In 1807-12 Alexander I.of Russia resumed the conquering march of the Czars southward, captured Bessarabia, and forced the Sultan to grant certain privileges to the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.

In 1815 the Servians revolted against Turkish rule: they had always remembered the days of their early fame, and in 1817 wrested from the Porte large rights of local self-government.
[Footnote 87: The story that Peter the Great of Russia left a clause in his will, bidding Russia to go on with her southern conquests until she gained Constantinople, is an impudent fiction of French publicists in the year 1812, when Napoleon wished to keep Russia and Turkey at war.

Of course, Peter the Great gave a mighty impulse to Russian movements towards Constantinople.] Ten years later the intervention of England and France in favour of the Greek patriots led to the battle of Navarino, which destroyed the Turco-Egyptian fleet and practically secured the independence of Greece.
An even worse blow was dealt by the Czar Nicholas I.of Russia.

In 1829, at the close of a war in which his troops drove the Turks over the Balkans and away from Adrianople, he compelled the Porte to sign a peace at that city, whereby they acknowledged the almost complete independence of Moldavia and Wallachia.

These Danubian Principalities owned the suzerainty of the Sultan and paid him a yearly tribute, but in other respects were practically free from his control, while the Czar gained for the time the right of protecting the Christians of the Eastern, or Greek, Church in the Ottoman Empire.