During the eighteenth century, throughout the Orthodox world still ruled by Muslims in the Balkans and the East, Churches began looking with increasing hope to this great power in the north which proclaimed its protection over them, whose Church still announced itself to be the Third Rome, and which pushed its armies ever further into the lands so long languishing in the hands of the Grandsons of Hagar. Soon in its efforts to fulfil its ambitions at the expense of the decaying Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire would clash with heirs of the Western Reformation, with consequences disastrous for
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