The war still continued to rage on the frontiers of Turkey.  After ten months of almost incessant slaughter, the Turkish army was nearly destroyed.  The empress collected two squadrons of Russian men-of-war at Archangel on the White Sea, and at Revel on the Baltic, and sent them through the straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean.  All Europe was astonished at this wonderful apparition suddenly presenting itself amidst the islands of the Archipelago.  The inhabitants of the Greek islands were encouraged to rise, and they drove out their Mussulman oppressors with great slaughter.  Catharine was alike victorious on the land and on the sea; and she began very seriously to contemplate driving the Turks out of Europe and taking possession of Constantinople.  Her land troops speedily overran the immense provinces of Bessarabia, Moldavia and Wallachia, and annexed them to the Russian empire.

The Turkish fleet encountered the Russians in the narrow channel which separates the island of Scio from Natolia.  In one of the fiercest naval battles on record, and which raged for five hours, the Turkish fleet was entirely destroyed.  A courier was instantly dispatched to St. Petersburg with the exultant tidings.  The rejoicings in St. Petersburg, over this naval victory, were unbounded.  The empress was so elated that she resolved to liberate both Greece and Egypt from the sway of the Turks.  The Turks were in a terrible panic, and resorted to the most desperate measures to defend the Dardanelles, that the Russian fleet might not ascend to Constantinople.  At the same time the plague broke out in Constantinople with horrible violence, a thousand dying daily, for several weeks.

The immense Crimean peninsula contains fifteen thousand square miles, being twice as large as the State of Massachusetts.  The isthmus of Perikop, which connects it with the mainland, is but five miles in width.  The Turks had fortified this passage by a ditch seventy-two feet wide, and forty-two feet deep, and had stationed along this line an army of fifty thousand Tartars.  But the Russians forced the barrier, and the Crimea became a Russian province.  The victorious army, however, soon encountered a foe whom no courage could vanquish.  The plague broke out in their camp, and spread through all Russia, with desolation which seems incredible, although well authenticated.  In Moscow, not more than one fourth of the inhabitants were left alive.  More than sixty thousand died in that city in less than a year.  For days the dead lay in the streets where they had fallen, there not being carts or people enough to carry them away.  The pestilence gradually subsided before the intensity of wintry frosts.