helmet and the gauntlets which
the warrior had worn in so many fierce battles, suspended over his
lifeless remains. His heart was sent in an urn to be deposited in the
royal tomb where his ancestors slumbered. His embalmed body was interred
in the metropolitan church in Vienna. The emperor and all the court
attended the funeral, and his remains were borne to the grave with
honors rarely conferred upon any but crowned heads.

The Ottoman power had now passed its culminating point, and was
evidently on the wane. The Russian empire was beginning to arrest the
attention of Europe, and was ambitious of making its voice heard in the
diplomacy of the European monarchies. Being destitute of any sea coast,
it was excluded from all commercial intercourse with foreign nations,
and in its cold, northern realm, "leaning," as Napoleon once said,
"against the North Pole," seemed to be shut up to barbarism. It had been
a leading object of the ambition of Peter the Great to secure a maritime
port for his kingdom. He at first attempted a naval depot on his extreme
southern border, at the mouth of the Don, on the sea of Azof. This would
open to him the commerce of the Mediterranean through the Azof, the
Euxine and the Marmora. But the assailing Turks drove him from these
shores, and he was compelled to surrender the fortresses he had
commenced to their arms. He then turned to his western frontier, and,
with an incredible expenditure of money and sacrifice of life, reared
upon the marshes of the Baltic the imperial city of St. Petersburg.
Peter I. died in 1725, leaving the crown to his wife Catharine. She,
however, survived him but two years, when she died, in 1727, leaving two
daughters. The crown then passed to the grandson of Peter I., a boy of
thirteen. In three years he died of the small-pox. Anna, the daughter of
the oldest brother of Peter I., now ascended the throne, and reigned,
through her favorites, with relentless rigor.

It was one of the first objects of Anna's ambition to secure a harbor
for maritime commerce in the more sunny climes of southern Europe. St.
Petersburg, far away upon the frozen shores of the Baltic, where the
harbor was shut up with ice for five months in the year, presented but a
cheerless prospect for the formation of a merchant marine. She
accordingly revived the original project of Peter the Great, and waged
war with the Turks to recover the lost province on the shores of the
Euxine. Russia had been mai