And let me say now a word which will have to apply to all the rest of the story, so far as it touches these Balkan States, Danubian Principalities, and so on: that the changes which have taken place in their governments and political conditions have been so many and so quickly varied that it is quite impossible to give them place in this story. They are changes, moreover, of relatively little importance for the story as a whole. The population is almost inextricably mixed, with the Slav generally predominating. Among this mixture the Turk appears quite alien in blood, as he is in religion, and therefore it seems only natural and right, that Russia, as the leading Slav nation, with the headquarters of the Greek Church, which is the national Church of the Slav, at her southern capital city of Moscow, should extend, as she did, her sway over the Balkans and that the domination of the Turk should continually recede. Perhaps the really most interesting outcome of all this anti-Turk fighting is the independence won by Greece and acknowledged by Turkey in 1820, after some ten years of intermittent wars. {183} [Sidenote: The power of Russia] In the main we have to realise that by this date Russia had taken over what used to be Austria's part in the defence of Christendom against the Moslem Turk. Not indeed that Austria had lost importance, except, maybe, in comparison with Russia, for she had become for the moment the most important of the Teutonic States. Prussia was still her chief rival among them, but until the other German States were brought to act together under Prussia's lead Austria was singly the most powerful of them all. In a second Persian war, Russia gained a large territory in the Caucasian district which reached right down to the borders of Armenia. The unfortunate Poland, already thrice divided, had become nominally a kingdom, but was subject to Russia's dictation, and in 1831 she was annexed by that vast and ever-increasing empire---a domination from which she has only recently been delivered as a result of the Great War. Thus it is that, on all sides except the west, where she was up against the solid Teuton block of the German States, the great Slav monster, whose appropriate emblem was the bear, was stretching its huge grasping paws ever farther.