It was to check the action of Britain in the East that the Czar now turned to the French Consul, and seconded his efforts for the formation of a naval confederacy in the North, while his minister, Rostopchin, planned a division of the Turkish Empire in Europe between Russia and her allies. Austria was to be satisfied with the western provinces of the Balkan peninsula; Russia gained Moldavia, Bulgaria, and Roumelia as far as Constantinople; while Greece fell to the lot of France, whose troops were already on the Italian shores, at a day's sail from the Illyrian coast. A squabble over Malta, which had been blockaded since its capture by Buonaparte, and which surrendered at last to a British fleet, but whose possession the Czar claimed as his own on the ground of an alleged election as Grand Master of the Order of St. John, served as a pretext for a quarrel with England; and at the close of 1800 Paul openly prepared for hostilities. In October he announced an armed neutrality; in December he seized three hundred English vessels in his ports, and sequestrated all English goods found in his Empire. The Danes, who throughout the year had been struggling to evade the British right of search, at once joined this neutral league, and were followed by Sweden in their course. It was plain that, as soon as the spring of 1801 opened the Baltic, the fleets of the three Powers would act in practical union with those of France and Spain. But the command of the seas which such a union threatened was a matter for England of life and death, for at this very moment the Peace of Lunéville left Buonaparte without a foe on the Continent, and able to deal as he would with the whole military resources of France. Once master of the Channel he could throw a force on the southern coast of England which she had no means of meeting in the field. But dexterous as the combination was, it was shattered at a blow. On the first of April 1801 a British fleet of eighteen men-of-war forced the passage of the Belt, appeared before Copenhagen, and at once attacked the city and its fleet. In spite of a brave resistance from the Danish batteries and gunboats six Danish ships were taken, and the Crown Prince was forced to conclude an armistice which enabled the English ships to enter the Baltic, where the Russian fleet was still detained by the ice. But their work was really over. The seizure of English goods and the declaration of war had bitterly irritated the Russian nobles, whose sole outlet for the sale of the produce of their vast estates was thus closed to them; and on the twenty-fourth of March, nine days before the battle of Copenhagen, Paul fell in a midnight attack by conspirators in his own palace. With Paul fell the Confederacy of the North. The policy of his successor, the Czar Alexander, was far more in unison with the general feeling of his subjects; in June a Convention between England and Russia settled the vexed questions of the right of search and contraband of war, and this Convention was accepted by Sweden and Denmark.