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
