Crimean War 1853 to 1856: Telegraph, Rifles and the Sevastopol Winter

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The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 pitted Russia against the Ottoman Empire, France, Britain and the Kingdom of Sardinia, with fighting from the Balkans and Caucasus to the Baltic and the Pacific. Russia wanted warm water ports as the Ottoman state contracted, and Britain had a trade stake after the 1838 Treaty of Balta Liman nearly tripled its exports. Tsar Nicholas I demanded protection over Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, occupied the Danubian principalities in July 1853, and destroyed an Ottoman squadron at Sinop in November with explosive shells. Britain and France joined in March 1854 and landed in Crimea that September to take the naval base at Sevastopol, beginning an 11 month siege.

A French undersea cable across the Black Sea put generals under daily orders from London and Paris, while William Howard Russell, Roger Fenton and a young Leo Tolstoy reported the war's misery. In November 1854 a storm sank 30 transports off Balaclava, and disease killed far more allied soldiers than combat. After the French took the Malakoff in 1855, Russia signed the Treaty of Paris in March 1856, demilitarizing the Black Sea. Defeat pushed Alexander II to free about 23 million serfs in 1861 and to sell Alaska in 1867, while Ottoman war loans ended in default by 1875.

• Timothy, a tortoise who served aboard HMS Queen, lived until 2004 as the war's last surviving veteran.
• Rifled muskets let British and French infantry hit Russian formations at 300 to 400 yards.
• The Snowball Riot in Trafalgar Square in January 1855 fed the anger that brought down Lord Aberdeen's government.
• Florence Nightingale's polar area diagram showed that most deaths at Scutari came from preventable disease.
• In Sevastopol, surgeon Nikolai Pirogov used plaster casts, triage by wound rather than rank, and ether anesthesia.