In January 1854 the British consul in Wallachia noted that the occupying force was ‘actively engaged in enrolling a corps of volunteers comprised principally of Greeks, Albanians, Serbs and Bulgarians’. They were incorporated into the Russian army as a ‘Greek-Slavonic Legion’. So far only a thousand volunteers had been recruited, the consul reported. Called up to fight a ‘holy war’ against the Turks, ‘they are to form a body of crusaders, to be equipped and armed at the expense of the Russian military authorities’, he noted. The volunteers were known as the ‘cross-carriers’, because they wore on their shakos a ‘red Orthodox cross on a white background’. According to a Russian officer, nearly all these volunteers had to be employed as police auxiliaries to maintain order in the rear, although they had received training for military purposes. The repressive nature of the Russian occupation, with public meetings closed, local councils taken over by the military, censorship tightened and food and transport requisitioned by the troops, bred widespread resentment. The Russians were despised by the Moldavians and Wallachians, the British consul reported, ‘and everybody laughs at them when it can be done with safety’. There were dozens of uprisings in the countryside against the requisitioning, some of them repressed by the Cossacks with ruthless violence, killing peasants and burning villages. Omer Pasha’s Turkish forces also carried out a war of terror against dozens of Bulgarian settlements – destroying churches, beheading priests, mutilating murder victims and raping girls – to deter others from rising up against them or sending volunteers to the Russians.16
Omer Pasha was even more concerned to prevent the Russians breaking through to Serbia, on the Turkish flank, where there was strong support for an uprising in favour of the Russians among the Serbian Orthodox clergy and some sections of the peasantry (suggesting that the Tsar’s assessment and preference for an attack towards Serbia had been right). The commander of the Turkish forces concentrated his defences in the strategic area around Vidin, the eastern gateway to Serb lands on the Danube, and in late December used 18,000 troops to drive 4,000 Russians from Cetatea on the other side of the river (in a foretaste of the sort of fighting yet to come in the Crimean War the Turks killed more than a thousand wounded Russians left behind on the battlefield).17
The urgency with which the Turks defended Serbia was dictated by the country’s instability. Prince Alexander, who ruled under licence from the Porte, had lost all authority, and pro-Russian elements in the Serbian Church and court were actively preparing for an uprising against his government timed to coincide with the anticipated arrival of Russian troops in Serbia. The leaders of the Serb army were resigned to and even colluding in a Russian takeover, according to the British consul in Belgrade. In January 1854 the commander-in-chief of the Serbian army told him that it was ‘pointless to resist a power as invincible as Russia, which would conquer the Balkans and turn Constantinople into the capital of Orthodox Slavdom’.18
If Serbia was lost, there was a real danger that the entire Balkans would rebel against the Ottomans. From Serbia it was not far to Thessaly and Epirus, where 40,000 Greeks were already organized in armed rebellion against the Turks and were supported by the government in Athens, which took the opportunity provided by the Russian occupation of the principalities to start a war with Turkey for the rebellious territories. Warned by the British not to intervene in Thessaly and Epirus, King Otto chose to ignore them. Gambling on a Russian victory, or at least a prolonged war on the Danube, Otto hoped to win support for his monarchical dictatorship by establishing a greater Greece. Nationalist feelings were running high in Greece in 1853, the 400th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, and many Greeks were looking towards Russia to restore a new Greek empire on the ruins of Byzantium.19
Afraid of losing all their Balkan territories, the Turks decided to hold a defensive line on the Danube and attack the Russians in the Caucasus, where they could draw on the support of the Muslim tribes, to force them to withdraw some of their troops from the Danubian front. They could count on the support of the Muslim rebels against Russian rule in the Caucasus. In 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