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168 in the eighteenth century, driving the Turks before them from Hungary, until by the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739 they fixed the line which, for more than a hundred years, afterwards delimited Turkish power towards Christendom. Undoubtedly the Austrians thus rendered a great service to Europe, but the incidental effect, so far as the Croatians, Magyars, Slovaks, and Rumanians of Transylvania were concerned, was merely to substitute the mastery of the German for that of the Turk. When Peter the Great of Russia moved his capital at the beginning of the eighteenth century from Moscow to Petrograd, he went from a Slavonic to a German environment, a fact recorded in the German name St. Petersburg. As a consequence, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, German influence was great in Russian Government. The Russian bureaucracy, on which the Czardom depended, was, in large measure, recruited from among the cadets of the German baronial families of the Baltic provinces.

Thus East Europe has not consisted, like West Europe, of a group of peoples independent of one another, and—until Alsace was taken by Prussia—without serious frontier questions between them; East Europe has