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council. Meeting for the first time at Smederevo two months later, the council voted to establish a western-style army, reach out to the Serbs of the pashaliks bordering on that of Belgrade and seek help from the Austrians and the Russians. In theory the objective remained autonomy within the Ottoman Empire: indeed, the Serbs continued to try to conciliate Constantinople. But to secure Russian help - in the end the only hope of victory - they also had to persuade St Petersburg that they were viable allies in the Balkans and also that a South Slav army might one day serve alongside the Russians against the French or Austrians. Needless to say, the resultant military posturing killed all hope of a peaceful settlement and plunged the western Balkans into all-out war. This situation was, of course, not entirely unconnected with Napoleon. If conditions had deteriorated to such an extent in the Serbian lands that the populace had been driven to revolt, it was in part because one of the subsidiary effects of the attack on Egypt had been to completely disrupt Selim III’s attempts to end the tyranny of groups like the yamaks. Equally, if the Russians had encouraged the Serbs in their demands, it was partly because they were terrified of French designs in the Balkans. Finally, as implied above, Serbia’s fate largely rested on developments in central Europe. But in the end this was a Balkan quarrel - quite literally, given the fact that the yamaks were frequently as much Slavic in their origins as their hajduk enemies. And, had Napoleon never existed, such was the extent of its misgovernment that Turkey-in-Europe would always have been a powder-keg.

As for the wars of Napoleon, meanwhile, at sea and in the colonies Britain continued to reign supreme: January 1806 saw the British occupy the vital Dutch colony of the Cape, and the following month witnessed the destruction of a small battle squadron that had managed to slip across the Atlantic in an attempt to assist the French garrisons who were still hanging on in the Caribbean. Similarly, the troops evacuated from the mainland of Italy by the Royal Navy secured Sicily for Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina. And for Russia too, her navy allowed her to maintain a foothold in the Mediterranean, where it kept the Republic of the Seven Islands as a secure base for the army of General Anrep. Otherwise, however, the picture seemed bleak indeed. Prussia had reverted to her previous neutrality. Supported though she was by 6,000 British troops who had landed at the mouth of the river Weser under General Don, and 20,000 Russians who had been sent by sea to Stralsund, Sweden was helpless; and Austria was completely out of the game. In the southernmost provinces of Naples, brutal French requisitioning had sparked off a serious peasant insurrection, but this offered little hope. In the words of Sir John Moore, the insurgents were ‘mafia . . . lawless banditti, enemies to all governments whatever . . . fit to plunder and murder, but much too dastardly to face an enemy’.43 In Britain there were added reasons for despair and self-doubt, the near simultaneous loss of both Nelson and Pitt having struck home very deeply, and in the circumstances, it is perhaps a wonder that resistance continued at all. Russia had been badly shaken. The vacillating Alexander had lost all faith in Czartoryski, on whose aggressive policy he blamed all his difficulties. To make matters still worse, in the aftermath of Austerlitz Alexander had been treated to a display of Napoleonic charm that was not unlike that received by his father, Paul I. Following a somewhat flowery exchange of courtesies, the remnants of the Russian army were allowed to withdraw unmolested, and many prisoners were sent back to Alexander. All this was sufficient to persuade Alexander to renounce all thought of offensive operations, the tsar calling home the troops that had been sent to Stralsund and announcing his intention ‘to remain absolutely passive and not to budge in any way until the time we are attacked on our own soil’.44 Yet the immediate way