No race could under such conditions maintain a high intellectual life; and among Greek Christians orthodoxy was a matter of course. While Venice held the Morea at the end of the seventeenth century, and while Genoa ruled some of the islands, the same state of things prevailed under Catholic rule. When accordingly the sense of nationality began to grow in the eighteenth century, it was from the first associated with the national religion. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Catholic propaganda was carried on in Chios and elsewhere under French auspices, and the Greek Church persuaded the Turkish Government to prohibit proselytism. At no period does the strife between easterns and westerns at the Holy Sepulchre seem to have ceased; and it now began to worsen. The wars between Austria and Turkey, however, began the gradual emancipation of the Greek people from servitude, by putting an outside pressure on the Turkish Government; the Russians continued the process; and the new friendly relations now set up between Greek and other Christians developed a new Greek sentiment of racial hostility to the Turks. At the same time, the hostility of the Christian powers made the Porte inclined to attach the Greek upper class by giving them privileges as Turkish officials, and thus the national self-respect was on that side further encouraged, despite the corruption of the favoured class. Probably Russian influence in the eighteenth century did most to arouse national aspirations, Russia being specially welcome as holding the Greek form of Christianity; but the Russian attempt to secure sovereignty as the price of military help checked the movement for independence; and it needed the contagion of the French revolutionary movement to cause a vigorous revival. Then Russia on political grounds combined with the Porte to resist French influence from the Levant and the Ionian islands; and when in 1815 the revived Ionian Republic was placed under British protection, Russia and Turkey continued to combine in jealousy of Western influence. English rule in the Ionian Islands in turn was "neither wise nor liberal," and while it subsisted did nothing for Greek development; but it remains the fact that Russia, holding the Greek creed, never aimed sympathetically at Greek liberation. That came about at length through the fervour of national feeling set up at the French Revolution and encouraged by a common European sympathy, grounded not on religion but on admiration for ancient and pagan Greece as the great exemplar of civilization and intellectual life. The same admiration for their ancestors was naturally aroused among the Greeks themselves, and was their strongest political impulse. "Ecclesiastical ties greatly facilitated union, but they neither created the impulse towards independence, nor infused the enthusiasm which secured success."