Fetch Crimea: The Last Crusade Depicted By Orlando Figes Publication

have to admit that I didnt know much at all about the Crimean War before I read this book, I was probably like most people when I thought about the conflict, if I thought about it at all it was one of those endless little European wars, maybe less little than most, that seemed to pop up between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, one of a series of conflicts that involved Turkey and its neighbors or somehow involved the Balkans the Balkans!, famous for Florence Nightingale and the Charge of the Light Brigadeand that was about it.
I know it didnt involve the United States in any real way, perhaps one of the reasons I hadnt heard much about the war and me a history minor!.


Well, this book changed all of that for me, The book was engaging, wellwritten, and informative, It did not like some other history books I have read get endlessly bogged down in the minutia of cabinet or other government meetings, It had at times a somewhat narrative, almost novellike feel, in part because one of the individuals followed through the conflict is one Leo Tolstoy with passages of his descriptions of the conflict, geography, and people included.
When the author wasnt following the course of events leading up to the war, the actual battles and sieges themselves, and events afterwards, there were many rather fascinating asides about camp life, military technology, the culture of the peoples of Crimea, and even personal stories of individuals I had not heard of but were famous or infamous at the time.
The book was pretty even handed, not dwelling overly much on one country or another, with more or less equal time given to the main participants,

The Crimean War I learned was not just another midth century war in Europe, lost in the fog of war of all those other conflicts involving say the unification of Italy or Germany though those other wars and especially World War I the author writes is one of the reasons it is not more well known at a popular and cultural level today.
It was a war of firsts, including some surprising ones for me, It was the first war to be brought about in large part by the press and public opinion, This was the first war to be photographed and “seen” by the public at the time of its fighting, Due to the undeniable bravery of its men, it was the war that caused Queen Victoria to institute a new medal, the Victoria Cross, a medal awarded to servicemen without regard to their class or rank sadly, the French, Dutch, and the Russians had already had such medals well before the conflict.
On a related note, it began in Britain the veneration of the common solider rather than the officer, with real and widespread public appreciation and admiration of the rank and file a first due to the war.
It was the war that pretty much began Tolstoys literary career, and a major reason for Russia to turn towards the conquest of Central Asia and a big turning point in Russian history, the emancipation of the serfs.


I would say that were five big take aways from the book, First, arguably the star of the book has to be the siege of Sevastopol, a conflict that defined the Crimean War far more than the Charge of the Light Brigade.
The author did an excellent job of describing this long and bloody siege, both inside the city and out, from military and civilian points of view, the narrative well supported by maps and photographs.
Second, the gap between the suffering and bravery of the soldiers and both the incompetence of so many officers as well as the callous, heartless, and cold calculations of those at home in the capital was staggering.
Some of that has to be read to be believed, Third, some of the in popular culture from the Crimean War well, the Charge of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale may not only not be worth the veneration they have received at least at the near mythic level that they have achieved, but sadly, other actors deserve at least something on that level of myth making, individuals like Nikolai Pirogov, a Russian national hero whose contributions to battlefield medicine are at least as significant as anything Florence Nightingale did, if not more so Alexis Soyer, whose invention of the Soyer Stove and easy to follow and nutritious recipes for soldiers, using basic army rations, revolutionized and arguably saved many British lives and Daria Mikhailova, a loneyear old Russian woman who at personal expense bought a cart and supplies to tend to wounded and dying Russian troops when no one else would, another true Russian hero.
Fourth, wow, the Ottoman Empire truly was the Sick Man of Europe, It was an incredibly weak state I wouldnt call it a nation, and to my surprise, was almost singlehandedly conquered by the Russians inholding back at the last minute from taking the capital and by the Egyptians inwhen the Russians interfered on behalf of the Turks against Mehmet Ali.
Finally, fifth in no way doing justice to this point but the Orthodox religion was a huge, huge motivating factor for so many in Russia, for everyone from soldiers and serfs to the Tsar, at a scale that I think many today just do not appreciate or understand.


Despite its length, this read very fast and was enjoyable despite some sections describing lets face it, utter misery, both in terms of battlefield conditions and worse perhaps, those of military hospitals.
I really liked the sections after the conflict, about what the major players did afterwards and the changes the war wrought on those countries, I wished the section had kept on going, as I would have followed the authors history of Europe afterwards for a long time to come!
Its Good Friday, April,.
Jerusalem is packed with pilgrims on an Easter weekend that happened to fall on the same date in both the Latin and Orthodox calendars, The mood is tense. The two religious communities had been arguing over who has the right to be first to carry out the rituals at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the

holiest places in Christendom, standing on the spot where Jesus is said to have been crucified.


That Friday was to be anything but good, The Catholics arrived only to find that the Greeks were there first, A fight broke out, priest against priest, soon to be joined by monks and pilgrims from the respective camps, People fought not just with fists but anything they could get a hold of crucifixes, candlesticks, chalices, lamps and incense burners, Wood was torn from the sacred shrines and used as clubs, Knives and pistols were smuggled into the church, By the time the Mehemet Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, had restored order forty people lay dead,

This dreadful incident, all in the name of a shared belief, marks the departure for Orlando Figes Crimea, the Last Crusade, the first full account of the Crimean War that I have read.
I know Figes well, one of the best specialists on Russian history in the Englishspeaking world, the author of the superlative A Peoples Tragedy: the Russian Revolution,.
Although his history of the Crimean War lacks the range and power of the latter book, he has done a tremendous service, placing the conflict firmly within the context of the Eastern Question the issues arising from the continuing decline of the Ottoman Empire and European power politics as a whole.


Im not completely convinced by his crusading hook, I have to say, Yes the war did begin with a conflict over who had the best claim to protect the holy places within the Turkish empire, the Catholic French or the Orthodox Russians, and again, yes, Tsar Nicholas I was strong in his conviction that he was a defender of the true faith, a defender of the Orthodox faithful in all the Turkish lands.
But almost immediately, when the fighting started, the religious issue was obscured by more general issues arising from European geopolitics, Besides, a war which involved Turkish Muslims, British Protestants and French Catholics, on one side, against Orthodox Russians, on the other, does not look much like a crusade, The Tsar may have begun with crusading thoughts, but before his death in Marchhe was more preoccupied by the decline in Russian power,

Figes' greatest service has been to rescue the conflict from fragmentation and partiality, the preserve, at best, of amateur military historians, more interested in the clash of arms than the reason for the clash of arms.
The war may have been tragic and unnecessary' but it still marks and important stage in the development of European politics and diplomacy, It marks the end of the Concert of Europe, the arrangement between the powers to police the settlement ofemerging from the Napoleonic Wars, It marks the break in the informal alliance between Russia and Austria that helped preserved that settlement in aspic, allowing for the rise of new nations like Italy and Germany.
So, in all, it was so much more than the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Thin Red Line and the Lady with the Lamp,

So far as the conflict itself is concerned there was really no need, as the author shows, for the Crimean War ever to have been the Crimean War.
There was no need, in other words, for the landing on the Crimean peninsula, followed by the lengthy, and bloody, siege of the port of Sevastopol, for the simple reason that the Russians had suffered a serious tactical and strategic reverse in early.


They had previously occupied the semiautonomous Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and Walachia, now Romania, with a view to pushing south of the Danube in a march on Constantinople.
But unexpectedly tough resistance by the Turks at the fortress of Silistria prevented any further advance, When this was coupled with the landings of the French and British at Varna, in what is now Bulgaria, and the threat of Austrian intervention, the Russians had no choice but to withdraw from the occupied provinces.
But the blood was up the war had to run its course, Russia had to be humbled Sevastopol had to fall,

Crimea marks a vital stage in the development of warfare, combining elements of the old and the new, combining the Napoleonic Wars at one remove and the First World War at the other.
It was the last of the old wars, if you like, containing the seeds of the new, Although it may come as a surprise, the campaign on the Crimea itself, and its eventual outcome, was far more a French than a British affair, The French contributed many more troops, It was their capture of the Malakhov redoubt in Septemberthat led to the fall of Sevastopol and the end of the war,

Diplomatically their role was also decisive, Palmerston, who succeeded the far less militant Aberdeen as prime minister in, rather took on the role of Cato the Elder, Cartago delenda est was his war cry, His Carthage was Russia, which he intended to remove forever as a threat to the British Empire, If he had had his way the Russian borders would have returned to those of, before Peter the Greats victory over the Swedes at Poltava, The press was behind his wardrive, the people were behind him, even the Queen was behind him the French were not, He did not have his way because Napoleon III had other visions, Britain may have had the fleet, but the French had the army,

This is a good story, an important story told with verve and style, told in a wholly compelling fashion with plenty of balance and nuance, placing the Crimean War in proper context.
The author is to be commended for his industry and his scholarship, for writing a firstclass account of an important passage in European history, On July,, two British warships under the command of Captain Erasmus Ommaeny bombarded the monastery on the main island in the Solovetskie Islands in the White Sea, The monastery itself had no real military or political value, but as Ommaney lacked the forces necessary to attack the main Russian base in the area at Archangel he decided that the monastery was a suitable enough target to win his men plaudits at home.
After the outdated Russian batteries defending the monastery were destroyed, Ommaney demanded the surrender of the place when this was refused he launched a second bombardment before sailing away in frustration, his bold military action having caused a total of six casualties, all among his own men.


There is no mention of Ommaney's adventure in Orlando Figes's history of the Crimean War, which is unfortunate considering how nicely it encapsulates the pointlessness that is a dominant theme of his assessment of the conflict.
Its absence is also revealing, as it shows Figes's focus to be squarely on the eponymous theater of the war, There is some discussion of the combat in the Caucauses, a couple of passing mentions of fighting in the Baltic and no mention of battles anywhere else, This is also unfortunate, as it would have been interesting to see him employ the same penetrating analysis to these other overlooked theaters that he applies to the fighting in the Crimea.
His book offers a reexamination of a oftenoverlooked conflict, one that demonstrates its underrated significance to the history of Europe in theth century,

Figes spends the first part of the book teasing out the complicated origins of the war, While many factors were involved, he considers the role of the Russian tsar Nicolas I to be the most significant one, giving greater weight to religion as a motivating factor in his actions than have previous historians.
Yet this only served to define some of the particulars of what was an ongoing struggle between the major European powers over the fate of the Ottoman Empire and her territories.
Pressured by Russia, the Ottomans received support from Great Britain and France, each of whom were motivated by different interests and seeking different goals,

Achieving their various goals eventually cost the sides involved far more than they had anticipated, When war did break out in, the British and the French were divided as to what to do to strike at the Ottomans, Eventually an assault on the Russian Black Fleet and their main naval base at Sebastopol became their goal, motivated as much by the allies' desire to move their forces out of choleraafflicted Bessarabia as anything else.
Their landing and subsequent advance soon developed into a ponderous siege of the town, Here Figes excels in describing the siege and the major personalities involved, capturing the bravery of the men and the appalling errors which were made by their leaders in waging it.
The fall of Sebastopol, along with Nicholas's death and succession by his reformminded son Alexander II, led to a negotiated peace that was a humiliation, one which was soon reversed by a combination of adroit diplomacy and fortuitous timing.
Figes concludes with a chapter in which he looks at the weight given to the conflict in the national imaginations of the various countries which sent men to fight and die there, a few of whom were immortalized but most ultimately forgotten.


Figes's book is a superb history of a oftenoverlooked war, His background in Russian history and his command of the Russianlanguage sources allows him to provide a far more complete examination of the conflict than exists in most Englishlanguage accounts, while his abilities as a writer help bring the war to life.
In this sense Ommaneny's escapade can go unnoticed, overshadowed as it was by the far larger and bloodier farce that took place further south that Figes recounts with both humanity and insight.
The result is a book that, while far from the final word on this complex and multifaceted conflict, is unlikely to be bettered anytime soon for the author's success in providing such an entertaining and informative account of a war that has long been denied its due.
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