The year 2014 marked the 160th anniversary of the beginning of the Crimean War, 1854–6. It was during that anniversary year that the names of Crimea, Sevastopol, Simferopol and the Black Sea re-entered the lexicon of Ireland, and so did the terms ‘Russian aggression’, ‘territorial violation’ and ‘weak neighbour’. Coincidentally, those same places and terms, and the sheer extent to which they perpetuated within Irish and even world media as well as popular parlance, had not been seen nor heard since 1854. It was in that year that the British and French Empires committed themselves to war in the wider Black Sea region and beyond against the Russian Empire. The latter had demonstrated clear aggression, initially diplomatic and later military, against its perceived-to-be-weak neighbour and long-term adversary in the region, the Ottoman Empire, or Turkey. As part of that aggression Russia invaded the latter's vassal principalities in the north-western Balkans, namely Wallachia and Moldavia (part of modern-day Romania), collectively known as the Danubian Principalities. Russia had previously taken Crimea from the Ottomans in 1783. That invasion, as Orlando Figes has shown, came after and was followed by Russian hopes and efforts to stoke ethno-national and ethno-religious feelings in the border regions of the Ottoman Empire. The invasion of 1853, coupled with a variety of other factors, served to turn what could have been another regional Russo-Ottoman war into the first general European war since the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. The western powers feared the Ottoman Empire's weakness and perceived a quick and imminent defeat at the hands of the Russians. This was because by that time the phrase coined by the Russian Tsar Nicholas I for the Ottoman Empire in the preceding decade – ‘the sick man of Europe’ – had gained popular currency and acceptance. With an Ottoman defeat it was believed (especially in London) that the resulting Russian dominance of Constantinople, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles would lead to a Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean.