Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/78

 The Italian War and the two Balkan Wars were natural sequels to the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. Far outside the frontiers of the Empire, its final break-up had been decreed, and the conference at Bucharest which ended the Second Balkan War was a diplomatic maneuvring for position between Russia and Austria-Hungary. The latter won and Serbia was wrapped round with a hostile Albania, a hostile Bulgaria and a hostile Greece. The only other interest which the Balkan Wars hold for us, lies in the fact that they left a Constantine, wedded to a Sophia, preparing at Athens for still another war.

Five centuries ago, the Catholics of Spain had driven the Moors out of Europe and destroyed the great Moslem monuments at Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo. The Orthodox of Old Greece were now planning to visit the same fate on the Turks and to restore a Byzantine Christian theocracy in Constantinople. The Young Turks' attempt at Ottomanization had made their Rûm community more than ever tenacious of its institutions, and it had come to a time when the Ottoman Greeks in the capital were ready to join with Athens and the Phanar in lifting the Cross over the yellow-brown dome of the great mosque of Ayiah Sophia in Stamboul.

An ugly and a mediaeval business, but a business in which the Greeks were by no means alone. Its irony lay in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Church of England had followed its Foreign Office into contact with Russian Orthodoxy and it was only a matter of time until the Foreign Office should acquiesce in the Russian claim to the steep green