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 THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. 169 Greece, all came to nothing. Only one of the Western European states, the republic of Venice, was incessantly opposing the Turks, and often with success, but the Venetians in their turn like- wise oppressed the Greeks. They acted not as their friends, but from selfish motives. The religious separation between the Eastern and the Western churches is a thing of great im- portance to be considered in regard to the posi- tion of the Greek people toward the peoples of Western Europe. This religious dissension was to some extent the reason why Western Europe ceased to care what happened to the Greeks. The Turks made their final conquests in the ' south; they took Crete. The last half of the. seventeenth century was the direst period through which the Greeks ever had to pass. With the beginning of the eighteenth century Greece hoped for help from Russia, the very power whose population shared her religious belief, and who freely fed her with promises and encouragements. Catharine II. together with Emperor Joseph II. both had for a time the same plans as Charles VIII. — namely, to restore the Byzantine -Greek empire. The Greeks were for the first time undeceived in their confidence in Russia at the time of the insurrection in 1770