Position of the pope.
Although the papal possessions were declared a part of the kingdom of Italy, a law was passed which guaranteed to the pope the rank and privileges of a sovereign prince. He was to have his own ambassadors and court like the other European powers. No officer of the Italian government was to enter the Lateran or Vatican palaces upon any official mission. As head of the church, the pope was to be entirely independent of the king of Italy, and the bishops were not required to take the oath of allegiance to the government. A sum of over six hundred thousand dollars annually was also appropriated to aid the pope in defraying his expenses. The pope, however, refused to recognize the arrangement. He still regards himself as a prisoner, and the Italian government as a usurper who has robbed him of his possessions. He has never accepted the income assigned to him, and still maintains that the independence which he formerly enjoyed as ruler of the Papal States is essential to the best interests of the head of a great international church.[458]
Southeastern Europe.
274. To complete the survey of the great political changes of the nineteenth century, we must turn for a moment to southeastern Europe. The disposal of the European lands occupied by the Turks has proved a very knotty international question. We have seen how the Turks were expelled from Hungary by the end of the seventeenth century, and how Peter the Great and his successors began to dream of acquiring Constantinople as a Russian outpost which would enable the Tsar to command the eastern Mediterranean.[459] Catherine II (1762–1796) had extended the Russian boundary to the Black Sea. On the whole, however, the Turks held their own pretty well during the eighteenth century, but the nineteenth witnessed the disruption of European Turkey into a number of new and independent Christian states.
Servia and Greece revolt from the Sultan.
The Servians first revolted successfully against their oppressors, and forced the Sultan (1817) to permit them to manage their own affairs, although he did not grant them absolute independence. Of the war of independence which the Greeks waged against the Turks (1821–1829) something has already been said.[460] The intervention of Russia, England, and France saved the insurgents from defeat, and in 1829 the Porte recognized the independence of Greece, which became a constitutional monarchy. The Turkish government also pledged itself to allow vessels of all nations to pass freely through the Dardanelles and the Bosporus.
The Crimean War, 1853–1856.
Origin of the principality of Roumania, 1859.
Inasmuch as a great part of the peoples still under Turkish rule in Europe were—like the Russians—Slavs and adherents of the Greek church, Russia believed that it had the best right to protect the Christians within the Sultan's dominions from the atrocious misgovernment of the Mohammedans. When in 1853 news reached the Tsar that the Turks were troubling Christian pilgrims, he demanded that he be permitted to assume a protectorate over all the Christians in Turkey. This the Porte refused to grant. Russia declared war and destroyed the Turkish fleet in the Black Sea. The English government looked with apprehension upon the advance of the Russians. It felt that it would be disastrous to western Europe if Russia were permitted to occupy the well-nigh impregnable Constantinople and send its men-of-war freely about the Mediterranean. England therefore induced Napoleon III to combine with her to protect the Sultan's possessions. The English and French troops easily defeated the Russians, landed in the Crimea, and then laid siege to Sevastopol, an important Russian fortress on the Black Sea. Sevastopol fell after a long and terrible siege, and the so-called Crimean War came to a close. The intervention of the western powers had prevented the capture of Constantinople by the Russians, but very soon the powers recognized the practical independence of two important Turkish provinces on the lower Danube, which were united in 1859 into the principality of Roumania.
Revolt of Bosnia, 1875.