agreement was not without its advantages; but it diminished the independence of Hungary, and placed that kingdom more under the dictation of the Empire than was consistent with its ancient renown as a powerful and warlike State. While these events were proceeding, Russia continued to make some progress out of the primitive barbarisin which had so long held her en. chained. The Czar Alexis, son of Michael Romanoff, was distinguished rather in peace than in war. The code of laws compiled by Ivan IV. was amended by his orders. Many works on mathematics, military science, tactics, fortification, and geography, were translated into the Russian language under the directions of this enlightened sovereign. The city of Moscow was enlarged by the addition of two suburbs; foreign officers were invited to join the Russian service; and Alexis constructed some vessels on the Caspian by the help of shipwrights whom he procured from Amsterdam. Alexis died on the 10th of February, 1676, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Feodor II., who brought the Turkish war to an end in 1681. The Ottomans then acknowledged the Muscovite sovereignty over the Cossacks, and one cause of dissension between the two Empires was removed. Feodor expired in 1682, after having nominated his half-brother, Peter, as successor to the throne; for Ivan, the second son of Alexis, was set aside on account of mental incapacity. The Princess Sophia, Ivan's sister, was dissatisfied with the arrangement, and excited an insurrection, which was not put down until Peter consented to share the sovereignty with Ivan, and to recognise Sophia as Regent on behalf of the imbecile. Such were the opening events of the reign of Peter the Great, which, however, can hardly be said to have really commenced until a later period. A new insurrection broke out in 1689, when the Prime Minister, Prince Galitzin, attempted to upset Peter, and confer the sole authority on Sophia, acting in the name of Ivan. The rising was soon crushed; Galitzin was sent to Archangel, and the Princess was shut up in a convent until her death in 1704. Ivan expired in 1696, and Peter then became the sole monarch, not merely in fact, but in name. Up to this period, the rule of Peter had been far from brilliant. The Russians, who had joined the Holy League in 1686, were frustrated by the Tartars in all their attempts to penetrate into the Crimea; but the true glory of Peter's reign, such as it was, appeared very conspicuously after the Czar had carried out those reforms in his army, his navy, and his civil administration, which we shall hereafter have occasion to describe. The war between Venice and Turkey was attended by some important results. The Venetians acted with extraordinary vigour, and a large number of places on the mainland of Greece, especially in the Morea, fell into their hands. Corinth and Athens were among the cities taken by the forces of the Republic, and the siege of Athens is especially memorable for an event which must be regarded as a permanent misfortune to the whole civilised world. The Turks had abandoned the city, with the exception of the Acropolis. Here they maintained the defence, and during the siege one of the Venetian bombs fell into the Parthenon, which had been converted into a powder-magazine. The damage thus inflicted on some of the noblest remains of antiquity was irreparable; but, regarded from a military point of view, it contributed to the desired effect. The Acropolis surrendered on the 29th of September, 1687, and the great seat of ancient philosophy and art was now completely in the hands of the Venetians. The Turkish star was once more declining, and the Grand Vizier Solyman, after his repeated defeats in Hungary and the adjacent countries, found his troops in a state of mutiny. The army was concentrated at Belgrade, where the Janizaries and Sipahis, alienated by the severity of Solyman's discipline, and enraged at his frequent reverses, deposed him from his high office, elected the Governor of Aleppo in his place, and sent envoys to Constantinople, to require that their acts should be ratified. The Vizier had fled to the capital; but Mohammed IV., knowing that the infuriated sidiery were in full march for the Bosphorus, refused to support his chief Minister, and even ordered his head to be struck off. The mutineers were informed of this concession, but did not abandon their attitude of defiance. They even demanded the deposition of the Sultan himself, and continued their forward movement. Their wishes were seconded by the populace generally, and the Ulema, or men of the law, made themselves the interpreters of the general desire. Mohammed IV. had spent the greater part of his time in hunting and other amusements, and the Turks were now in no humour to tolerate an idle and unwarlike sovereign. The Sultan was upbraided with neglect of business, and required to resign the government into the hands of his brother. In order, if possible, to avoid such a step, Mohammed sent orders that his relative should be put to death; but his commands were disregarded, and the Sultan was obliged to submit to a mandate framed by the Ulema in the Mosque of St. Sophia, on the 8th of November, 1687, and conveyed to him by the keeper of the holy standard. This mandate pro nounced the deposition of Mohammed IV.; his brother, Solyman II., was saluted as Padishah by the soldiers; and the fallen monarch was thrown into prison, where he died in 1691. 341 Their hatred of Romanist idolatry inclined them to take a favourable view of the Moslem religion, and they were little disposed to strengthen a Catholic Empire by any serious reduction of the Turkish power. Even to the present day, the Hungarians show a friendly disposition towards the Ottomans; and in the latter part of the seventeenth century this feeling was perhaps even stronger, owing to greater provocation on the part of the Imperial sovereigns. After his great defeat of the Turks before Vienna in 1683, and the victories which he obtained in his pursuit of the invaders, John Sobieski gave earnest attention to the reform of his own country, where the arrogance of the nobility, and the miserable condition of the serfs, threatened the gravest consequences in the future; but his efforts in this respect were defeated by the selfishness of the privileged classes. He was accused of desiring to perpetuate the sovereignty in his own family, and the projects of amelioration which he pressed on the Legislature met with no support. His spirit was at length broken by continual opposition, and, in closing the Diet of 1688, he warned its members, in solemn language, that the ruin of the country was inevitable if the dominant orders continued in Even this change of government did not ensure the restoration of order. The rebellious troops entered Constantinople immediately after the appointment of the new sovereign, when the Janizaries and Sipahis demanded that the customary donation on the accession of a new Sultan should be increased, and that all unpopular ministers should be banished. These insolent requirements being resisted, the soldiers broke into still more confirmed rebellion, stormed and burned several of the ministerial palaces, and even slew the Grand Vizier whom they had themselves chosen. The insurrection was at length put down, in February, 1688, by a movement of the people themselves, and Ismael Pasha, a man of years and discretion, was called to the chief office. The position of the Empire was very serious, for the Imperialists, under the Elector of Bavaria and the Margrave Louis of Baden, were making great progress, and the Ottomans, distracted by military insubordination, were rapidly losing the supremacy they had recently once more acquired. Belgrade was taken in 1688; a large part of Bosnia submitted to the invaders; and the Porte was reduced to the necessity of soliciting peace. Leopold, however, believed that he was destined to destroy the Turkish Empire in Europe, and to reunite the Greek and Latin Churches. He therefore refused to entertain the Turkish proposals, and in 1689 the Margrave Louis penetrated into Servia, occupied the passes of the Balkans, captured several fortresses on the Danube, and took up his winter quarters in Wallachia. Still, the Turks were far from being reduced to extremities; and when Mustapha Kiuprili-the grandson of Mohammed, and son of Achmet became Grand Vizier in 1690, so much vigour was thrown into the conduct of the war that the Imperialists receded from nearly all the positions they had won. The tide again shifted in the following year, during which Mustapha Kiuprili was defeated and slain by the Margrave Louis. In fact, the strength of the two belligerents was so fairly balanced that for several years the war proceeded with frequent alternations of success and failure on both sides. The Imperialists were in some degree weakened by the lukewarmness of their Hungarian troops. The Protestants of Hungary-a very numerous body-mother, Olimpia Mancini, was a distinguished had been so severely persecuted by the Emperors that they had often doubted whether they would not be better off under a Mohammedan dominion. their fatal path. "For myself," he remarked, "I may from time to time have gained her battles ; but I am powerless to save her." The words were indeed prophetic, but they made no impression on the assembled legislators. From that time forth, Sobieski appears to have refrained from any further attempt to remedy the abuses which were destroying the very life of Poland. In 1696 he was taken suddenly ill, and, dying on the 17th of June, was succeeded by Augustus of Saxony, whose election was supported by the Emperor, and secured by liberal payments. To qualify himself for the position, Augustus renounced his Protestantism for the faith of Rome, entered the kingdom with a body of Saxon troops, and was crowned at Cracow on the 15th of September, 1697. His successor in the command of the Imperial army-which he had for some time held with no great credit to himself was destined, within a short period, to gather brilliant laurels in the field of battle. Prince Eugene was descended from a younger branch of the House of Savoy, and related, through his mother, to Cardinal Mazarin. His father was the Comte de Soissons, and he was born in Paris on the 18th of October, 1663. His member of the court of Louis XIV. during the earlier years of that reign, but in 1680 was banished, owing to a suspicion that she had been that of a traitor, it must be recollected that Eugene was much more an Italian than a Frenchman, and that at any rate he acted from no selfinterested motive. His first campaign was against the Turks, and he was at Vienna during the siege of 1683. In 1691 he was raised to the command of the Imperial army in Piedmont, and obtained some brilliant successes over the French in the war then raging with that nation. On the return of the Duke of Savoy to the French alliance, Prince Eugene was again at the disposal of the Emperor, and his appointment to the chief command against the Turks, in 1697, afforded him a large field for the display of his military genius. He gained a signal victory over the Turks at Zeuta, on the river Theiss, on September 11th, when the discomfiture of the Ottomans was so great that they mitted to the Republican fleet. In the following year, however, that valuable possession was recovered by a Tunisian pirate, who offered to destroy the whole Venetian armament, if the Sultan would furnish him with twelve vessels of war. This success was more than counterbalanced by the failure of the Mohammedan arms in the direction of the Danube, where the Venetians acquired, and retained, a large tract of country. The conquest of Azof by the Russians, in 1696, was a serious blow to the Turks, since it gave Russia a position at the mouth of the Don, and opened the Black Sea to their enterprise and ambition. Worn out and disheartened by a long series of reverses, the Turks were now resolved to obtain peace at almost any price, and, in October, 1698, conferences were opened at Carlowitz, near Peterwaradin, in Austrian With which had been conquered by the Turks; and the Venetians kept the Morea, St. Maura, and Egina, together with a strong frontier in Dalmatia. Russia, peace was not concluded until July, 1702, owing to the reluctance of the Porte to abandon Azof to its northern enemy. Peter the Great, however, had posted himself so strongly in the coveted possession, and was so well acquainted with its value, that he would have risked a long continuance of the war, rather than relinquish what he had obtained. In the end, Azof was handed over to him, together with eighty miles of the adjacent territory, and in a little while a fortress of unusual strength bore witness to the power of Russia in the vicinity of the Euxine. The general results of the man of good military abilities, accompanied his armies to the field, and was often fortunate in his operations; but the concessions he was at length obliged to make raised so strong a feeling of opposition that an insurrection in 1703 compelled his resignation of the sovereignty. The internal affairs of Germany presented little of interest during the progress of the war; but in 1692 Hanover underwent an important change by its elevation to the dignity of a ninth Electorate. The Emperor conferred this honour on Duke Ernest Augustus, but with the understanding that the Duke was to furnish him with 6,000 men, in addition to his ordinary contingent, as long as the war lasted, and at the same time to pay a subsidy of 500,000 The crowns. In other respects, the Duke was compelled to bind himself, his heirs and successors, to an unquestioning support of the House of Austria in all important transactions. This arrangement was strongly opposed by some of the other German princes, and it was not until several years later that a full recognition of the new Electoral dignity was obtained by George Louis, the son of Ernest Augustus. A more important change was effected, at an earlier period, in the Constitution of Denmark, the weakness of which kingdom was due to the oligarchical nature of its government. nobles were exempt from taxation, and enjoyed many privileges which they used to the detriment of the State. In the war with Sweden, they refused to take any part in the defence of Copenhagen, and the popular hatred of their order was so extreme that Frederick III. saw his opportunity for effecting a pacific revolution. Great concessions were made by him both to the citizens and the serfs, and Copenhagen was constituted one of the States of the kingdom, which conferred on it a voice in the direction of public affairs. A general Assembly was opened at the Danish capital on the 10th of September, 1660, when a contention arose as to whether the taxes necessitated by the late war should be shared by the nobility or not. The representatives of the clergy and citizens took the popular side; but the great landowners stood out obstinately for the retention of their invidious privilege. Up to this time, the Danish crown had been elective; it was now declared to be hereditary, both in the male and female issue of the King-a change which the nobles were compelled to accept by the pressure of military force. On the 18th of October, an oath of homage was taken to Frederick, and the administration was entrusted to various official bodies, the members of which could be appointed or dismissed at the sovereign's pleasure. The Constitution of Denmark was thus changed from an oligarchy to an autocracy; but the despotic powers acquired by the King, and which were supported by a standing army of 24,000 men, were in reality much more favourable to the national wellbeing than the state of aristocratical misgovernment which had preceded them. Unlike Denmark, Sweden became even more aristocratical in its constitution after the Peace of Copenhagen in 1660. The Regency appointed by The Regency appointed by Charles X., a little before his death, was overthrown by a combination of the nobles, and an oligarchical government was established, which administered the royal domains, the national revenues, and the affairs of the kingdom, during the minority of Charles XI. The subsequent alliances of Sweden with England, during the early years of the reign of Charles II., have already been described; but the contests of the northern kingdom with the Elector of Brandenburg, and with Christian V. of Denmark, merit a more particular account than has been given in connection with the wars of Louis XIV. In 1672, Sweden entered into a treaty with that powerful monarch, to help him in his conflict with the Dutch; and the Elector of Brandenburg, having in 1674 leagued himself with the Emperor, the Dutch States, and Spain, assumed an attitude of hostility towards the Swedes, who had invaded his dominions. His warlike projects received no sanction from the Emperor, or the German princes generally; but Frederick William was a man of ambitious views, and hoped to extend his dominions at the cost of his Scandinavian enemy. He therefore set his troops in motion towards the March of Brandenburg, which the Swedes had occupied, and the war began in the summer of 1675. The Swedes, taken by surprise, were defeated at Rathenau on the 25th of June, and again at Fehrbellin on the 28th. The latter reverse was so considerable that the Swedes were obliged to quit the Electoral dominion with the utmost haste. The throne of Denmark was now occupied by Christian V., who had succeeded his father, Frederick III., in 1670. He could not well be indifferent to a war which might approach his frontiers; but, before joining the Elector of Brandenburg— the alliance which appeared most politic—he inveigled the Duke of Holstein, a connection of Charles XI., into a meeting at Rendsborg, and compelled him, by actual violence, to sign a convention on the 10th of July, 1675, by which he consented to transfer his troops to the Danish service, and to place his dominions at the disposal of Christian. The result of these proceedings was the conclusion of a secret treaty between the King of Denmark and the Elector of Brandenburg, when the contracting parties engaged to carry on war against the King of Sweden until they had effected an arrangement favourable to the interests of both parties. The allies were soon afterwards supported by a Dutch fleet, and the war raged with great fury both by sea and land. Upon the whole, the issue of the contest was unfavourable to Sweden; but a sanguinary battle, fought in December, 1676, between the Kings of Sweden and Denmark, near Lunden, the ancient capital of Scania, terminated rather in favour of Charles XI. than of Christian V. Both sovereigns claimed the victory; but the Danes were so much disabled as to be prevented from pursuing their invasion of the Swedish dominions. The Elector of Branden |