248 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

ment of a Hapsburg Power that was implicated in Western Christen-
dom's border warfare with the 'Osmanlis as well as in the Hapsburgs'
family quarrel with France; and, thanks to this French forbearance,
whether it was deliberate or inadvertent,1 the Danubian Hapsburg Mon-
archy, throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,
usually found itself able to avoid simultaneous engagements on its
French and on its Ottoman front.

The same policy of limiting her military liabilities to a single front
at a time was followed by Russia after she had become implicated in the
Western Balance of Power at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries; and, until after the close of the General War of A.D. 1792-
1815, the insulation of the vortex round the frontier between Western
Christendom and the Ottoman Empire from the vortex in the interior of
the Western World usually proved to be practical politics. 'The Eastern
Question* began to enter into the Western Balance of Power only when
Napoleon's failure to expand a French ascendancy over the debris of a
Medieval city-state cosmos into a French ascendancy over the whole of
a Modern Western and Westernizing World2 left a victorious Russia and
a victorious Great Britain free to pursue a rivalry with one another in the
Near and Middle East.

Even the vortex round the frontier between Western Christendom and
Russian Orthodox Christendom did not coalesce completely with the
vortex in the interior of the Western World till more than a hundred
years after the date of Peter the Great's victory at Poltava in A.D. 1709
over Charles XII of Sweden. It was not so surprising that, before
Russia had been received into the Western Society as a result of Peter's
life-work, the Great Northern War of A.D. 1700-21 should have been
waged without becoming implicated in the Western World's General
War of A.D. 1673-1713, just as the Great Northern War of A.D. 1558-83
had been waged without being implicated either in the last cadences of
the overture (currebat A.D. 1494-1568) to a latter-day Western series of
cycles of War and Peace or in the first cadences of the first regular cycle
in this series (currebat A.D. 1568-1672). It was more remarkable that the
partitions of Poland-Lithuania in A.D. 1772-95 between Russia and the
two eastern march-Powers of the Western World, and also even Russia's
acquisition of Finland from the Scandinavian march-State of the
Western World in the Russo-Swedish war of A.D. 1808-9, should still
have taken place in the margin, and not in the centre, of the Western
system of international relations. It is true that Russia was a belligerent
in the Seven Years War from A.D. 1756 to A.D. 1762, and that her with-
drawal from this war in A.D. 1762 may have marked a turning-point in
the fortunes of Frederick the Great. Yet the first Western general war in
which Russia played a principal part was the war of A.D, 1793-1815, and

a rival Power, -while on the other hand the French might have hoped, if their intervention
against the 'Osmanlis at Candia had been successful, to enter into Venice's heritage in at
least a remnant of her dominion in Crete.

> According to Fueter, op. cit., p. 48, no special consideration was shown to the
Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy or to Venice by other states of the Western comity in
return for the public service which these two anti-Ottoman march-states were perform-
ing for Western Christendom as a whole. » See V. v. 619-42.