5.
And, last of all, as if it were not enough to be unable to procure the countenance of any Christian power, except on specific conditions prejudicial to their existence, still further, as the alternative of their humbling themselves before the haughty nations of the West whom they abhor, they have to encounter the direct cupidity, hatred, and overpowering pressure of the multitudinous North, with its fanaticism almost equal, and its numbers superior, to their own; a peril more awful in imagination, from the circumstance that its descent has been for so many centuries foretold and commenced, and of late years so widely acquiesced in as inevitable. Seven centuries and a half have passed, since, at the very beginning of the Crusades, a Greek writer still extant turns from the then menacing inroads of the Turks in the East, and the long centuries of their triumph which lay in prospect, to record a prophecy, old in his time, relating to the North, to the effect that in the last days the Russians should be masters of Constantinople. When it was uttered no one knows; but it was written on an equestrian statue, in his day one of the special monuments of the Imperial City, which had one time been brought thither from Antioch. That statue, whether of Christian or pagan origin is not known, has a name in history, for it was one of the works of art destroyed by the Latins in the taking of Constantinople; and the prediction engraven on it bears at least a remarkable evidence of the congruity in itself, if I may use the word; of that descent of the North upon Constantinople, which, though not as yet accomplished, generation after generation grows more probable.
It is now a thousand years since this famous prophecy has been illustrated by the actual incursions of the Russian hordes. Such was the date of their first expedition against Constantinople; their assaults continued through two centuries; and, in the course of that period, they seemed to be nearer the capture of the city than they have been at any time since. They descended the Dnieper in boats, coasted along the East of the Black Sea, and so came round by Trebizond to the Bosphorus, plundering the coast as they advanced. At one time their sovereign had got possession of Bulgaria, to the south of the Danube. Barbarians of other races flocked to his standard; he found himself surrounded by the luxuries of the East and West, and he marched down as far as Adrianople, and threatened to go further. Ultimately he was defeated; then followed the conversion of his people to Christianity, which for a period restrained their barbarous rapacity; after this, for two centuries, they were under the yoke and bondage of the Tartars; but the prophecy, or rather the omen, remains, and the whole world has learned to acquiesce in the probability of its fulfilment. The wonder rather is, that that fulfilment has been so long delayed. The Russians, whose wishes would inspire their hopes, are not solitary in their anticipations: the historian from whom I have borrowed this sketch of their past attempts,[90] writing at the end of last century, records his own expectation of the event. "Perhaps," he says, "the present generation may yet behold the accomplishment of a rare prediction, of which the style is unambiguous and the date unquestionable." The Turks themselves have long been under the shadow of its influence; even as early as the middle of the seventeenth century, when they were powerful, and Austria and Poland also, and Russia distant and comparatively feeble, a traveller tells us that, "of all the princes of Christendom, there was none whom the Turks so much feared as the Czar of Muscovy." This apprehension has ever been on the increase; in favour of Russia, they made the first formal renunciation of territory which had been consecrated to Islam by the solemnities of religion,—a circumstance which has sunk deep into their imaginations; there is an enigmatical inscription on the tomb of the Great Constantine, to the effect that "the yellow-haired race shall overthrow Ismael;" moreover, ever since their defeats by the Emperor Leopold, they have had a surmise that the true footing of their faith is in Asia; and so strong is the popular feeling on the subject, that in consequence their favourite cemetery is at Scutari on the Asiatic coast.[91]