Britain and Her Rivals in the Middle East 87
had been allayed by the development of a dispute between those
two Powers over the respective claims of the Catholic and the
Orthodox Churches to the Holy Places in Palestine. In the first
half of the nineteenth century the Russians had established numer-
ous claims which the Ottoman Empire had accorded in previous
centuries to the Catholic Church and its French protector, but
which had been allowed to lapse during the Revolution and the
Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon III, however, wishing to win for his
regime the support of French Catholics, revived in 1852 all the
Latin claims to the Holy Places which had been conferred by the
Capitulations of 1740, and demanded that any subsequent con-
cession to the Orthodox Church which conflicted with them
should be set aside. The Russian government responded with
counter-claims, and went so far as to demand the right to protect
all Orthodox Christians of whatever nationality throughout the
Ottoman Empire. Such a claim was deemed by the Powers to
disturb the European Balance of Power by encroaching on the
authority of the Sultan over his millions of Orthodox subjects in
the Balkans. Negotiations produced agreement on the question
of the Holy Places, but on the larger issue Russia remained ob-
durate. She allowed herself to be diplomatically outmanoeuvred
by the British Ambassador in Turkey, and had to fight the Crimean
War against an alliance of Britain, France, and the Ottoman Em-
pire. The Treaty of Paris which ended the war in 1856 forbade the
Russians to launch warships on the Black Sea, and thus removed one
potential danger from Britain's Mediterranean route to the East.
While the other Powers were preoccupied with the Franco-
German War, however, Russia resumed her freedom of action in
the Black Sea. She had for forty years been progressively bringing
under her dkect rule what is now Russian Turkestan, for her im-
portant trade-route across Siberia, the forerunner of the Trans-
Siberian Railway, had been continually harassed by the lawless
Turcomans to the south. Her southward expansion seemed to
have been completed with the ratification of the Anglo-Russian
Convention of 1873, in which the Amu-Darya was recognized as
the definitive Russian frontier, and the Russian government ack-
nowledged that Afghanistan was 'completely outside the sphere
within which Russia might be compelled to exercise her in-
fluence'. Within four years Russia was engaged in a war against
the Ottoman Empire which would certainly have left her ,pre-
G