12/27/2022 0 Comments Age of empires 3 revolution![]() ![]() British public opinion saw Russian ambitions and values as a threat to Europe as a whole, and particularly to the liberal and national cause in Hungary, Poland and Italy. Britain and France agreed on the political need to secure Constantinople, but some British naval strategists would instinctively have preferred a naval blockade and the bombardment of Russia’s Baltic ports, and it was the eventual decision to focus on the Baltic theatre that forced Russia to make peace in 1856. Britain and France aimed simply to prevent a maritime attack on the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, by neutralising the Russian naval base on the peninsula – a task which turned out to be not at all simple. Though the conflict that followed is almost always known as the Crimean War, it was not a war for the liberation of the Crimean peninsula, which Russia had annexed in 1783. In March 1854, both of them joined the Ottoman side. The British and French press lamented their countries’ humiliation. On 30 November 1853, Russian missiles destroyed the Ottoman navy in the Black Sea. In response to the invasion, Sultan Abdulmejid I declared war on Russia, and Britain and France sent ships to the Bosphorus to protect him against attack. The Revolutions of 1848 had demonstrated that Western liberals could stimulate uprisings against the status quo in Italian, Hungarian, Polish and Balkan lands now the Ottoman Empire, which Russia was used to bullying, was being bullied more effectively by Britain and France. The motivation for this expansionist gamble was Russia’s anxiety about the balance of power across Central and Eastern Europe. It refused to leave, despite intense international diplomacy. Russia asserted a historic right and duty to protect these people, though the vast majority had expressed no interest in such protection. It was an unprovoked attack, justified on spurious grounds: Tsar Nicholas I claimed that more than ten million Orthodox Christians were imperilled by the indifference and barbarism of their Ottoman overlords. ![]() By 15 July they had occupied Bucharest, the capital of Ottoman Wallachia, as well as its other major towns. ![]() E arly in July 1853, eighty thousand Russian troops crossed the River Pruth and invaded the Ottoman Empire. ![]()
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