the City of the Tsar, as the Byzantine Emperor was then called--with
peculiar veneration.

All through the long Tartar domination, when the nomadic hordes held the
valley of the Dnieper and formed a barrier between Russia and the Balkan
Peninsula, the capital of the Greek Orthodox world was remembered
and venerated by the Russian people, and in the fifteenth century it
acquired in their eyes a new significance. At that time the relative
positions of Constantinople and Moscow were changed. Constantinople fell
under the power of the Mahometan Turks, whilst Moscow threw off the yoke
of the Mahometan Tartars, the northern representatives of the Turkish
race. The Grand Prince of Moscow thereby became the Protector of
the Faith, and in some sort the successor of the Byzantine Tsars. To
strengthen this claim, Ivan III. married a niece of the last Byzantine
Emperor, and his successors went further in the same direction by
assuming the title of Tsar, and inventing a fable about their ancestor
Rurik having been a descendant of Caesar Augustus.

All this would seem to a lawyer, or even to a diplomatist, a very
shadowy title, and none of the Russian monarchs--except perhaps
Catherine II., who conceived the project of resuscitating the Byzantine
Empire, and caused one of her grandsons to learn modern Greek, in
view of possible contingencies--ever thought seriously of claiming
the imaginary heritage; but the idea that the Tsars ought to reign in
Tsargrad, and that St. Sophia, polluted by Moslem abominations, should
be restored to the Orthodox Christians, struck deep root in the minds of
the Russian people, and is still by no means extinct. As soon as serious
disturbances break out in the East the peasantry begin to think that
perhaps the time has come for undertaking a crusade for the recovery of
the Holy City on the Bosphorus, and for the liberation of their brethren
in the faith who groan under Turkish bondage.

Essentially different from this religious sentiment, but often blended
with it, is a vague feeling of racial affinity, which has long existed
among the various Slav nationalities, and which was greatly developed
during last century by writers of the Panslavist school. When Germans
and Italians were striving after political independence and unity, it
naturally occurred to the Slavs that they might do likewise. The idea
became popular among the subject Slav nationalities of Austria and
Turkey, and it awoke a certain amoun