The rhetoric of Holy Russia’s duty to its co-religionists was also employed by Pozzo di Borgo, the Tsar’s ambassador to France, though he was more interested in promoting Russia’s strategic ambitions, calling for a war to expel the Turks from Europe and establish a new Byzantine Empire under Russian protection. Such ideas were widely shared by high officials, army officers and intellectuals, who were increasingly united in the early 1820s by their Russian nationalism and at times by an almost messianic commitment to the Orthodox cause.
