Great difficulty was experienced in finding a foreign minister willing to challenge comparison with Visconti-Venosta.
Documents subsequently published have somewhat attenuated the responsibility of Ferry and Saint Hilaire for this breach of faith, and have shown that the French forces in Tunisia acted upon secret instructions from General Farre, minister of war in the Ferry cabinet, who pursued a policy diametrically opposed to the official declarations made by the premier and the foreign minister.
The Austrian government, for its part, desired that the king should be accompanied by Depretis, though not by Mancini, lest the presence of the Italian foreign minister should lend to the occasion too marked a political character.
This and other actions excited the French to act on the secret understanding effected with the British foreign minister at the Berlin Congress.
Golovin's first achievement as foreign minister was to supplement the treaty of Carlowitz, by which peace with Turkey had only been secured for three years, by concluding with the Porte a new treaty at Constantinople (June 13, 1700), by which the term of the peace was extended to thirty years and, besides other concessions, the Azov district and a strip of territory extending thence to Kuban were ceded to Russia.
