Reason in Exile: The War for Orthodox Christendom

Abstract

In the spring of 1854, a wave of martial religiosity such as Europeans had not seen since the great wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries swept over the continent from Britain to Russia and the Ottoman Empire. ‘It seemed’, recalled one French observer, ‘as though all the religious fervour left in the world had become concentrated on the Eastern Question’.³ The crisis at the centre of this religious ferment began a year earlier. At the beginning of 1853, Tsar Nicholas I had astonished the world by making an abrupt demand that the Ottoman sultan provide him with binding guarantees that the ancient rights and privileges of the Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire would remain unchanged, without exceptions and in perpetuity. This unexpected intrusion into Ottoman religions affairs had taken Sultan Abdülmecid aback, but he reassured ‘his brother’, the tsar, that there were no plans to abrogate any of the privileges of the Orthodox Church. He conspicuously refused to sign any formal engagement to this effect, however. A written guarantee, he objected, would turn concessions that the Ottoman dynasty had made of its own free will into capitulations imposed by a foreign power. The Russian government rejected this answer and had retaliated by withdrawing its entire embassy from Istanbul.

It seems almost incredible, in this enlightened age, that the quarrels of a few ignorant Latin and Greek monks … should have been able to light up the torch of war, and to involve the most powerful nations in the world in a deadly strife; … but the fraud on the credulity of mankind is so completely established, that these monks have succeeded in enlisting both Europe and the East under their banners, carrying havoc and destruction in their train, perhaps unparalleled since the Crusades.¹

George Fowler, 1855

The Crimean War was one colossal Comedy of Errors, in which one constantly asks oneself: Qui trompe-t-on ici which is the dupe? But this comedy cost countless treasures and over a million human lives.²

Friedrich Engels, 1890