Crimea: The Last Crusade

Orlando Figes's Crimea, The Last Crusade, published by Allen Lane in 2010, is a scholarly history of the Crimean War that reframes the conflict as substantially a religious one, fought over competing Orthodox and Catholic claims to guardianship of Christian holy sites in the Ottoman Empire and over Russia's self-presentation as protector of Ottoman Orthodox Christians. Figes is a widely published historian of Russia with a substantial record of archival research. Its strength is that it foregrounds the religious dimension of a war more often taught as a purely geopolitical contest, drawing on Russian, French, British and Ottoman sources. Its limit is that some of Figes's specific archival claims in other works have drawn scholarly scrutiny over the years, so a precise factual claim in this book is best checked against the sources Figes himself cites rather than taken on the strength of his authorship alone.