Image: Piedmontese "bersaglieri" soldiers engaged against Russian troops in Crimea, ca 1855. Of the 15,000 troops sent to Crimea from Piedmont, it is reported that only about 2500 returned to their homes. Painting by De Stefani, from Wikipedia
History sometimes repeats itself, often rhymes, always it is shaped by chains of events that sometimes have remote and little known origins. What led me to re-examine the history of the Crimean War of 1843-1845 was the attempt of understanding the reasons of the birth of Italy as a unified state, in 1860. As it nearly always happens, that led me to discover a number of events that history books often fail to report or to assess correctly. In particular, how the origins of the Italian state is the result of a concatenation of events whose origins lie with the "Great Game", the gigantic struggle that pitted Russia and Britain over the 19th century for the domination of the world. It is a thread that goes back to long ago, but that is still playing its role in our times.
We may start this story with 1783; at the time of Catherine the Great, when the Russian Empire occupied the Crimean peninsula as part of a victorious campaign against the Ottoman Empire. It was a small event in itself, but one that would have great effects on the history of the world. In particular, it had an important reflection on events that took place in the Italian peninsula almost one century later, with the political unification of a region that had never been an independent state before.
The story stars from he late 18th century, when the world saw a phenomenon never seen before: the rise of coal-based empires; large structures that exploited their coal resources to industrialize and to boost their military power. The main ones were the British and the Russian empires that had the largest coal resources in the world. These two empires came in contact along a ragged ring of fire that started on the Baltic sea, in Northern Europe, all the way to the remote peninsula of Kamchatka in the North Pacific. Over this vast area, the "great game" was being played: a game that had world domination as its final reward. It was this struggle that inspired Rudyard Kipling's novel "Kim" (written in 1901), where you can't understand the story of the transformation of an independent and free Indian boy into a spy for Britain if you don't remember how important the Great Game was at that time.
In the West of Eurasia, the big prize was the Middle East, being encroached from the North by Russia and from the South by Britain. And so it was that, in the late 18th century, Crimea became a strategic asset in the great game. For the Russians, it was the door to both the Mediterranean and to the Middle East. There, they started creating a major military port to host their black sea fleet, founding the city of Sevastopol on the South-Western tip of Crimea.
Of course, the European powers didn't like the idea of sharing the Mediterranean with the Russians but, initially, they had to put up with the events. But, in 1853, the Russians and the Ottomans were again at war in the Balkans, with the Ottomans being defeated. That was too much and the Western Powers found an excuse to declare war on Russia. They assembled a large expeditionary force that included British, French and Ottoman troops that landed in Crimea in 1854. The objective was ambitious: take Sevastopol and kick the Russians out of the Black sea.
Today, we remember little of the Crimean war that, actually, didn't involve just Crimea but also the Baltic, the Caucasus, the White Sea, and even military operations in the remote Kamchatka peninsula. It was a major war that saw the engagement of nearly one million combatants on each side and some 400,000 casualties on the Russian side while those on the allied side were nearly 300,000. The Crimean war was not just large, but it involved elements that would reappear in later wars: propaganda, railroads for transporting troops, photographic reporting, amphibious warfare, and more. In many ways, the Crimean war prefigured the much larger world wars of the 20th century.
From a military viewpoint, the Crimean war was a defeat for the Russian Empire, forced to de-militarize Crimea. But it was also an example of the "
two rules of military engagement with Russia," already well established with Napoleon Bonaparte. They are: 1) The Russians seem to lose and 2) Eventually, they win. By 1877, Russia had reoccupied Crimea and was again at war with Turkey. This time, the Western European powers didn't intervene to help Turkey. Rather, Britain profited of the occasion to snatch Cyprus away from the Ottoman Empire.
At that time, in Italy, nobody seemed to be especially interested in the events taking place in the remote Crimea. But, with the war in full swing, France and England desperately needed all the allies they could find. And so, France asked (or perhaps ordered) the Kingdom of Piedmont (also known as Kingdom of Sardinia) to send an expeditionary force to fight with the allies in Crimea. Piedmont was not an empire but it had been able to industrialize using British coal and had built-up a considerable military force with the objective of subduing the plethora of statelets that existed in the Italian peninsula at that time. The Piedmontese intervention had only a modest effect on the balance of forces in Crimea, but it established the fact that Piedmont and France were allies. It also established that Piedmont had gained a certain degree of strategic credit that it was to redeem later in terms of military help from France.
A less known part of this story is the role of the Kingdom of Naples. The Kingdom had a long story of friendship with Russia and, some 50 years before,
Russia had sent troops to Naples to help (unsuccessfully) the Kingdom to repel an attack from France. It seems that the Russians saw the Southern Italian kingdom as their gateway to the Western Mediterranean region and maintained good relations with it. At the time of the Crimean war, there was no formal alliance between the Kingdom of Naples and Russia, but when the British asked to the King of Naples to send troops to Crimea to join the Anti-Russia alliance.
The King refused, preferring to remain neutral and to maintain commercial exchanges with Russia. Even when it was clear that Russia was losing, the King of Naples refused to make the about-face that the Austrian empire did at the last moment. That turned the Kingdom of Naples into a pariah in the eyes of both the French and the British.
So, much of what happened in Italy after the Crimean War can be explained by these simple facts. The French and the British felt that the Kingdom of Piedmont was to be rewarded for its help, while the Kingdom of Naples was to be punished. For the Kingdom of Naples, already economically backward, it was a disaster: the defeat of Russia in Crimea had made it impossible for the Russians to send help to Naples and the kingdom found itself completely isolated against the more powerful Kingdom of Piedmont, well supported by Britain. There came the expedition of Garibaldi to Sicily in 1860, whose ships were protected by the British fleet. The Neapolitan army was defeated, the kingdom was invaded by the Piedmontese from the North and that was the end of the Kingdom of Naples and the birth of the Kingdom of Italy.
And that's the story as it went. It is curious how so many things are connected and how things could have gone differently if only some events had played out in a different way. What if the Crimean war had gone in a different way? Would Italy still exist today? What if Napoleon III had realized that in helping Britain against Russia he was damaging the French interests in the Mediterranean? And what could have happened if France had refused to help Piedmont to conquer Italy? This is the fascination of history that sometimes repeats itself, often rhymes, and always surprises us.
