Asia Minor is arguably one of the worst defined regions in world geography - a nebulous area where the popular conception is that the girls all wear bright multi-coloured long dresses and headscarves and weave equally bright multicoloured carpets whilst the men, all looking about 140 years old, sit in the sun on decrepid wooden chairs wearing little woolly waistcoats and skullcaps and smoking hookahs. But as to where it actually is...
It seems that the allies during the Crimean War suffered from much the same attitude - Asia Minor was so remote that any military goings on there were too trifling to worry about. It was an attitude which at the end of the War was going to cost them dear at the conference table. And many believed that it was more by luck than good judgement that it didn't cost them the War itself.
Although I can't be precise on the boundaries of Asia Minor, at least I can draw a map which covers this theatre of the War. There had been much recent upheaval following Russian expansion. In 1828 the Russians had seized Georgia, Daghestan and exclusive navigation rights to the Caspian Sea as war reparations from Persia. The Shah had allowed their territories a loose form of independence - the Russians emphatically did not.
Shortly afterwards Russia emerged victorious from a short war against Turkey. Amongst other concessions made in the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople, the Turks handed to Russia all the territory bordering the eastern coast of the Black Sea from Poti up the southern entrance to the Sea of Azov.
As a result of these changes, much of the area was a bubbling cauldron of unrest. The political situation in Georgia was typical. The Georgians were predominantly Christians and initially well disposed to the new Russian masters - later on,when they realised that their traditional freedoms were being denied to them, they turned against the Russians. only to turn back to them in reaction to atrocities committed by Turkish irregulars early in the War. Throughout the War, Georgians would remain moderately active on the Russian side. To the north of them however it was a different story. The inhabitants of the Caucasus Mountain region, broadly known as Circassians, had never recognised outside authority and would fight to the death against any who tried to impose it. In the 1830s, following their treaty acquisitions, the Russians had built a string of forts in the mountains and along the Black Sea coast, the theory being that they could control the population through military garrisons operating from strongholds; what had been good enough for Edward the First in Wales was seemingly still good enough for them. This strategy was meat and drink to the Circassians who set about reducing the forts piecemeal. In the few cases where the walls were thick enough and the garrisons large enough to resist, the Russians were starved into submission.
