For a thousand years, Russia has had a vision of Constantinople as the centre of Russian power. Her first descent upon it was made in the ninth century, while still a heathen nation; and her latest in the nineteenth. Can any parallel instance be found, in which a nation has held fast to one great idea for a thousand years, through all vicissitudes of fortune, and all changes in government, religion, and civilization? It has been called the dream of Russia, — is it not a marvelously prophetic dream?
Into the early and partly legendary period of her plans for reaching the Bosphorus we shall not enter. The first decided and solemn announcement to the world of her intentions was made in 1472 by Ivan III., when he married the Princess Sophia, niece of Constantine Palæologus, the last of the Greek emperors, and assumed the double-headed eagle of the Byzantine Empire as the symbol of the Russian. This bold assumption of right to the Byzantine throne was the more worthy of admiration from the fact that Mehmet, before whom Europe trembled, was the occupant of that throne; it was the distance and obscurity of the claimant that secured his safety. But he made the claim; and for five centuries Russia has prosecuted it with serene and invincible courage. She was then an unknown, insignificant power, but just casting off the trammels of the Tartar domination, and slowly gathering the elements of that mighty strength of which she alone was conscious. She is now the terror of the world. Her territory was then about 740,000 square miles; it is now more than eight millions! Every square foot of it has been won by the sword and stained with human blood.
