Owing to the intervention of Austria, which was averse to a war with France, the question of Egypt was only settled on July 13, 1841, by a hatti-sherif, which gave Mehemet Ali the hereditary possession of Egypt, and by the treaty of London, which guaranteed the neutrality of the Straits, as Russia wanted to control the Straits and conquer Constantinople to free the Christians in the Balkan Peninsula from the so-called Ottoman tyranny, and “relight the tapers which had been put out by the Turks” in St. Sophia, restored to Orthodoxy. France, following the old traditions of her foreign policy and in agreement with England, confined the Russians within the Black Sea by the convention of the Straits in 1841, and thus secured, not the integrity, but the existence of the Turkish Empire. But the Tsar, Nicholas I, who was bent on defending the Greek faith within the Ottoman Empire, was anxious to see Turkey pursue the work of the Tanzimat—_i.e._, the new régime—confirmed by the promulgation by Abdul Mejid of the hatti-sherif of Gulhané on November 3, 1839. In 1844 he made overtures concerning the partition of Turkey, to England, to which the latter country turned a deaf ear. Thanks to the support of Great Britain and France, the Turkish troops, which had been sent to Moldavia and Wallachia after the riots which had broken out after the revolution, compelled the Tsar in 1849-51 to withdraw his army beyond the Pruth. In 1850 France protested against the encroachments of Russia in the East, who, in order to protect the Greek monks living in Palestine and secure her own religious domination, wanted to deprive the Roman monks of their time-honoured rights over the Christian sanctuaries.