Since 1780 the Russian alliance had failed him. He valued it as a means of preserving peace, but the policy which now prevailed at St. Petersburg looked towards war. Frederick, who was strangely blind to this, declared in response to the blandishments of the Czarina that the time was not ripe to seize more of Poland (1779). He proposed the admission of the Turk into the league at the moment when Catherine was dreaming of a new crusade. In Joseph, on the other hand, the Czarina found a willing partner in a policy of adventure. From the time when he visited her in the summer of 1780, the alliance between Russia and Prussia was practically dead. Frederick sacrificed to it in May, 1781, by joining the Armed Neutrality which Russia had organised in order to check the high-handed treatment of neutral vessels by Great Britain. But in the same month Catherine and Joseph made a defensive alliance for eight years. Frederick rightly divined that the ambitious Czarina had won the Emperor’s countenance to the scheme of a revival by Russia of the old Eastern Empire. Her eldest grandson was destined to be Czar of all the Russias. Her second was named after the founder of Constantinople and suckled by six Greek nurses. The third, sneered the King, when another was expected, would presumably become Great Mogul. But though Frederick regarded Catherine as pretentious, saying that if she were corresponding with God the Father she would claim at least equal rank, none knew better than he the value of her alliance. In 1762 Russia had turned the scale, and had she been favourable to the plan, Joseph’s bold throw for Bavaria might have been successful. It was no light matter for Frederick that in his old age his State was threatened by an Emperor whose thoughts were still running on Silesia and who had succeeded in seducing his sole ally. France and England were beyond the range of his overtures, and when the Russian armies moved in 1783 Europe believed that the Turk was about to be finally expelled. Frederick, it seemed, was doomed to perilous isolation. [Illustration: UNTER DEN LINDEN IN 1780. FROM AN ETCHING BY ROSENTAG.] One force indeed remained—a force difficult to marshal, but as Charles V. had found, formidable when marshalled—which Frederick might hope to rally to his side. The tilted balance of Europe might still be redressed in Germany. By his conduct in the affair of the Bavarian Succession Frederick had proved that it was not impossible for Germans to trust him, and since that time Austria by fresh aggressions had alienated from herself the general body of Romanist opinion among them. It appeared that the Empire which was a corporation for the preservation of rights had acquired in Joseph a head who set at naught all rights save those of Austria. The inevitable result was that the princes began to think of uniting in self-defence.