts was a manifesto giving the aristocracy a
pragmatic explanation: “I am convinced that... it is
better to begin to destroy serfdom from above than to
wait for that time when it begins to destroy itself from