For a much longer period has Russia had her longing eyes on what she was wont to call “The Sacred City”--the city which had so long been the goal of the nations of Asia and Europe. From the days of Rurik, the reputed founder of the Russian monarchy, the Muscovites have never ceased to look forward to the time when the peerless city of Constantine would be in the possession of Holy Russia, and when the strategic channel which links the Euxine with the Mediterranean would be under her absolute control. For a thousand years the forces of Russia continued irresistibly to move toward the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. When Catherine II, “The Semiramis of the North,” in 1787, made her magnificent progress through Southern Russia she entered the city of Kherson under a triumphal arch which bore the inscription “The Way to Byzantium.” As still further expressive of her faith in Russia’s ultimate destiny there was a gate in Moscow named “The Way to Constantinople.” But this was not all. With the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II, she worked out a scheme for a restored Greek Empire, with Constantinople as its capital, the throne of which was to be given to her second grandson. And so sure was she of effectuating her plan that “the boy with sagacious prescience had been christened Constantine; he was always dressed in the Greek mode, surrounded by Greek nurses and instructed in the tongue of his future subjects. That no detail might be lacking which foresight could devise, a medal had already been struck, on one side of which was a representation of the young prince’s head and on the other an allegorical device indicating the coming triumph of the Cross over the Crescent.”[45] At the famous conference on the raft anchored in the river Nieman, when Napoleon and Alexander I discussed plans for the division of the world’s sovereignty, the Russian monarch demanded, as his share of the partition, the City of Constantinople together with the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. For this he was willing to concede to the French Emperor the most valuable regions on the Mediterranean littoral and to aid him with money and men in his projected conquest of India. But this the ambitious dictator of Europe would not grant. Placing his finger on the map where Constantinople was indicated, he exclaimed with passionate emphasis, “Constantinople! Constantinople! Never. That would mean the empire of the world!” At St. Helena he again gave clear expression to his estimate of the value of Constantinople when he declared “_Constantinople est placée pour être le centre et le siege de la dominion universelle._”[46]