The Cyprus Convention, secretly concluded with Turkey on 4 June 1878, might seem, like most of the events in the history of the island when viewed in relation to other happenings in the general field of European politics, to be a secondary affair–‘a side-show quite outside the Congress of Berlin’, as it has been called. It was not so to those statesmen to whom the Eastern Question meant something more than the problem of unravelling the Balkan tangle, and whose eyes were fixed on the Near and Middle East and India. To France, the occupation of the island by any other Power on the breaking up of the Turkish Empire would threaten her connexion with Syria, in which her interest, not merely from a commercial point of view but as the acknowledged champion of Latin Christianity in that region, dated from the Middle Ages. If the plans for the opening up of ‘an alternate route to India’ by the Euphrates valley, which had attracted attention off and on from as early as 1836 and became an object of lively interest in the early seventies, came to anything, Great Britain would be vitally concerned; and Cyprus, it was thought, would play an indispensable part, as a stage on the way to whichever Syrian port might be chosen as the terminus of a branch line. British control of the Euphrates valley communications would be strategically important in view of a possible Russian advance south of the Caucasus, and the fear of Russian designs in that direction was at the time intense.