The Battle of Balaclava takes place during the Crimean War. It is soon memorialized in verse as The Charge of the Light Brigade.

The Battle of Balaclava, fought on 25 October 1854 during the Crimean War, was part of the Siege of Sevastopol (1854–55), an Allied attempt to capture the port and fortress of Sevastopol, Russia's principal naval base on the Black Sea. The engagement followed the earlier Allied victory in September at the Battle of the Alma, where the Russian General Menshikov had positioned his army in an attempt to stop the Allies progressing south towards their strategic goal. Alma was the first major encounter fought in the Crimean Peninsula since the Allied landings at Kalamita Bay on 14 September, and was a clear battlefield success; but a tardy pursuit by the Allies failed to gain a decisive victory, allowing the Russians to regroup, recover and prepare their defence.

"The Charge of the Light Brigade" is an 1854 narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson about the cavalry charge of the same name at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. He wrote the original version on 2 December 1854, and it was published on 9 December 1854 in The Examiner. He was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom at the time. The poem was subsequently revised and expanded for inclusion in Maud and Other Poems (1855).