tharine said,

"I will frighten Turkey and flatter England. Do you take it upon
yourself to buy over Austria, and amuse France."

Though the arrangements for the partition were at this time all made,
the portion which was to be assigned to Austria agreed upon, and the
extent of territory which each was to appropriate to itself settled,
the formal treaty was not signed till two years afterwards.

The war still continued to rage on the frontiers of Turkey. After ten
months of almost incessant slaughter, the Turkish army was nearly
destroyed. The empress collected two squadrons of Russian men-of-war
at Archangel on the White Sea, and at Revel on the Baltic, and sent
them through the straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. All
Europe was astonished at this wonderful apparition suddenly presenting
itself amidst the islands of the Archipelago. The inhabitants of the
Greek islands were encouraged to rise, and they drove out their
Mussulman oppressors with great slaughter. Catharine was alike
victorious on the land and on the sea; and she began very seriously to
contemplate driving the Turks out of Europe and taking possession of
Constantinople. Her land troops speedily overran the immense provinces
of Bessarabia, Moldavia and Wallachia, and annexed them to the Russian
empire.

The Turkish fleet encountered the Russians in the narrow channel which
separates the island of Scio from Natolia. In one of the fiercest
naval battles on record, and which raged for five hours, the Turkish
fleet was entirely destroyed. A courier was instantly dispatched to
St. Petersburg with the exultant tidings. The rejoicings in St.
Petersburg, over this naval victory, were unbounded. The empress was
so elated that she resolved to liberate both Greece and Egypt from the
sway of the Turks. The Turks were in a terrible panic, and resorted to
the most desperate measures to defend the Dardanelles, that the
Russian fleet might not ascend to Constantinople. At the same time the
plague broke out in Constantinople with horrible violence, a thousand
dying daily, for several weeks.

The immense Crimean peninsula contains fifteen thousand square miles,
being twice as large as the State of Massachusetts. The isthmus of
Perikop, which connects it with the mainland, is but five miles in
width. The Turks had fortified this passage by a ditch seventy-two
feet wide, and forty-two feet deep, and had stationed along this line
an army of fifty thousa