ere on behalf of a new
Russian church in Constantinople, advertised the claim of the tsars to
be the natural protectors of the Orthodox in the Ottoman dominions; but
when she took up arms again in 1788 in alliance with Joseph II. (q.v.),
it was to make a mere war of conquest and partition. The Turkish wars
show the weak side of Catherine as a ruler. Though she had mounted the
throne by a military revolt and entered on great schemes of conquest,
she never took an intelligent interest in her army. She neglected it in
peace, allowed it to be shamefully administered in war, and could never
be made to understand that it was not in her power to improvise generals
out of her favourites. It is to her credit that she saw the capacity of
Suvarov, yet she never had as much confidence in him as she had in
Potemkin, who may have been a man of genius, but was certainly no
general. She took care never to have to deal with a disciplined
opponent, except the Swedes, who beat her, but who were very few.

It was the misfortune of Catherine that she lived too long. She
disgraced herself by living with her last lover, Zubov, when she was a
woman of sixty-seven, trusting him with power and lavishing public money
on him. The outbreak of the French Revolution stripped off the varnish
of philosophy and philanthropy which she had assumed in earlier years.
She had always entertained a quiet contempt for the French writers whom
she flattered and pensioned, and who served her as an advertising agency
in the west. When the result of their teaching was seen in Paris,
good-natured contempt was turned to hatred. She then became a persecutor
in her own dominions of the very ideas she had encouraged in former
years. She scolded and preached a crusade, without, however, departing
from the steady pursuit of her own interests in Poland, while
endeavouring with transparent cunning to push Austria and Prussia into
an invasion of France with all their forces. Her health began to break
down, and it appears to be nearly certain that towards the end she
suffered from hysteria of a shameful kind. It is plain that her
intellect had begun to fail just before her death, for she allowed the
reigning favourite, Platon Zubov, to persuade her to despatch his
brother Valerian, with the rank of field marshal and an army of 20,000
men, on a crack-brained scheme to invade India by way of Persia and
Tibet. The refusal of the king of Sweden to marry into her family unless
the