Yanky Fachler
The Deadly Jerusalem Fist Fight That Provoked the Crimean War

The immediate cause of the 1853 Crimean War was Russia’s push to expand its influence over the declining Ottoman Empire and a dispute over authority regarding Christian minorities in the Holy Land. But the underlying cause goes back seven years earlier to Good Friday 1846, when a bloodbath in Jerusalem between rival Christian monks—Latin and Orthodox—left 40 dead. Catholic France, the Vatican, and even Protestant Britain, all underestimated how much that bloody Good Friday event inflamed religious feeling in Russia.