hit in the leg by a stray bullet, which killed his horse beneath him). Rumours of his death created panic. After making a brief stand, the Ottoman forces found themselves driven back into the city, losing 5,000 men to the Russians' 2,000. The next day Osman surrendered the city, the garrison and his sword to Romanian Col. Mihail Cerchez. He was treated honorably, but his troops perished in the snow by the thousands as they straggled off into captivity. Aftermath The siege of Plevna seriously delayed the main Russian advance into Bulgaria, but its end freed up Russian reinforcements, which were sent to General Joseph Vladimirovich Gourko, who then decisively defeated the Ottoman forces in the Fourth battle of Shipka Pass. The siege was widely reported on and followed by the public in Europe and beyond. Although the declining Ottoman Empire was by this time often regarded as "the sick man of Europe", its five-month-long resistance against a much larger army earned a degree of admiration, which may have contributed to the unsympathetic treatment of Russia at the Congress of Berlin. According to the British diplomatic historian AJP Taylor: Most battles confirm the way that things are going already; Plevna is one of the few engagements which changed the course of history. It is difficult to see how the Ottoman Empire could have survived in Europe... if the Russians had reached Constantinople in July; probably it would have collapsed in Asia as well. Plevna... gave the Ottoman Empire another forty years of life. The siege also signalled the introduction of the repeating rifle into European warfare. Both the Russian and the Ottoman armies were each using two types of infantry rifle at Plevna. Russian troops were largely armed with the old M1869 Krnka, a single-shot lifting breech block conversion of the muzzle loading M1857 rifled musket. It was soundly outperformed by the more modern single-shot Turkish Peabody-Martini rifles. At the time, the Russian Army was in process of reequipping with the more modern but still single-shot Berdan rifle. It became clear at Plevna that it was already obsolete while it was introduced and that it was outclassed by the Turkish Winchester repeaters. Reports of the heavy losses suffered by the Russian Army at the hands of the Turks at Plevna prompted militaries across Europe to start re-equipping themselves with repeating rifles or finding a way to convert their existing single-shot