ore recently assimilated elements, such
as the Albanian, the Slavonic, or the Greek, that men of the requisite
character and vigour could be found. The rally which marked the latter
half of the seventeenth century was entirely the work of Albanians or of
other generals and admirals, none of whom had had a Moslem grandfather.
Marked by the last Osmanli conquest made at the expense of Europe--that
of Krete; by the definite subjugation of Wallachia; by the second siege of
Vienna; by the recovery of the Morea from Venice; and finally by an
honourable arrangement with Austria about the Danube frontier--it is all
to be credited to the Kuprili 'dynasty' of Albanian viziers, which
conspicuously outshone the contemporary sovereigns of the dynasty of
Osman, the best of them, Mohammed IV, not excepted. It was, however, no
more than a rally; for greater danger already threatened from another
quarter. Agreement had not been reached with Austria at Carlowitz, in
1699, before a new and baleful planet swam into the Osmanli sky.

It was, this time, no central European power, to which, at the worst, all
that lay north of the proper Byzantine sphere might be abandoned; but a
claimant for part of that sphere itself, perhaps even for the very heart
of it. Russia, seeking an economic outlet, had sapped her way south to the
Euxine shore, and was on the point of challenging the Osmanli right to
that sea. The contest would involve a vital issue; and if the Porte did
not yet grasp this fact, others had grasped it. The famous 'Testament of
Peter the Great' may or may not be a genuine document; but, in either
case, it proves that certain views about the necessary policy of Russia in
the Byzantine area, which became commonplaces of western political
thinkers as the eighteenth century advanced, were already familiar to east
European minds in the earlier part of that century.

Battle was not long in being joined. In the event, it would cost Russia
about sixty years of strenuous effort to reduce the Byzantine power of the
Osmanlis to a condition little better than that in which Osman had found
the Byzantine power of the Greeks four centuries before. During the first
two-thirds of this period the contest was waged not unequally. By the
Treaty of Belgrade, in 1739, Sultan Mahmud I appeared for a moment even to
have gained the whole issue, Russia agreeing to her own exclusion from the
Black Sea, and from interference in the Danubian principalities. But th