the Old Turks by force and substituted a new regime which might be described as Old Greek. The old Byzantine Empire had been snuffed out as an independent political entity in 1453, but it still lived as an ecclesiastical, commercial and political force in the Oecumenical Patriarchate in the Phanar suburb of Stamboul. Its clergy still perpetuated its memory in the black cylindrical hats and the black robes of Orthodoxy, but for the time being their communicants wore the red fez which marked the Ottoman subject. The King at Athens whence the challenge of Westernism had first been flung down to the Empire, had adopted the title of King of the Greeks and Orthodoxy dominated Old Greece with a degree of intolerance which had never marked Islam in the Empire. Orthodoxy had established its hold on Russia and Orthodox Russia had become the most powerful enemy Islam had ever known. Russia had acquired the protectorship of the Rûm community in the Empire and the great yellow-brown mosque of Ayiah Sophia in Stamboul had become the most sacred irredentum of the Orthodox. Russia sent thousands of pilgrims annually from Odessa to Palestine, and built a hospice on the Mount of Olives which commands Jerusalem in a military sense, with a tower which could not have been better adapted for the uses of a signal tower if it had been built for the purpose. Between Orthodoxy and Islam, there had arisen that state of bitter truce which was typified in the juxtaposition of a Russian church and a Turkish serai. France which had divorced Church and State at home, still held the protectorship of the Katolik
