French Catholic opinion feared Russia wanted to spread the Orthodox ‘heresy’ across Europe and called for a ‘holy war’ against Russians and Greeks in defence of Catholicism.
The Turks viewed the Crimean War as a jihad to regain land around the Danube, Black Sea and Caucasus humiliatingly lost to the Russian infidel in the last 80 years.
While Russia, a Byzantine formation, saw it as its right and duty, ‘its divine mission’, to crush the Ottoman empire, retake Constantinople and redeem its brethren, both Slav and Orthodox, living under Muslim yoke.
British Protestants saw Orthodoxy as ‘semi-pagan’, the Russians as modern Attilas whose hordes threatened Western civilisation while the Greeks – seen as collaborating with Russian imperialism against Turkey – were ‘a besotted, dancing, fiddling race’.
British Protestant distaste for Orthodoxy, the view that Orthodox Christians weren’t really Christians at all, justified fighting on the side of Muslim Turkey against Christian Russia.
For British Protestants, Orthodox Christians were best off under Turkish rather than Tsarist rule. Protestants felt more affinity to austere Islam than Orthodoxy and Turkish rule also gave British missionaries more chance to convert Orthodox Christians to Protestantism.
Some British Protestants even hoped to convert the Turks, encapsulating the liberal imperialist belief, still around today, that the barbarian once exposed to the self-evidently superior ways of the West will give up his culture for the more advanced one being offered to him.
The Turks viewed the Crimean War as a jihad to regain land around the Danube, Black Sea and Caucasus humiliatingly lost to the Russian infidel in the last 80 years.
While Russia, a Byzantine formation, saw it as its right and duty, ‘its divine mission’, to crush the Ottoman empire, retake Constantinople and redeem its brethren, both Slav and Orthodox, living under Muslim yoke.
British Protestants saw Orthodoxy as ‘semi-pagan’, the Russians as modern Attilas whose hordes threatened Western civilisation while the Greeks – seen as collaborating with Russian imperialism against Turkey – were ‘a besotted, dancing, fiddling race’.
British Protestant distaste for Orthodoxy, the view that Orthodox Christians weren’t really Christians at all, justified fighting on the side of Muslim Turkey against Christian Russia.
For British Protestants, Orthodox Christians were best off under Turkish rather than Tsarist rule. Protestants felt more affinity to austere Islam than Orthodoxy and Turkish rule also gave British missionaries more chance to convert Orthodox Christians to Protestantism.
Some British Protestants even hoped to convert the Turks, encapsulating the liberal imperialist belief, still around today, that the barbarian once exposed to the self-evidently superior ways of the West will give up his culture for the more advanced one being offered to him.
