Each belligerent preached its own version of a holy war. Russian manifestos called the campaign a defence of the faith and revived the old hope of a cross above Hagia Sophia; Ottoman proclamations summoned the sultan's Muslim subjects to the defence of the caliph's realm; and French Catholic opinion treated the expedition as a vindication of the Latin rite. The awkwardness fell on Britain and France, whose armies fought to preserve a Muslim empire against a Christian one, a reversal that Anglican and Catholic commentators alike found difficult to explain to their congregations, and which anti-war critics in both countries made much of.
The war was also the first to be reported by telegraph and photographed in the field, and the reporting produced its own religious icon in Florence Nightingale, whose sense of a divine calling shaped a nursing service at Scutari that Christian and secular writers have claimed ever since.
The settlement moved in the opposite direction from the rhetoric. The Treaty of Paris of 1856 neutralised the Black Sea and, instead of a Russian protectorate, obtained from the sultan the reform edict of that year, which promised equality before the law to the empire's non-Muslim subjects. The holy places themselves were frozen: the arrangement of 1852, confirmed after the war, hardened into the Status Quo, the rule that nothing in the shared churches may be altered without the consent of all the communities, which is why a ladder has stood on a ledge of the Holy Sepulchre for well over a century.