Technically the war began in July 1853, when Russia simply annexed some Ottoman territory along the Danube, and the Ottomans responded by declaring war on Russia. Britain and France, which had been floating credit to Istanbul just to keep the empire going (in order to serve as a check on Russia), told Russian Tsar Nicholas I that they would stay out of this emerging conflict provided that Russia did not take any offensive military action, and Russia stayed within that limitation for a few months. An Ottoman offensive into the Caucasus began to get some traction, however, and when Sultan Abdülmecid I ordered a convoy to sail through the Black Sea to resupply his army in the Caucasus, the Russian navy was ordered to interdict it.
A Russian fleet (well, three ships of the line, a frigate, and a steamer, which isn’t much of a fleet but let’s call it one anyway) under the command of Pavel Nakhimov (d. 1855) began to interfere with Ottoman shipping in the Black Sea, though one major convoy did get through to the Caucasus. Given that it was November, and the seas were choppy, a second major Ottoman convoy stopped to wait out the nasty weather at Sinop. Nakhimov maneuvered his ships into a blockade around the port. Secure in the belief that the Russian ships wouldn’t dare challenge the harbor defenses to try to get at his convoy, the Ottoman commander, Osman Pasha (d. no later than 1860), simply left his ships at anchor and made no move to break out of the blockade (which was not a particularly massive one, given that Nakhimov had only about 10 ships at his command, and that only after being reinforced). Osman also figured that Nakhimov would abide by the (unwritten) rules of naval warfare, which stipulated that you couldn’t attack ships at anchor and couldn’t attack a ship of a lower class. In other words, Nakhimov’s ships of the line weren’t “supposed” to attack Osman’s frigates, which were the biggest ships in the Ottoman convoy.
Osman got a valuable lesson in the value of the (unwritten) rules of naval warfare when Nakhimov ordered his ships into the harbor and began firing on the Ottoman vessels. Since the Ottoman ships were at anchor and thus couldn’t move, Nakhimov was able to maneuver his fleet so that the Ottoman ships were between the Russian ships and Sinop’s harbor defenses, which lessened the effectiveness of those harbor batteries considerably. Nakhimov also had far more guns than the Ottomans did, so this was a fight that wouldn’t have lasted very long anyway. But the Russians also had a significant technological edge, in that their ships carried several Paixhans guns, which fired explosive shells rather than solid, non-explosive cannonballs.
Naval warfare always lagged behind land warfare in terms of gun technology. Until the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, Mediterranean navies were still using galleys, whose design and tactics would have been familiar to the ancient Greeks, with maybe a couple of forward-facing guns mounted on them. This was a couple of centuries after cannon had started to become indispensable to warfare on land, and yet navies were still fighting mostly ramming-and-boarding battles. It was only at Lepanto that the idea of the “ship of the line” began to come into fashion. The adoption of explosive shells by navies similarly lagged. Explosive shells were dangerous to handle and fire, seeing as how they were prone to, you know, exploding. On land they were employed in “indirect fire” weapons like mortars, which were less powerful than direct fire cannon, so the danger of a shell going off in the gun or just outside the gun was minimized. At sea, though, there was no indirect fire. If you’ve seen just about any movie about naval combat during the age of sail, you know that ships of the line pulled up alongside one another and fired directly from close range. The kind of explosive shells used on land would pose a major risk for exploding prematurely when fired by powerful naval guns, would deal serious damage to any ship trying to fire them.
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It was a French general named Hans-Joseph Paixhans who solved the problem. I am no engineer so I won’t pretend to understand what he did, but Paixhans is credited with developing a gun that fired shells whose fuses would ignite upon firing but would then burn beyond the time it took them to reach the other ship. These shells were designed to embed in the wood of an enemy ship, so the lit fuse might actually ignite the hull, and even if that didn’t happen the shell (or, rather, several shells, all at once) would then explode, dealing hot metal shrapnel all over the place to devastating effect. Paixhans’ guns were powerful enough to be used as direct fire weapons, and his shells were safe enough to be employed at sea. Nakhimov’s use of these guns (or, more likely, a Russian copy of them) was, as I say, devastating, and the already outgunned Ottoman fleet was rendered even more disadvantaged by their use. With the effectiveness of these weapons demonstrated in battle, they became the basis of all naval artillery moving forward. Naval warfare would never be the same.
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After the Ottoman ships were all either destroyed or rendered useless, the Russians turned their attention to the shore defenses and destroyed those as well. They lost a few dozen men (the highest estimates get into the mid-200s), compared to thousands of Ottomans killed. Osman Pasha was taken prisoner.
As I said above, Russia’s victory at Sinop laid the groundwork for it to lose the war. Britain and France, which–let’s be honest–were itching for an excuse to jump in and do something to contain Russia, determined that Sinop was the offensive action that they’d warned Tsar Nicholas against taking, despite the fact that attacking a convoy headed to supply an army that has invaded your own territory is, by almost any definition, an act of defensive warfare. Needless to say it seems certain that France, or Britain, wouldn’t have hesitated to take the same action the Russians took if they’d been in a similar situation, and would have loudly and forcefully insisted that they were acting in self-defense. Nevertheless, they did jump into the war in December, and although it took a couple of years and several hundred thousand deaths, soundly defeated the Russians.
Very interesting article and very interesting website! Thanks for posting this.
This was interesting.
Thank you for taking the time to post
The author never heard of Nelson's destruction of the Danish navy?
Between two Crimean wars and the Nazi invasion, Russia has about 1 million soldiers buried in Ukraine.
And there are people dumb enough to believe they are going to walk away from it without a real fight.
Thanks for the interesting history of Sinope. Before this, I only knew that my brother in the 1960s Army was stationed there. We used the place to electronically spy on the Russian missile testing.
While there, he ran across a Turk who said he had “some old guns”. It ended up that my brother got 5 “Coult” revolvers for $50. They were so marked “Coult Firearms Co.” with the American address and were copies of the Navy version. I called ‘em “Swayback models” as they all had an obvious dip in the profile between the barrel and the cylinder. Guns appeared to be deadly at either end. Workmanship was horrible, with some of the screws having barely any thread. IMO, they were relics of the Crimean War.
I fell on hard times in the ‘70s and sold them for $30 each at a Yuma gun show - and kissed my hands at being so clever. Wonder what those wall hangers would be worth today?