IVAN THE TERRIBLE

By

K. WALISZEWSKI

Translated from the French by

LADY MARY LOYD

INTRODUCTION

The work of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great show us modem Russia, armed already, cap-a-pie, for all the conquests, moral or material, gained then or since. But this work, as all men know, possessed certain antecedents, and Peter gave himself out to be a follower—of whom? His immediate predecessors we know—the earliest Romanoffs, obscure sovereigns of an Empire cut off from all European contact, closed to all external influence, and incapable of evolving even a rudimentary civilization from its own elements. Going back further, to the closing years of the sixteenth century, we see the troublous times — that is to say, disorder, anarchy, barbarism, darkness. Yet, looking closely, the sudden brightness of the eighteenth century was no dawn. For a rising sun the light was all too brilliant. Peter the Great was not mistaken. The darkness out of which his vivid genius flashed was only an eclipse.

The internal and external development of the great Northern Empire seems to partake of the nature of the avalanche. At widely-parted intervals we have a sudden displacement of the centre of gravity, resulting in a swift movement forward, followed by a more or less lengthy period of immobility. This phenomenon has occurred several nines already, and appearances are all in favour of its reproduction. The reason and the explanation are both very simple. The nation, in the performance of the mighty task laid upon it, was bound to meet with formidable obstacles, and consequently to make successive efforts. At this moment, and for the past twenty years, its progress has been apparently suspended internally, and checked on the lines it had previously pursued externally.

This is because Russia’s activity has been absorbed and diverted by the conquest of a new territory, destined to widen the field of her efforts yet further—to the Chinese Seas on one side, to the Persian Gulf on the other. But the problems momen­tarily put aside are ripening all the same, slowly but surely, and beware of the avalanche !

The predecessor whom Peter the Great invoked was a con­temporary of the last Valois Kings, and to this period we must go back, indeed, to discover the reformer’s political and intellectual origins. The task is a heavy one, but it is the price which must be paid for our comprehension of the final result, and it is the raison d'etre of the volume I now place in my readers’ hands. I shall be told, no doubt, that I ought to have begun with it ; but in history, as in anatomy, it would be foolhardy to go, in the first place, to the very beginnings, to the embryo, to the cell—and in reality I am only following the regular order and method of every study.

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, then, Russia dwelt apart, or almost apart, from the European community and from civilization. But she had made a previous effort to enter both, and the work to which Voltaire lent his aid and gave his praise was begun when Charles IX. and Henri III. reigned over France. At that moment Muscovy, huge and barbarous, set forth to enter into contact with her Western neighbours. She found the road barred. Poland, with Sweden, threw herself athwart it, and the removal of the obstacle was the work of more than a hundred years. But, if it had not been for Batory, the hands of the clock which marks the hours of all great historical evolutions might have whirled round the dial a century before. Externally, the acquisition of the Baltic seaboard, the destruction of the last vestiges of the Tartar power, the conquest of Siberia, the opening up of political and commercial relations with all the European countries ; inter­nally, the introduction of the elements of foreign culture, the reorganization of the State on the very basis we see at the present day — all this, accomplished by Peter and Catherine, was undertaken, outlined, even partly realized, in the course of that first morning on which an all too speedy evening fell.

Who did it ? The man of whom Custine wrote that he had, ‘ so to speak, outrun the limits of the sphere within which God permits His creature to work harm,’ the tortures, whose figure is a nightmare, whose name is a terror, the emulation of Nero and Caligula—the Terrible!

Here we have one of the most curious instances of aberration to be found in legend, and even in critical history.

To begin with the name ‘ the Terrible,’ with which, to insure the recognition of my personage, I have been forced to head my volume—the name is, I say, a misinterpretation. The Russians of the present day, deceived by a translation im­posed on them by foreigners, do not recognise this themselves. The Germans hesitate between dcr Schreckliche (the Terrible) and der Gran same (the Cruel), and while both versions are incorrect, the second is the worst. Never did the Muscovites of his time call Ivan thus. He was the groznyi. Now hearken : In the course of an epistolary dispute which is one of the curiosities of the period, Batory having reproached his adversary with surrounding himself with battle-axe-men (ryndy) when he received the King’s envoys, Ivan replies, ‘ Eto tchine gossoudarskii, da i Groza ’ ‘ Thus it must be, for my rank and the respect I must inspire ’).

The Groza has never meant any other thing. Consult the ‘ Domostroi',’ the famous Muscovite household book of that epoch, as to the duties imposed on the father of the family; he is expected to be groznyi—that is to say, n-ipr t-H .worthy of resnect. But what, then, of the tortures, the scaffolds, theTLf'atombs of human lives, whereof the chroniclers speak ? That is another matter. Do you know, in any Euro­pean country, a chapter of sixteenth-century history that reads like an idyll ? In Poland, perhaps, where the szlachta, with the last of the Jagellons, was inaugurating the perilous experiment of the noli me tangere. And there, again. Batory set things in order for a time. But from this point of view Poland and Russia were the very antipodes, and :f the latter has succeeded where the foimer failed it is just because she has not been too dainty as to her methods. Look into the huge crucible in which this people has laboured, from the Ural to the Carpathians, the White Sea to the Black; it is not

gentleness, politeness, consideration, that made it possible to mingle, and bray, and melt twenty diverse races into the compact block which is the Russia of to-day ! That Ivan IV., ir* the course of his work, may have gone somewhat beyond the atrocity usual in his century, may be. We will go back to that. But both in legendary and in critical history the surname of ‘ the Terrible ’ has become synonymous with an unreasonable and inexcusable ferocity, purely barbarous in its origin, and carried to madness in its manifestations. To anybody who knows the power there is in words the con­sequence cannot be doubted : the word has set its false hall­mark on the thing.

The evocation of the man and his surroundings cannot, indeed, be parted from some hideous sights and my readers must brace their nerves to meet some severe shocks. Yet athwart these gloomy visions they will perceive that of which I have spoken—the sun-ise. The bright sun, the red sun, of the rhapsodists : in their tongue the two adjectives are one and the same. A blood-stained sun, lighting up a gloomy landscape. That, again, is another matter. The ideal here sought and gained is not, perhaps, the most seductive in the world’s history ; but an ideal it is, and it gave, and still gives, the law to a great nation.

In the last Rurikovitchy who ruled—for Feodor was a mere shadow—Kaveline, one of the leaders of the Slavophil school, has already recognised ‘ the central figure ’ of his country’s history. Since then attempts at posthumous rehabilitation and apotheosis have so multiplied as to reach a not less evi­dently excessive point in the other direction. I shall endeavour to determine, between these opposing currents, what is truth and what justice. ,

It has not appeared to me possible to begin this study without preceding it by a general view of the geography, political, social, and intellectual condition, and habits and customs of a country into which, even nowadays, the historian must penetrate in the guise of an explorer. To these subjects the first four chapters of the book are devoted. Their length and detail must be excused : without them I should have run the risk of failing to make myself understood, and of talking

in perpetual riddles. To most of my readers, I believe, this key will be indispensable.

My authorities this time include few unpublished sources. Of the documents I might have utilized most have either beer printed or continue inaccessible. The literature of the subject is exceedingly abundant, so much so that, to avoid overloading my pages, I have abstained, with very few exceptions, from direct references. I may add that this literature exists, as a whole, in the form of unworked materials, collections of documents, or monographs. The historical edifice has yet to be built up.

I beg my friend, I. Stchor.kine, whose rich library and unwearying kindness have alone enabled me to begin and accomplish my task, to accept the expression of my deep gratitude.

PART I . RUSSIA IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE

I.              RUSSIA, NEW AND OLD. II. THE TERRITORY. III.SOCIAL MATTERS : THE ARISTOCRACY. IV.—POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION : THE ORIGIN OF ABSOLUTISM. V. THE PEASANTS. VI.------------------- THE SERFS. VII. THE TOWNS­FOLK. VIII.—THE CHURCH

CHAPTER II POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LIFE

I. THE CENTRAL POWER. II.—PROVINCIAL ORGANIZATION. III.—THE MIESTNITCHESTVO. IV.—THE COMMUNE. V. JUDICIAL ORGANIZATION AND LEGISLATION. VI.—THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM. VII.— THE FINANCES -

CHAPTER III INTELLECTUAL LIFE

I. CAUSES OF ITS WEAKNESS. II.—INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS. III. — LITERATURE. IV. ART. V. THE RENOVATING MOVEMENT

CHAPTER IV HABITS AND CUSTOMS

I.—THEIR ASPECT, PHYSICAL AND MORAL. II.—THE WOMEN. III.—THE FAMILY. IV.—SOCIETY

PART II

THE YOUTH OF IVAN

CHAPTER I THE FIRST RUSSIAN TSAR

I.—THE BIRTH OF THE TERRIBLE. II. THE GOVERNMENT OF THE BOIARS. III.—MARRIAGE AND CORONATION. TV. SYLVESTER AND ADACHEV. V.—THE FIRST ASSEMBLY : RU.SSIAN PARLIAMENTARIANS!

CHAPTER II THE FIRST REFORMS

I.—THE REFORMING CURRENTS. II. THE NEW CODE. III.— THE REORGANIZATION OF THE ‘ SERVICE.’ IV.—THE RE­LIGIOUS REFORM

CHAPTER III THE EXPANSION EASTWARDS—THE TAKING OF KAZAN

I. THE REMNANTS OF THE MONGOL EMPIRE. II.—IVAN’S ARMY. III.—THE CAPTURE OF KAZAN IV. THE CONSE­QUENCES. V.—THE CAPTURE OF ASTRAKAN. VI. THE COSSACKS. VII. THE CRIMEA AND LIVONIA

CHAPTER IV THE CONQUEST OF LIVONIA

I.—HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS. II. THE LIVONIA OF THE SIX­TEENTH CENTURY. III. THE M-USCOVITE CONQUEST. IV.—THE EUROPEAN INTERVENTION

CHAPTER V THE STRUGGLE FOR THE EMPIRE OF THE BALTIC

I.—SWEDEN AND POLAND. II.—THE COALITIONS. III.—THE COLLAPSE OF HIE ALLIANCES : MAGNUS. IV.—IVAN’S CANDIDATURE FOR THE POLISH THRONE. V.—THE ELEC­TION OF BATORY

PART III THE CRISIS

CHAPTER I THE POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL EVOLUTION

I.-—THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES. II.-- THE DIS­GRACE OF SYLVESTER AND ADACHEV. III.—THE FLIGHT OF KOtRBSKI ...... 216-236

CHAPTER II THE OPRITCHNINA

I.—THE FICTIONS AND REALITIES OF THE DRAMA. II.—THE TERROR. III.—THE TSAR SIMEON. IV.—THE OPRITCHNINA AT THE BAR OF HISTORY .... 237-273

CHAFTER III THE ANGLOMANIA OF IVAN THE TERRIBLE : IVAN AND ELIZABETH

I.—THE FIRST ENGLISHMEN IN RUSSIA. II.—PROJECTS OF ALLIANCE. III. A PROJECTED MARRIAGE. IV. — MARY HASTINGS. V. THE DUTCH COMPETITION AND THE RUP­TURE

PART IV

THE END

CHAPTER I THE POLISH INVASION : BATORY

I.—BATORY. II.—THE STRUGGLE. III.—THE POLISH ARMY. IV.—THE RUSSIAN ARMY. V. THE CAPTURE OF POLOTSK. VI.—THE POLES IN MUSCOVY. VII.—THE DIPLOMATIC INTERLUDE. VIII. THE SIEGE OF PSKOV

CHAPTER II THE LOSS OF LIVONIA—ROME AND MOSCOW

I.—CHEVRIGUINE’S MISSION. II. THE PAPAL MEDI ATION. III. —THE TRUCE OF IAM-ZAPOLSKI. IV.—PObSEVINO AT MOSCOW. V.—THE DAY AFTER THE TRUCE -

CHAPTER III THE CONQUEST OF SIBERIA : ERMAK

I. CONQUEST AND COLONIZATION. II. THE STROGANOVS. III.—THE COSSACKS. IV.------------- ERMAK IN SIBERIA

CHAPTER IV THE COURT OF IVAN THE TERRIBLE—HIS PRIVATE LIFE

I. THE COURT. II.-- THE SLOBODA OF ALEXANDROV. III.----- IVAN'S DOMESTIC LIFE. IV.-------------------------- THE TSAR’S FAMILY

CHAPTER V THE MAN AND HIS WORK

I. HIS DEATH. II.—CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT. III.--- KNOWLEDGE AND INTELLIGENCE. IV.—IDEAS AND FEEL­INGS. V.------------------------------ THE RESULTS OF HIS REIGN -

BIBLIOGRAPHY

RUSSIA IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE

I.- RUSSIA, NEW AND OLD. II. THE TERRITORY. III.—SOCIAL MATTERS : THE ARISTOCRACY. IV. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION: THE ORIGIN OF ABSOLUTISM. V.----- THE PEASANTS. VI.—THE SERFS. VII. THE TOWNSFOLK. VIII. THE CHURCH.

I.—Old and New Russia.

‘ An eagle, many-winged, with lion’s claws, has fallen upon me. He has robbed me of three Cedars of Lebanon : my beauty, my wealth, my children. Our country is deserted, our city is in nrns, our markets are destroyed. My brothers have been carried to a place where neither our fathers, nor our grand­fathers, nor our forefathers have dwelt. . . .’

Thus, by the mouth of one of her chroniclers, did Pskov, a free and republican town, absorbed, in the year 1510, into the new Muscovite Empire, lament her lost independence, her broken privileges, and her exiled sons. The father oi Ivan the Terrible, Vassili Ivanovitch. had just passed by, had carried off the great bell which for centuries had called the townsmen to the vietchie—the popular meetings of the place—deported hundreds of families—quickly replaced by Muscovite immi­grants—to the interior of his territories, and proclaimed the incorporation of the Republic with his State.

And this, in a then unknown corner of the European world, was the repetition, at short notice, of a chapter of European history. Thus, at Liege, in 1467, Charles the Bold had over­thrown the fpmous perron, the ancient bronze column, at the foot of which, for centuries past, the people had been wont to make its laws and accomplish all the acts of its public life. Thus, too, at tlie same time, and hard by, Louis XI., striving with hi* vassals of Burgundy, Brittany, and Guyenne, was labouring to ‘ reunir les fieurons ’ of the crown of France.

From one end of the European continent to the other, this was the decisive hour of great political formations, everywhere attended by the same painful crises. But here, in the far North-East, the task of the ‘ gatherers of the Russian land,’ as they have been called, was especially difficult and arduous. This was, in fact, no matter of welding together provinces already bound by numerous affinities, common traditions, an evident solidarity of interests. Conceive the France of the fifteenth cen­tury conquered by the English, and some Burgundian Prince founding, not at Dijon even, but in Germany, in Switzerland, or in Italy, the nucleus of a new monarchy, destined to gather into one whole the remnants of the French fatherland, dis­membered, broken ^;nto pieces. There you have the equivalent of the obscure and laborious process of gestation which gave birth, in the early days of the sixteenth century, to that new world, the Russia of the Ivans and the Vassilis.

What was that Russia ? Not the country you now traverse in your sleeping-car from Kiev to St. Petersburg, from Warsaw to Irkutsk. The Russia of Kiev had passed away ; as yet the Russia of St. Petersburg was not. Of the lands which in the tenth and eleventh centuries had made up the Empire of the Jaroslavs and the Vladimirs, the Sovereign seated at Moscow held not an inch. He called himself Duke, or Tsar, ‘ of All the Russias ’ indeed, but his right to assume the title was much on a par with that of the English kings, his contemporaries, to reckon the crown and arms of France in their own patrimony. The Russia of Kiev was now part of the Polish territory ; the Russia of Mokhilev belonged to Lithuania. Red Russia, White Russia, Little Russia, were all held by neighbours. Moscow was but a Russian colony in a foreign —a Finnish—country.

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Empire of Kiev had melted away in the fratricidal struggle waged by the sons of Vladimir Monoinachus. In the thirteenth century, it underwent a Tartar invasion, in the next, a Polish-Lithuanian conquest, and naught remained. At the height of the tempest, Geoige Dolgorouki, one of Monomachus’ heirs, put himself at the head of a¹ band of Russian colonists in quest of a new home. Crossing the huge forests which at that t’me parted the plain of the Dnieper from that of the Volga, he pushed north­westward, subjugating the tribes of Finnish origin he found on liis way. And this led to Moscow, founded in 1147—a town set ^;n a conquered country, an emigrant station. And here, again, the Mongol invasion had overtaken the scarcely settled

colony, and imposed foreign laws and foreign customs. For two centuries, reckoning from the disaster of the Kalka (1224), it bowed the country down under all the weight of an Eastern tornado. It was only towards the close of the fifteenth century that the Muscovite princes, taking advantage of the slow crumbling cf the Mongol Empire, felt strong enough to cast off the yoke. They had laboured, meanwhile, to bring together some neighbouring colonies, first, and then some other remnants, relatively near, of the ancient Russian fatherland, and thus had gathered them up a new empire, and endowed Russia with a new home. Novgorod had been theirs since 1478 ; Tver, Rostov, Jaroslav, soon joined them. Ivan III.— the Great, as he has been justly called—added more territory, which had not been included within the boundaries of Ancient Russia, pushing the frontiers of New Russia as far as Finland, the White Sea, and the frozen seas to the north, and towards the Ural on the east. His son Vassili added Riazan and Nov­gorod Sieverskii, to the south. Did all this constitute a country in the historical meaning of that word ? Not yet !

II.—The Territory.

When he succeeded to the throne, in 1533, Ivan IV.—the Terrible—inherited a territory already extensive, but which, geographically speaking, lacked unity and harmony. The tumult of battle, the confusion of conquest, were apparent everywhere. It was a scene of spoils scattered broadcast. Around the Muscovite nucleus in the centre had been grouped, in constantly broadening eccentric circles, territories which, for the most part, had no resemblance, even, to provinces, and can only be designated by topographical indications : the Govern­ments of Arkhangelsk, Vologda, and Olonetz to the north­east ; those of Novgorod and Pskov to the north-west; to the west and south-west, the region of the Dnieper, and the present Government of Smolensk, the western portion of the present Government of Kaluga, part of that of Tcliemigov, and the western parts of those of Orel and Kursk ; north-east lay the Steppe country, without any definite southern frontier, and for its northern limit the 55th parallel—the northern boundary, in other words, of the present Governments of Kaluga, Tula. Riazan, Tambov, Penza, and Simbirsk; and, lastly, to the east, the basin of the Kama and its tributaries, the Viatka, the Tshoussova, and the Biela.

A singularity which in itself paints the nature of this settle­ment is that its most recent and distant conquests, Novgorod and Pskov, with their dependencies, were its most important constituents , for these included the industricd and commercial

1—2

regions of the country, and on these, economically speaking, the new Empire subsisted and depended.

Industries were trifling, trade brisker, but still confined to very modest proportions. The population of this land of desolate" marsh and moor, living mostly by fishing and only quite exceptionally by husbandry, drew its chief sub­sistence from a certain flow of merchandise passing to and fro between the Baltic seaboard and the interior of the country. But on an area of 282,127 square versts there were but fourteen towns. Most of these, too, were no more than tiny forts (io&trojki), and in the districts (piatiny) of Biejets and Olonetz, a huge country covering 171,119 square versts, there were no towns at all; their place was taken by villages (possielki), with markets and small bazaars.

Up to near the second half of the sixteenth century, Novgorod, with its 5,300 dwelling-houses, was the most important of all the towns in the Empire, save Moscow ; and at Pskov the inventories of the period enumerate 1,300 shops or trading- houses within the town alone, apart from the suburbs. But these documents everywhere point to a phenomenon which looms large in the sixteenth-century history Of this particular sphere—the swift extinction of the civilian citizen, properly so called, eliminated by the military element which takes his place. At Gdov, which boasts the largest number of inhabitants belonging to this class, the lists for 1580-1585 only give four­teen ! And this is the work of the Muscovite conquest, which, with its system of general confiscation and its bestowal of the confiscated properties on men of its own choice, has rapidly succeeded in changing the face of the country, even as to its social elements. Now, these newcomers are all warriors, and Moscow, in her invading march, her overflowing expansion, still preserves the primitive characteristic of her first settle­ment—a military colony in a conquered country.

And it could not be otherwise, for this, like ;dl the other provinces of the new F2mpire, remains a battlefield, with frontiers ill-defined on one side, and constantly disputed elsewhere. Amongst the fortresses protecting it on the north-west, Smolensk, only conquered in 1514, is still the nominal capital of a Litliuanian-Polish Palatinate, and Vielikie-Louki will soon be snatched by Batory from Ivan IV. North-eastward colonization creeps gradually along the White Sea, from the Onega and the Northern Dvina to the Ural; but possession is limited along this coast—pomorie, as it is called—to the sea­shore and the river-banks, and even from the economic point of view, monasteries—strategically-occupied points more than pious foundations—take first rank here. That of Solovki, on the White Sea, possesses, with valuable salt-works and

fisheries, a police force and a little army of its own. Further on. east of the Dvina, the conquest is barely outlined : the only rallymg-point of the poor fishing population is a half-yearly fair at Lampojnia, on the Mezen, and, the Mezen once crossed, there is a desert country.

A further singularity is that Moscow, girdled by a ring of fortified posts, remained an open town, with all the appearances of a temporary settlement. The city proper, indeed—the Krenl —was surrounded by battlemented walls studded with towers. But this enclosure, which included the Sovereign's palace, some boi'ars’ houses, a few churches and monasteries, did not in any sense encircle the life of the capital. The town, with its wooden dwelling-houses, its shops,its markets, its gostinnyi dvor, a stone-built bazaar on the Levantine model, and all its busy trade, escaped outwards in huge suburbs, some open, some protected by mere wooden palisades. and all stretching out into the country, till its meadows and tilled fields mingled with the houses and shops. Industrial life was scattered still further afield, in spacious slobodas, perfect villages, which neigh­boured it, still amongst fields and woods and gardens, with more monasteries, whose white enclosures and gilded church domes carried the landscape, half urban, half rustic, far out to the horizon. And a fitting capital it was for this Empire on its outward march- moving to a future that still lay obscure, hidden in a perpetual beyond.

The designations of the hastily-formed provinces of the new Empire corresponded with the migratory nature of their constitution. Men said ‘ The towns beyond the Oka,’ ‘ beyond the Kama,’ the word town (gorod) meaning, to them, the terri­tory with its chief town. For the central region itself, the nucleus of the Empire in process of formation, the expression was ¹ The towns beyond the Moskva, zamoskovnyie gorody.’ Nijni-Novgorod, recently conquered.by the rulers of Moscow from another group of the descendants of Monomachus, was sometimes looked on as belonging to this central region, and sometimes relegated, with Arzamas and Mourom, to the outer zone. And yet here the Russia of the North-West, just beginning her new life, possessed another Kiev, as it were, on the very marches of the annexed territories. Tlie situation, the beauty of the site, were both the same. Jenkinson, the Englishman, starting thence, in 1558, with his flotilla of galleys, for the Far East, was to see a renewal of the period of the floating caravans despatched by the Princes of Kiev on the ‘ Voyage to Greece.’ But all around, even to the neighbouring river basin of the Kliazma, save for Vladimir, where some remnants of vanished splendours still remained, the conquest had laid the country waste and scattered it with ruins. The population in the

country parts still clung to the soil. In the towns no one was left, save the soldiers, who were everywhere. This is the general hall-mark of the new settlement. The populated centres of the province of Moscow, beyond a radius of some 60 to 100 miles, themselves bore this mark. Northward, at the distance thus indicated, stretched an essentially military zone, wherein military considerations were constantly mingled with peaceful occupations, and the urban districts—Tver, Rjev, Zoubstov, Staritsa—were all strategic points. South­ward, the towns of Serpoukhov, Kashira, and Kolomna, on the Upper Moskva, and the Oka, guarded the passage of the two rivers against an ever-threatening invasion. Beyond these lay another desert, the dikoie pole (wild field), not to be colonized tlli in the second half of the century.

Such was the territory to which the rule of Ivan IV. was to annex, with Kazan, Astrakan, and their dependencies, the low-lying lands along the Middle, and Lower Volga, the Kama, the Viatka, and the Caspian seaboard, and to which, as a field for future hope, w^ras to be added, from the banks of the Volga to those of the Don, the Northern Doniets, and the Lower Dnieper, the enigmatic sphere of the Kozatchina, that huge reservoir into which, from the furthest depths of Poland and Muscovy alike, a whole population of willing exiles per­petually flowed; upon which, from either side, the same action of laws, political and social, poured forth, in one continuous stream, the same quota of diverse elements, driven out of their natural centres by those three eternal instruments of the formation and disaggregation of societies—the spirit of revolt, the spirit of enterprise, and the spirit of liberty.

As to the total numbers of the population within these borders we have no clue, not even approximate. Touching the capital itself, information varies to an extent which defies all certainty. The number of houses set down for the year 1520—41,500—would give us a population of at least 100,000 souls. But thirty years later the Pope’s Envoy, Possevino, gives 30,000 as a more likely number. True it is, indeed, that the town, during the interval, had undergone a Tartar invasion which had laid it in utter ruin. But the same thing is true of most of the towns of this Empire, in which war still raged almost everywhere, and, between any two given periods —often in the space of a year—changed the whole face of a country.

From the ethnographical point of view, the Russian element in nine-tenths of this country was that exceedingly slight one arising out of a very recent colonization. There is no necessity, at this period, for scratching the Muscovite to discover the Tartar, or, above all, the Finn. The bulk of the population every­

where is of this latter race. Yet, in this respect, the conquest? of the Terrible and his successors have been the chief instru­ments of the introduction into the composition of the Empire of that great diversity, the existence of which Keppen’s map even now demonstrates. We have no documents, indeed, on which to found any exact opinion as to the part played by the various races. This scarcely appears, except In the moral and intellectual life of the country, and these I shall set forth later. Politically it is almost non-existent; whether by elimination or absorption, the Muscovite hegemony has put down all resistance. Socially, the difference of origin does not appear, for another reason. It is hardly possible to assert that this Muscovite centre contained two, or several, distinct societies, :n mutual but antagonistic contact. Was there, in fact, any society at all ?

III.—Social Classes : The Aristocracy.

Amidst the divergencies on which a certain school of history and politics has been fond of dilating, even to exaggeration— divergencies greatly diminished at a later date, which then separated this growing world from Western Europe—the absence of all social classes holds the front rank. Other features of dissimilarity may easily be noted. There was no feudal organization, nor any of its modem offshoots; no chivalry, nor survivals from it; no Church armed with secular powers, and using them to battle with the State. But all these features are easily traced back to one common denomina­tor—no social classes.

The phenomenon is genuine, but most complex, both as to its causes and ^;ts manifestations. In this country, of course, as in every other, there are rich men and poor, labourers and tradesmen, townsfolk and countryfolk, and a variety, therefore, of social elements. But these elements have no real organic value here. Let me explain myself.

Ivan IV. was to spend his whole life warring against the bo'iars. The boiars certainly formed an aristocracy, and the country, indeed, recognised several of these. Along with the bo'iars, the descendants of the old appanaged Princes — who traced back their origin in some cases to Rurik, the first Russian, in others to Guedymin, the first Lithuanian. Prince, and who all held governmental powers in that country—claimed a predominant position. Some members of the elder branch of the family of the founder of the dynasty—the ruling house of Moscow was of the younger branch—and still holding remnants of their ancient patrimony, had just claims to high pretensions, and did not fail to put them forward. They

enjoyed certain rights and privileges, clearly denoting their former quality as independent Sovereigns, and fought for them fiercely.

But read the Code drawn up by the grandfather of the Terrible, the Soudiebnik of 1497 : nut a trace does it bear of all these rights and privileges and pretensions! The clergy once set apart, it divides all the remaining dwellers in the country into two categories, which have no social quality about them, and in which the diverse conditions history creates count not at all : ‘ men who serve ’ on one side, r men who do not serve ’ on the other—sloojilyie and nicsloojilyie, nothing more. What does this mean ? It means that the legislator wiped Out all historical precedents, and, dealing despotically with the mass of beings at his disposal, divided it up according to the constitution of the existing settlement at Moscow— that, as I have endeavoured to show, of a campaigning aimy.

In a regiment, there are neither princes nor churls, neither merchants nor labourers—there are soldiers, corporals, officers. And here we have a regiment. In a prison, the prisoners are only known by their numbers. And this is, or is to be, a prison. The sloojilyie are soldiers, who are to help their chief to ‘ gather up the soil of Russia.’ The nicsloojilyie are the labourers, the fatigue-parties, who feed the arrny 011 its march. Neither class has any place, or dignity, or function, save that allotted to it by the regulation. Every man to serve in the ranks —that is the general order. No sign of any hierarchy of birth. In the first category, with the boi'ars, the Princes, the great officers of the Crown, the chief functionaries, and hardly distinguished from them by a subordination of a purely administrative character, we see the humble workers, civil and military, blacksmiths and gunners, carpenters and private soldiers. Merchants and agriculturists, again, in the other category, are mingled together under the common law of the taxation imposed on them. The sloojilyie of the highest rank do, indeed, enjoy certain privileges—they perform the higher functions, they own the land. In the eye of the law their testimony carries greater weight, and the indemnity rightfully paid them for an offence is three times that a mere dick (clerk) can claim. But this tariff of honour, varying according to grades and occu­pations, affects every rank. There is nothing social about it, as yet. It forms part of the emoluments assigned to each post.

I have yet to explain how it became possible to carry out this artificial grouping and despotic classification of the social forces. It was inevitable, in the first place, that elements so tom apart and cast into new and arbitrary moulds should have but little coherence at the outset. As regards the

aristocratic element this was assuredly the case. Here, as in the West, the higher stratum of society found its first nucleus in the Prince’s immediate following. Etymologists disagree as to the origin of the word boiar. \\ tiether it comes from bo'i (fight), or from bol, bolii, bolchyi (greater), it was used, in the first instance, to designate the comrades of the leader of the primitive band, his droojinniki {droojina, suite, company), who played, at his side, the part played by the anthrustinr.s of the first Frankish chiefs, the Anglo-Saxon thanes, the minisleriales in the heart of feudal Germany. But whereas in the West the relations thus formed between the Princes and their vassals were solidified by the establishment of each and all on domains, in political and social functions, clear, fixed, hallowed by law, by custom, and by habit, the same relations here continued vague, and shared thegenera mobility of all things. For a Ibng time the Prince was a nomad, and his droojina followed, or did not follow, him. There was no rule nor any obligation in this matter. The chief could dismiss his comrades, and they could leave him if they chose. They frequently used their right. When the Prince of Volhynia undertook a campaign against the Prince of Kiev, in 1-149, his droojina failed him, and exposed him to disaster. No constraint was recognised. When Russia was all cut up amongst a number of Sovereigns, the boiiars had no scruple about going over from one ruler to another, according to their own interest or fancy, and these desertions were no disgrace whatever. They were not regarded as felonious acts. The deserters continued to hold their lands, and carried them into the pale of the authority of the new chief, chosen of their own free will.

When Moscow began to play her part in history, she did not hesitate to take advantage of these habits, which she recognised as a wonderful instrument to serve her policy of unification —a means of ruining the neighbouring States by their dis­aggregation, and strengthening her own sovereignty at their expense. She had become an unrivalled centre of attraction, so the game held no risk for her; everything came to her, none dreamed of leaving her. Thus, from one neighbour to another, she gathered up the remnants of the lesser planets absorbed into her own sun—all the wreckage from scattered Courts and disbanded troops—and found in them an eminently plastic substance, easily shaped in her own chosen mould.

The Sovereign had fresh companions—not even the com­rades who had shared his perils and his triumphs, but beaten men, captives, rooted up from- their own soil. Further, the whole aristocracy in the heart of this North-Eastern Russia, even that which had remained on its hereditary domains,

lacked any sufficient consistency. Its descent was not over ancient, and it had no solid foundation. Under the feudal regime, the relations between the Sovereign and the great lords had their counterpart, on a lower scale, in those between the nobles and their churls. Serfdom completed vassalage. Here, as we shall see, amidst a free agricultural population, which only gave the great landed proprietors a sorely-bargained and disputed, and always most precarious, forced service, the counterpart was non-existent. And to use these floating ele­ments at will and solidify them, under another form, ^;nto a military organization; the power of Moscow must have been strongly constituted indeed.

IV.—Political and Social Organization : The Origin of Absolutism.

The origin and nature of this power have given rise to much conjecture. The school of history at the teaching of which I have already hinted has chosen to recognise it as an organic phenomenon, arising out of the temperament of the Slav race, domiciled, by the chances of desliny, in a land far distant from its ancient home. It has also taken it to be the only regime that has proved capable of supplying the special needs of this race, politically speaking, and of insuring the living existence of the settlements founded by it. After careers occasionally very brilliant, but always short, all the Slav States founded on other principles have proved themselves insuffici­ently protected against an abnormal development of the aristo­cratic element, and weakening of the central power.

But whence came the special inclination of the Slav colony in the north-east to adopt this regime, and its adaptability to it ? Monsieur Zabieline has ascribed the phenomenon to the principle of domestic absolutism developed by the teach­ing of the Eastern Church. Monsieur Kostomarov holds that it proceeds from the Tartar conquest, and others have attributed it to the influence of the Finnish element. These three explanations are of small value. The Eastern Church wielded quite as great an influence, or greater, over Southern Russia during the Kiev period, and during that very period the application of a personal and absolute power, as realized in Moscow towards the close of the fifteenth century, was unknown. The most ancient information we have as to the Slav peoples—Byzantine chronicles, Proccpius’ historical works, those of the Emperor Leon, of Dithmar, of Merseburg —shows us popular assemblies wielding supreme power, or sharing it, and the Slavonic tribes settled in Russia form no exception to this rule. As Nestor testifies, they even did

without Princes. Later, in the eleventh century, we find the same democratic institutions at Kiev and Novgorod, at Smolensk and Polotsk. From one end of the country to the other the vietchie (from viestchat, to announce), as the popular gatherings were called, are doing their work with varying privileges : here a full exercise of sovereign power, there a right to choose the ruler, and everywhere a more or less complete share ^;n every authority, guaranteed by regular contracts and formal charters.

Autocracy itself, in its first form, was not synonymous, here, with absolute power. Certainly the Muscovite samodierjets is the counterpart of the Byzantine auiocvator, but the abso­lutism of the Byzantine Emperors admitted the clergy to a share of power. And for a lengthened period the Muscovite clergy recognised the samodierjavie merely as a symbol of the national independence in dealing with the foreigner. It reserved the rights of the Church, at all events, if not those of the people, too. The word, nevertheless, favoured a danger­ous misunderstanding, and, as a matter of fact, even long before the coming of the Tartars, the Hval principle of popular sovereignty, compromised first in the North-Eastern regions, where the Princes of Souzdal and Riazan succeeded in establishing their dynasties on a firm basis of heredity and primogeniture, only maintained itself in exceptional cases. At Pskov and Novgorod it was preserved in all its integrity till the close of the fifteenth century. Elsewhere, from the beginning of the thirteenth, it had been eliminated cr visibly weakened.

The phenomenon does not find its explanation in the Mongol hegemony any more than in the Byzantine influence. The former did, indeed, introduce a radical change into the relations between governments and the governed. For the traditional source of supreme power, the popular favour, it substituted the caprice of the new sovereign masters. A journey towards the banks of the Volga and gifts offered to the Khan were better than any election. The pilgrim hied him homewards with an iarlik which made any other investiture superfluous. The Florentine Union and the fall of Constantinople also worked, to some extent, in the same direction. Up to the end of the four­teenth century, the Church recognised but one Tsar in Russia —the Emperor of Constantinople—called ‘ Emperor of the Russians ’ and ‘ Sovereign of the Universe,’ even in the prayers of the Muscovite clergy. After that date it became necessary to carry the same homage elsewhere, and the ruler of Moscow rose according to the measure of the Byzantine Sovereign’s fall.

Yet all these incidences, we must admit, played but a

secondary part; their action decided nothing. As to the influence of the Finnish element on the evolution in ques­tion, if the fact that a conquered people has imposed its ways, its ideas, its customs on its conquerors is not altogether un- discoverable in history, we must at least conclude, in every example known to us, that this triumph was accounted for by some superiority of culture. In this case no such hypothesis can be entertained. The Russian colonists of the thirteenth and fouiteenth century were certainly barbarians, but those they had to deal with were more barbarous still, and it was not force of numbers which gave them the victory.

The key to the riddle lies, as it seems to me, in the combined action and mutual reaction of two phenomena to which I have previously referred : the absence of any organic development in the heart of Russian society, and the military form imposed on that society by the circumstances attending the constitution or reconstitution of its new settlement in the north-east. Here Russian colonization found itself, for many years, in a hostile country, hemmed in by foes. Thus the Sovereign became the leader of an army. In this quality he naturally acted as a dissolvent on social elements which possessed no sufficient coherence, and, as they crumbled to atoms, his power fed on their weakness.

The origins of most States have witnessed the reproduction of these phenomena. The curious thing, in the case of this eccentric community, is that after long tarrying on the outer borders of European life, it was suddenly initiated into certain of Europe’s noblest conquests, and into the refinements of a culture according but ill with the backwardness of its organ­ization, social and political. Everything in it was done all at once, and the normal course of progress was often reversed. In a certain sense, the civilizing current, coming from without, has favoured the development of absolutism in this country, by endowing the personal power with resources and means of action it could never have drawn from the heart of a barbarous society. Ivan IV. was an ‘intellectual,’ and as such a far more redoubtable despot than Louis XI., who professed scorn for literature, science, and the arts. He only took men’s bodies, but Ivan was to take their souls, and shut them up in that iron cage of his, within which all Russia was to live, bent double, for centuries to come.

It is easy to show how this cage was built. When a sufficient tale of ‘ comrades,’ tempted from neighbouring Princes, had been enticed away, and Moscow was overflowing with men lit for service, the lord of the city grew eager to put down the system of free enlistment which had enabled him to fill up his fighting corps. His neighbours, indeed, had begun the work

for him. Their own interest had impelled them to impose some restrictions in the matter, but it was a Republican and so-called Liberal Government which had taken the decisive step. Republics are responsible for a good many misdeeds of this nature, and nobody can accuse me of dealing with present events—the fact occurred in the year 1368 ! At that date the Republic of Novgorod decreed that any citizen quitting her territory forfeited all right to hold any property within it. All Moscow had to do was to follow suit. For some time yet the principle was respected, but even under Ivan III. any ‘ man who served ’ who seemed inclined to leave the Prince was cast into prison; and to get out, he had not only to renounce his right, still nominally respected, but to undertake not to use it, and sometimes to furnish security as well.

I dwell on these details because they are indispensable to any comprehension of the interior development of the nation. Ivan IV. was to apply the precedents thus created in the broadest fashion, going so far as to establish a sort of mutual insurance against the infidelity of his sloojilyie.

Yet princes and boiars, even thus enlisted and settled in the ranks, preserved a certain autonomy, political and social, rooted in their illustrious origin and their possession of the ancient domains, or the remains of them—appanages and freehold lands—over which they still held certain sovereign rights and numerous privileges. To this the Muscovite Government applied a twofold remedy—first, by placing at the head of its new military hierarchy, not the descendants of Rurik and Guedymin, natural peers and rivals of the new master, but his own ‘ comrades ’—those who had been his first helpers in the task of ‘ gathering up the soil of Russia,’ even if their ancestors had been no more than humble stable-grooms. The absence of any corporate spirit, any caste feeling, in this aris­tocracy in embryo made the operation all the easier.

To this the Muscovite policy added another and a yet more efficacious expedient. A system of confiscation, energetically applied, amidst the destruction of the ancient principalities annexed to the Empire, placed a huge area of land at the Government’s disposal. This Moscow parcelled out afresh, but, when she bestowed them on her ‘ servants,’ she carefully avoided preserving the peculiar rights attending the possession of these lands by the old proprietors. They were, no longer called appanages or freeholds (vottchiny): they were mere pomiestia— in other words, as their name denotes (miesto, place), allot­ments, corresponding to the posts held by their occupiers in the ‘ service,’ and intended as remuneration for their work. They were thus life interests, or hereditary only in so far as the fomieshtchik's heir showed himself fit to succeed him in his

functions too. They were free from taxes, like the vottchiny, but burdened with the heaviest impost of all, that of forced service. They bore some analogy to the feudal holdings of the West, but differed from them in that, far from the service being a freely accepted condition and charge on the fief, the fief, in this case, was the consequence, the reward, of an arbitrarily imposed service. To sum it up, there, was no aristocratic or corporative position here. There was pay, emolument in kind. And, further, there was a deliberate intention to gradu­ally assimilate the ancient appanages and freehold lands to this new type of property, and the vottchinniki r.o the pomieshtckiki of the new regime.

The new territorial holdings, uncertain both by their mode of constitution and their slight chance of permanence, remained within very small proportions. Some diu not cover more than 30 diessiatines (about equal to a French hectare, or 2} acres, English), and even within these limits their bestowal was often delayed, or purely fictitious. Towards 1570, out of 168 ^k children of boi'ars ’—the term used to describe the fallen de­scendants of those high functionaries who had been unable to transmit the titles of the posts they had held to their heirs— out of 168 of these young men, borne on the ‘ service ’ lists at Pootivl and Rylsk, 99 had been given nothing, because there was no post to give. And at the same time, and for the same reason, a certain pomieshtckiki, very well provided for on paper, had not received 74 diessiatines out of the 80 conferred on him !

Hence, in matters of household life, lodging, food, clothing, the mass of the sloojilyie lioodi were scarcely distinguishable from the common peasantry. Their condition sometimes appears even lower. The dwellings of a few great men, holding high posts, and well paid accordingly, were the only ones which, though invariably built of wood, presented an imposing appearance, with their many pavilions clustered against a central block, their covered outer staircases, their projecting galleries, their elaborate roofs, and huge outbui’dings. In most cases these palaces were replaced by isbas, which, with their wooden floor, daily washed, scraped, and swept, the truss of hay by the entry to wipe the visitors’ feet, and a certain display of plate, more often pewter than silver, in the first room, had no lordly quality about them.

The difference between the boiar and the peasant was more especially marked by the number of servants the former thought himself obliged to keep—cooks, bakers, gardeners, tailors, workmen of every kind. Other daily guests he had, higher in degree, but rather less important, whose only function was to follow the master, on foot or horseback, whithersoever he went, and keep him company on his travels, in his business,

and his pleasures. I had forgotten the steward, but he was the most indispensable man of all. Even if he only held a few trifling acres, the fomieshtchik could not do without this alter ego, nor himself cultivate the soil on which he was to live. Had he possessed the desire, he would not have had the time. His time belonged to his Sovereign, who, from infancy to extreme old age, disposed of it at will. Campaigning service, service at the desk—the sloojily is a man of all work. We see him called out to fight. He takes a small bag of millet, a few pounds of salted pork, a little salt and pepper mixed (if his means allow of his indulging in this last much-appreciated condiment, already regarded as a luxury). To these supplies he adds a hatchet, some tinder, and a cooking vessel, and therein consists his whole equipment. On campaign he will dispense with the services of a military commissariat, non-existent here. When he comes back to his property, to find it devastated, perhaps, and pillaged, certainly, by that same steward, he will pick up the orange-skins and scraps of pumpkin thrown from the passing traveller’s vehicle—see Herberstein—but he will not even knock at his neighbour’s door except on horseback and attended by a serving-man.

Such are his fortunes. And it not unfrequently happens that his desires tend towards quitting them, and losing himself in that other category of ‘ non-servers ’ who, not having the same burdens to bear, are often more comfortably circum­stanced. The only thing that holds him back is the chain that binds him to his post. Of esprit de corps he has no trace. In fact, the line of demarcation between the two classes is marked by the official registers only. The son of a boiar, borne on them, has brothers who, having escaped enrolment by some chance, are plain peasants, and are glad of it. Another sloojily may have become a tailor in some boi'ar’s house.

Even in the highest places the solidarity of this hierarchy— a legacy of ancient aristocratic affinities, or the product of a new community of functions and positions—is constantly weakened and destroyed by the perpetual despotism and never-ceasing changes which break up every position attained, and carry men of every grade from the foot of the ladder to the top, from the lowest rank to the highest, making a dog-boy, on the shortest notice, the equal of the proudest boiar. Feeling themselves thus swallowed up in the mob of low-born ‘ servants,’ with no link of blood, tradition, nor even interest, between themselves and many of them, the descendants of Rurik and Guedymin soon lost, if not the memory of their own origin and their pride in it, their eagerness, at all events, to defend and establish and illustrate the new dignity they shared with comrades such as these.

Thus, voluntary abdication followed on enforced humiliation, and this shadowy aristocracy, constrained at first, and then submissive, surrendered itself to a victorious absolutism, till a power which knew how to turn it to account and use it, to serve the. needs and higher ends of Russia, had thus been consolidated, and even rendered indispensable.

And the same evolution repeats itself through every stratum of this society which is no society. Its progress is even more evident, perhaps, in the destiny of other classes, and notably in that of the peasant class.

V.—The Peasants.

The story I must here tell is a sad one. As a child, I saw the closing days of a regime which, in this humble sphere, only died out of Russia a little less than half a century ago, and the Emancipation of 1861 was then looked on as a belated act of justice and political wisdom. But, as a matter of fact, it was a premature and hasty measure, for the state of things it ended had only lasted two centuries and a half. Contrary to what had happened in every other European country, the serfdom of modem Russia was not the painful legacy of a barbarous age, but a new fact, coinciding with the country’s entrance on the path of European civilization, and the contradictory consequence, in a certain measure, of that new phase of the national existence.

This is an unquestionable paradox. Towards the close of the sixteenth century, when in every European country, and even close by, in Poland, the personal bond between the agricultural population and the landowners was breaking, or slackening, at all events, under the action of the new social and economic laws which were reforming the old feudal world, Russia contrives to forge, all complete, the very chains which have hitherto been non-existent within her borders!

Up to this period most of the peasants dwelling on the land conquered or recovered by Russian colonies ’n the north-west had been free—in theory, at all events—and the social condition of the class had even undergone some improvement. These peasants, once called smerdi—a name indicating scorn, if not i lfamy—(smerdit, to smell nasty), were now known by another generic title, which, while testifying to the lack of corporative differentiation always to be a peculiarity of the social elements of their country, clearly indicated a rise in the social scale. Whether town or country dwellers, tilling the soil or following other avocations, they were all simply called Khresiianie (Christians).

They made up the contingent of agricultural or industrial

labourers. As agriculturists, whether working their own land or land belonging to another, their time and their labour were their own. In the first case, they had the free disposal of their property, so long as they paid the taxes imposed by the State or by their own commune. In the second, whether as tenant farmers or metayers, they paid for the use of the ground according to the very varying provisions of their agreements with the owners. These depended on local custom, on the value of the land, and especially on the nature of its judicial tenure.

The land was said to be ‘ white ’—free from State taxation— or ‘ black ’—that is, taxed. The former category belonged to the vottchiny and the pomiestia, the latter either to the Court or to the peasants themselves. Church lands might belong to either category, according, to the concessions conferred on the clergy or the acquisitions made by them.

Leases on the metayage system for the period of crop rotation —three years—or even longer, were common, especially in the north and centre of the country, and those who held them were generally better off than their neighbours.

Other agreements imposed obligations on the farmer, re­sembling those of the English sveman, such as to cut wood and bring it to the manor-L rase, and pay certain lines, much like the French formariage, when Ms daughters married.

It was customary also, at Christmas emd Easter, and on some other solemn feast days, for the tenant to make his landlord certain presents. These special dues bore the name of barcht- china (the lord’s work), or izdielie (work), or boiarskoie ditto (the lord’s work). They foreshadow the forced service, soon, alas ! to be the law of serfdom. But at this period their definite and common reason is to be found in the supplies of money, implements, and seeds frequently received by the farmer from his landlord, and the interest on which he thus returned.

The relative importance of these dues varies greatly, and it is rather difficult to fix their value. In the central provinces, towards the middle of the sixteenth century, the rent of an obja or a vyt—five to six diSssiatines—reached two or three roubles. But very often the charge was paid in labour, the tenant of an obja, for instance, being bound to till a dies- siatine, or one and a half, for the landlord's benefit. And, further, we should have to settle the value of the rouble at that period. It has been reckoned, according to the price of com, at nearly 100 roubles of our coinage, but this seems a doubtful calculation.

On the ‘ black ’ lands belonging to the State these taxes were replaced by imposts and forced service, which ocrasiomdly reached a similar value, but were, generally speaking, less

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heavy. On lands, ‘ black ’ or ‘ white,’ belonging to the Church, the expenses connected with working the soil were also much lighter, as a rule.

The tenant, wherever he was, could give up his tenancy when he had settled accounts with his landlord, and the landlord had power to put in a new tenant as soon as the old one’s lease had expired. The extreme mobility of the popular existence —a universal feature, hereditary, and accentuated at this period—made these migrations matters of frequent occurrence. From the fifteenth century, however, economic necessities had brought about a certain modification of this freedom on both sides. First of all arose a custom according to which no landlord exercised his rights in harvest-time, a moment at which no peasant could dream of using his. This led Ivan III. to nx a period of fourteen days, just after St. George’s Day (November 24). for the relinquishment of tenancies and the winding up of accounts with landlords ; and in his time the outgoing tenant further paid for his right of habitation (pojiloie) a sum varying, according to the value of the land occupied, between fifty-six kopecks and one rouble six kopecks.

Such was the law. In practice, as may be imagined, many evasions were possible. Labour being scarce and universally sought after, proprietors enticed farmers from one property to another, just like the Sovereigns, on the look-out for ‘ser­vants.’ Often there were forcible abductions. These were called svoz. Often, too, on divers pretexts, outgoing tenants were called on to pay more than they owed, and thus detained. Yet, liberty, even so fettered and curtailed, was liberty still. What with the dues to his landlord and his commune, the extra charges for judicial proceedings, and the constantly increasing taxes laid upon him, the peasant had a heavy burden. Monsieur Rojkov, in his book on ‘ Russian Agriculture in the Sixteenth Century ’ (1899, p. 244), has calculated that the peasant in the northern provinces gave the landlord back one-half of the cereal produce of his holding, and that the other half hardly fed himself and his family for six months. Cattle-raising and some small industries enabled him to make two ends meet, but barely that. Very poor he was, but, like the old Anglo-Saxon ceorl, or the German Markgenosse, he continued to some degree the equal, from the judicial and administrative point of view, of the boiar, the merchant, ard the Churchman. The courts of justice were open to him as to others, and such was the equality in this respect, that in a dispute between men of different ranks, amenable, by virtue of their condition, to different jurisdic­tions, the peasant, like any other subject of the Empire, had a right to choose his judges.

Within his own commune, tco. whether rural or u^ban, he enjoyed a certain administrative autonomy which has taxed the sagacity of quite recent historians, and the nature of which I shall have to indicate more precisely when I reach a more detailed study of the organization of the country.

Finally, as I have just reminded my readers, these peasants were not all husbandmen. The documents of the period frequently divide them into two classes: labourers (fiakhatnyie) and villagers (derevienskiie). What are these villagers who do not dig ? In this category we find men registered as millers, tailors, shoemakers. Here again is manifested, once again, that lack of the corporative spirit, that confusion of social atoms, which, save in the Church—and even there we shall soon have to go back to the subject—keeps the national organization in the outline stage. If many country peasants do not till the soil, the towns hold many who are husbandmen. In country places the peasants of this first-named category often, though the fact is disputed (see Monsieur Diakhonov’s ‘ View of the History of the Rural Populations in Russia,’ 1889, p. 209, and SergUieievitch’s ‘ Judicial Antiquities,’ 1903, iii., 133, etc.). belonged to the mysterious class of the bobyli, land­less peasants, occasionally tillers, but not on their own account, and in that case agricultural labourers, but trade labourers often, and, oftenest of all, vagabonds pure and simple, lost in the mass of outlaws of every kind—Cossacks, wandering jugglers, beggars, and thieves. Those who would differentiate them from the tiaglyie—qualified peasants—are mistaken. Except in the case of lands enjoying a temporary or per­petual, but always an exceptional, freedom by virtue of special charters, the tiaglo (from Hanout, to draw, to drag a load) is the universal rule of the period. Everybody pays in some fashion, everywhere, and on everything, and the bobyli. who pay taxes or imposts on the houses they inhabit or the trades they follow, are no exception. They owe nothing for the soil they till, because they till for others, and in this lies the sole difference between them and the ordinary husbandman.

Whether imposed on them by some misfortune or volun­tarily accepted, nothing binds them to this comparati vely humiliating condition in life. They can always leave it as soon as they find means to do so, and share the common rights once more. In the sixteenth century the proportion of bobyli in the country parts was from 4/2 to 416 per cent., the lowest percentage occurring on the lands held by monastic establish­ments. In the following century, and under the influence of the tumult into which the disputes over the inheritance of the Terrible cast the country, these figures will be quite upset.

In a more and more floating population the monasteries

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alone, or almost alone, will preserve a regular supply of labour, settling most of these bobyli, together with another class of unqualified peasants, the ‘ children of the monasteries ’ (mon- astyrskitt dietienychy), in their own villages and hamlets. These last were peasants of an inferior class, but free in their own persons, and not serfs at all. Were there no serfs, then, in this country, which, till the middle of the nineteenth century, was the last stronghold of European serfdom ? Yes, indeed. But in the sixteenth century they formed an almost im­perceptible element in the mass of the population.

VI.—The Serfs.

Even at a later period, the conversion of war captives into slaves was considered a natural law, and there were other causes of slavery besides, such as marriage with a slave, slave birth, bankruptcy, certain domestic functions, and even the deliberate laying down of his own liberty by any man. Down to the fifteenth century the man who per­formed the duties of a tivoune (turnkey) was necessarily a slave, and until the seventeenth, an insolvent debtor was made over to his creditor, and remained his slave until the debt was paid.

To these constituting causes of serfdom the sixteenth cen­tury added a new custom—the kabala, or, after an Arab word, the contract made by a man who borrows a sum of money and undertakes to pay the interest with his labour. This transaction did not in itself involve loss of liberty, and in Germany and Southern Italy similar contracts did not produce this consequence. The kabalnyl could free himself by paying his debt. In Germany and Italy the man thus con­ditionally permitted to recover the power of his own person generally made use of the possibility. In Russia, as a rule, the fulfilment of the. conditions was impossible, and the whole history of serfdom, as finally established in the country, rests on this fact.

Ivan IV.’s Code noted four classes of slaves : full slaves (polnyie)—that is to say, these whose slavery, like that of their offspring, was unconditional—senior slaves, whose slavery, no doubt, was limited, according to a fashion unknown to us ; slaves called kabalynie; and slaves known as dokladnyie, en­slaved by virtue of a doklad, another form of free contract. But the legislator, while thus noting a state of things created by the action of the past, sought to reduce the proportions of this legacy from barbarous times, to restrict the causes constituting a state of slavery, and to encircle their applica­tion with formalities which in many cases became prohibitive.

Russia, now brought into contact with the Western world, showed her inclination to follow in the path of freedom, as well as on other roads to civilization ; and besides, though lack of documentary evidence prevents us from offering anv exact figures on the subject, the question, according to the agreement of many authorities, affected only a very small proportion of the labouring population.

Yet this period it was which led up to the general serfdom of the whole people. How ? By what strange reversal of the natural development of corresponding relations ?

Up to a comparatively recent date, the Russian Government of the close of the sixteenth century has borne the heaviest and most terrible responsibility in this matter. Alone, accord­ing to the very general belief, on its own initiative, by its own action, it worked this ruinous and far-reaching change in the judicial and social position of the classes affected by it. At the present day this view is generally cast aside. In Russia, as elsewhere, serfdom has been the outcome of time, and of a particular stage in the political and economic history of the country, and there is no necessity for seeking an explanation of the phenomenon in the misty conceptions of the Slavophile doctrine.

According to Kaveline (see his ‘Works,’ vol. i., p. 630), this phenomenon was the natural, necessary, logical result of the general organization of the country, itself based on the principle of domestic authority, and, as such, was rather beneficial than otherwise in its nature. This power of one man over another, used cruelly sometimes, because the habits and customs of the time were rough, but not really abused on the whole, was limited, in his view, to a sort of guardian­ship, founded, not on the strength of the guardian who had thus found means to impose his will, but on the feebleness of the ward, whose consciousness of weakness led him to accept an indispensable authority, guidance, and protection.

Granting this hypothesis, we should still have to account for the sudden discovery of a condition of social incapacity which had in no wise been previously revealed, and the co­incidence of this new state of things with a period of growth which should rather have prevented or diminished it. The truth, as it appears from historical data, would seem to be very different. In the records of the populations in question during the sixteenth century, two facts rule. One is the rapid disappearance of the peasant proprietor, the other the equally rapid ^;impoverishment of the peasant ‘n general. And behold the results : On one side a mass of men, agricultural labourers and others, who, finding they cannot support themselves in any other way, agree to sell their liberty, so that they may not

die of hunger ; on the other a mass of tenants, who, being unable to pay their landlords’ dues, lose the essential right on which tlieir liberty depends—that of leaving their tenancy at the end of their term. The first-named, having lost the scrap of land on which they lived, are forced either to beg or to give service ; the others, who have received a subvention, in some form, from their landlords, find its repayment an im­possibility. In the most ordinary circumstances a peasant entering into possession of his farm received an advance of three roubles. In ten years he had thirty roubles to pay, besides either fifty-six kopecks or one rouble fifty-six kopecks for the pojiloie—say, about 300 roubles in all, in our money.

In most cases the finding of such a sum was a pure impossi­bility. Therefore there was difficulty at the very start : the conversion of the debt that kept rolling up. the serebro, as it was called (serebro, money), into a sort of obligation which bound the debtor to the soil; the habitual assimilation of the serebriarJki to the serfs in common law, Kholopy dok- ladnyie, or kabalnyie. Here we have the history of the insolvent farmers of the ager publicus at Rome, as set forth by Fustel de Coulanges.

In fact, from the second half of the sixteenth century, liberty, while it was the theoretical right of most peasants, had practically become the privilege of a constantly decreasing number of proprietors and solvent tenants.

But what had caused this general impoverishment of the agricultural class ? Easily guessed ! A state of war is a most expensive condition. The Muscovite Government, when it adopted the fighting organization to which I have already referred, and perpetually increased its army, was forced to increase its expenditure and pay the ‘ service men,’ whose numbers grew from day to day. Then, when it placed its establishment in some degree on a European footing, it had to pay for the necessary plant, for the arms imported from foreign parts, and the employes recruited in every European country. And wherewithal ? The only funds it could com­mand, the only real wealth of the country, lay in the soil. The land, then, had to bear all these new charges. To find pomiestia for the sloojilyie the peasants were dispossessed, and to pay the foreign handicraftsmen the Government taxed the pumiecttchiki, who, themselves hard pressed, ground down their tenants.

The land answered for everything, paid for everything, became a sort of State coin, convertible into labour, military and civil service, obligations of every kind. It made no fight. It had never, even in the hands of the vottchinniki, been sub­jected to any complete, tangible appropriation. The con-

ception of a very early date made it a thing belonging essen­tially to the State, which could only be private property within certain limits, and subject to higher rights. The proprietors, on their side, were all in the master hand, and, lacking, as I have already shown, any cohesion or corporate organization, were incapable of making any serious resist­ance. Their weakness and docility only hastened the de­velopment of the system under which they suffered. The most recalcitrant could only hit on one expedient—flight. This has always been a feature in the Russian character. The Russian who rinds himself in an unendurable position will always slip out rather than resist. We shall have to follow the historical manifestation of this phenomenon. The peasants, but in far greater numbers, acted on the example thus set them. In their case flight was easier. The vott- chinniki and pomiechtchiki who sought fresh employment in the neighbouring country of Poland were more closely watched and less easily satisfied, and they ran serious risks and chances. But all the peasant had to do was to slip across the south­west frontier, ill-guarded and constantly pushed further afield, and there, in endless spaces, find hospitality on a virgin and untaxed soil.

Therefore, from the earliest years of the sixteenth century, the exodus of the agricultural population and the abandon­ment of the soil, left to lie untilled, became the great con­temporary fact, a national peril. Then the State, whose pocket was threatened, resolved to interfere. It began with that which seemed most pressing. It would seem—though the assertion is debatable—that in the middle of this century a series of administrative measures and judicial decisions, if not of legislative arrangements, established a fixed system of rating, and thence it resulted that the ratepayers on ilie ‘ black ’ lands belonging to the Court were unable to leave them. For though the tenant was still free to give up his tenancy, he had to pay the same iiaqlo, or a higher one, elsewhere. Then came the turn of the ‘ white ’ lands held by the ‘ service men.’

The peasants’ flight ruined the pomiechtchik, and a rained pomiechtchik brought poverty on the State. Wherefore the State, without having recourse, as yet, to any general measure, laboured to insure the continuity and yield of its ‘ service ’ by means of individual and local arrangements, which, in exceptional cases, authorized certain owners to keep the peasants settled on their land, or force the fugitives back to it.

The policy of Moscow always leaned to this marking out, in the first instance, of a regulation ultimately to become

general and definite. Towards the middle of the century two charters, granted to the brothers Stroganov, marked a decisive step forward on this road. They stipulated that the concessionnaires should seize and send back such peasants as might seek refuge, in their flight, on the huge domains they proposed to colonize in that far-away land of uncultivated steppes to which the current which was sapping the economic prosperity and military organization of the country had turned its course.

It has been further supposed that a general law, passed in the middle of the sixteenth century, suppressed the right of free exodus in the case of a certain class of peasants, the starujiltsy, or husbandmen settled for many years on the land they worked. But Monsieur Serguieievitch, disagreeing with Monsieur Diakonov and several other historians (‘ Antiq. Jur.,’ iii., p. 460. etc.), has finally refuted this hypothesis. The questions of labour and rating were the only ones which played a decisive part in the matter, and prepared the birth of the monster called Kricpostnoie pravo, the law of serfdom. One slavery involved another, and the ‘ service man,’ shut up in his iron cage, forced it on the peasant, soon to be followed by the merchant and even the Churchman. We have seen that there was no distinction, in this country, between the urban and the rural populations. Here, again, is an abyss which parts the Russia of the sixteenth century from the rest of Europe.

VII.—Tiie Townsfolk.

In the West, the progress of trade and industry led to the organization of the townsfolk into corporations, which armed themselves to withstand feudalism. In the bosom of these associations, in the mutual relations of their members, was elaborated that spirit of liberty from which the institutions of communal autonomy sprang, and that material and in­tellectual activity which evolved the higher forms of economic existence—the creation of capital, the establishment of credit, and the most elevated forms of cultured life, science, art, and society.

Russia has known nothing of this kind, and the absence of these centres of social life and resistance has contributed, more than any other reason, perhaps, to the maintenance and confirmation of the despotic organization imposed upon the country. Trade was restricted, manufactures hardly existed, and consequently the Russian town was not the natural outcome of their development. For long, as their name shows us—gorody means places that are ogorojennyie,

fortified—the urban settlements prrformtd a very different function. As a matter of fact, industrial life, as we have seen in the case of Moscow, escaped beyond their enclosures into the possady and dobody, in which most of the artisans, sharing their destinies and habits with the equal or larger number of husbandmen who likewise dwelt there, made their homes. It was only in the sixteenth century that the State was moved to draw^r a line, not even betw een the two classes of inhabitants, but between the places in which they lived. And this dis­tinction was of a purely fiscal nature, inasmuch as the towns­men had to pay more than the rustics, the reform, of course, not going so far as to create any organic tie between the taxpayers. The only anxiety of the Government was to obtain the highest possible yield from the taxable body, and insure a fixed taxation. And its ideas of political economy being misty and generally false, it succeeded in paralyzing this source of revenue, instead of increasing it, by multiplying the taxes and the places where they w^Tere paid, setting a Custom-house olficer at every cross-road and a collector at every- street corner, and monopolizing for its own benefit every branch of industry and commerce, from the sale of rye. oats, and every' cereal, to the making of beer, kvass, and every drink.

No resistance here, as in other countries—no trace of any struggle against this creeping system of monopoly. Fcr the cases of Pskov and Novgorod are purely political. Yet elements of resistance are not lacking. Frcm the \ ery earliest times commerce had been honoured in the country, and held to be a noble occupation. The enterprises of the Varegians and of the ancient Slav Princes had been both military and commercial in their character, and the heroes ot the national legend?, Sadko, Solovie! Boudomirovitcfe, Tchourila Plen- kovitch, Vaska Bouslaiev, all personified this twofold type of adventurous activity and courage. What was lacking was esprit dc corps. The retail trader |koupieis) and the whole­sale merchant (gosi) were both of them in trade, indeed, but they were also capable of turning to other avocations, and very frequently did so turn. On the other hand, the pro­fessional speciality to which they owed their designations was by no means confined to their persons. Everybody was in trade : peasants, monks, soldiers, high functionaries, all dabbled in it as they chose, till the time came when the Empire, still spurred by the same anxiety, separated the functions, so as to be better able to apportion and settle the charges they were to bear. That was to be the work of the seventeenth century. But even then there was only to be one regiment more in the great army, more prisoners in the great cage,

and no corporation as yet. That was to he set up, by virtue of ukases, in Peter the Great’s time, and Catherine the Second’s —the march of history never evolved it.

Thus these elements, as separate as all their fellows, and bereft—after the ruin of Pskov and Novgorod, consequent on their absorption into the great Empire—of the only centres in which they could have attained to efficacious association, shared in the general'servitude, and were utterly incapable of playing the part in the rise and progress of civilization so brilliantly borne by the town communities of the West.

The Church remained. I shall now show how she, too, failed, partly on account of the same causes, to follow the path of her Western rivals in this matter.

VIII.—The Church.

By the prestige attaching to her functions in this land of a robust faith, by her position as the depositary of all know­ledge and the sole imparter of instruction, and even by her material resources, the Church was a mighty power. Com­prising, from early in the sixteenth century, the ten eparchies of Moscow, Novgorod, Rostov, Vologda, Souzdal, Riazan, Smolensk, Kolomna, Sara'isk, and Perm, she exercised, within their borders, a far-reaching authority, at once spiritual and civil, alike over her clerical servants and her lay administrators, episcopal bo'iars and diaks, lieutenants and bailies. To exer­cise justice meant, in those days, to levy taxes on those amenable to it, and this order of things, copied from the civil organiza­tion of the country, and borrowing therefrom a system of imposition based on private rights, while it added to the strength of the institution which took advantage of it, was not calculated to increase its moral authority. It was destined, indeed, to feel the reform which tended, in the course of the sixteenth century, to the erection of several administrative centres into atitonomous communes. On the model of what then happened in the matter of civil administration, repre­sentative persons, starosts, duly elected and sworn in, were introduced in every jurisdiction, and the civil and spiritual jurisdictions were separated. But this arrangement was ephemeral. The State, which had outlined it by a mere accident, under the influence of the liberal tendencies reaching it from the West, very soon returned, as we shall see, to its original despotism, and the Church followed this second current as she had followed the first.

It was her destiny to be identified, all through the course of time, with that other power, the rival of her own, till an almost

complete confusion of organs, functions, and prerogatives was reached.

Yet means whereby the Church might have maintained and safeguarded her independence were not lacking. Even to the administration of her property her prerogatives were equal to the Sovereign’s. The Church lands, like the Sovereign’s, were, from the judicial and administrative pnint of view, save in the case of certain criminal affairs—theft, murder, brigandage—quite independent of the local authorities. And these lands were vast. The wealth of the clergy—secular and regular, but regular especially—most unequally divided, but constantly increasing, exceeded that of all the other classes. The properties owned by the Metropolite at the close of the sixteenth century brought in as much as 3,000 roubles a year, and the archbishopric of Novgorod, with 10,000 or 12,000 roubles a year, was richer still. The other bishoprics were more or less well dowered, but all of them richly. The parochial clergy, with their modest allotments, sometimes not exceeding three diessiatines, and seldom attaining, thirty or their sub­ventions (rougi) varying from nineteen roubles to twelve kopecks, could not hope much from the liberality of the faithful, generally bestowed on the monastic establishments, and were less well provided.

Four times a year at least the priest, bearing cross and holy water, passed round his parish with outstretched hand, but even on the results of this quarterly begging expedition the Bishops took their tithes.

The greater pt.rt of the public wealth was in the hands of the ‘ black ’ clergy. Not only was their landed property much larger, but their revenues were increased by the tribute of the national piety, which frequently produced enormous sums. From Ivan IV. alone the monastery of the Troltsa must have received, in less than thirty years, the sum of 25,000 roubles, averaging, according to some calculations, about a million roubles of our money. The monastery of St. Cyril at Bieloo- ziero, less highly favoured, received 18,493 roubles in the same space of time, without reckoning gifts in kind—a hundred pounds of honey, for instance, in 1570, ten horses the next year, and from time to time ikons and sacred objects of great value, one single gift of sacerdotal vestments being reckoned at 6,000 roubles.

O11 these huge lands of theirs, generally free from all imposts, on which they levied their own taxes, to which they attracted and on which they kept an abundant supply of labour, the monks added to the harvests of a soil that was better farmed than any other in the country, and to the perpetual aggran­dizement of their properties resulting from increased coloniza­

tion, a variety of other industries. They gathered up all the money in the country and turned it over in advantageous investments; they were big capitalists, almost the only ones in Russia—very big merchants, and fur the largest of all the landed proprietors. The domains of the monastery of the Troitsa, which comprised all the best land in the twenty-five districts, bore, at the close of this century, 106,600 peasants, and its revenue was calculated at 100,000 roubles, about 2,400,000 roubles of our money. Monsieur Ikonnikov (‘ Essay on the Byzantine Influence on the History of Russia,’ 1869, Part I.) reckons the revenues of the monastic communities in South Russia at 824,593 roubles, drawn from 3,858,396 diessiatines of land, tilled by 660,185 peasants; to these figures should be added the sums produced by the lands cultivated by the monasteries themselves.

These valuations, we may be sure, are only approximate. But the whole of the documents at our disposal give us an impression of considerable wealth, quite out of proportion with the general resources of the country.

It would be absolutely unjust to assert, as it was asserted even at that period, that the clergy, secular or regular, only used their material wealth for their own advantage. For long years here, as elsewhere, the moral consciousness of the people had no refuge save in the bosom of the Church, and no expres­sion save in her teaching. Up to the middle of the sixteenth century the spiritual power of its chiefs, and notably of its Metropolitan, acted as a precious counterpoise to the omnipo­tence of the State. Among the rights claimed by the upper clergy, that of intervening in favour of the victims of arbitrary power and violence is written in letters of gold in the country’s history.

And much more. The Church, and her secular clergy were active co-operators, and, to a certain point, even the chief workers, in the great labour of national unification pursued at Moscow. This calls for explanation. Amongst the first ‘ gatherers of the soil of Russia ’ the idea of unity only appears in the half-conscious stage. The will of Simon the Superb, son of Kalita (1341-1353) does, indeed, enjoin on his son to march in the pafh he has traced out for him, ‘ so that the memory of our fathers and our own may not die out, and that the torch may not be extinguished.’’ Yet an anxiety very different from any ambitious dream of a great fatherland seems to have inspired these obscure Princes in their centuries of effort. When they bought village after village, added land to land, heaped their coffers with gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls; when they cheated their Tartar master of his tribute; when they misused and stripped their brother Kings, if any

of them ever went so far as to reveal his inner thought, and hint at the reason of this unflagging toil, he was simply heard to speak of the time when ‘ God shall deliver us from the Horde.’ What they sought was liberty first and foremost, power to live without bending their backs under the con­queror’s foot, and licking up the drops of fermented milk dropped on his horse’s mane from the goblet they themselves had handed to the master. For they were still as low a? that. And from that state of humiliation they longed to be delivered. Which done, they will amass more riches, commit more violence and more acts of spoliation, simply, as it would seem, for the sake of gaining a few more acres or Ailing a few more coffers to the brim.

Yet slowly the idea of a national unify works its way into the obstinate brains of these hungry spoilers. But it had sprung into being, and grown already, close at their very side. Long before any Prince of Moscow thought of making himself the political representative of a united Russia, the Metropolitan of Moscow had become its religious representative. The force of circumstance had brought this about. Eastern Slavdom could only conceive an eparchy dependent on the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Here, then, it found a first centre of unity, a common hearth. This centre, like all the rest, was nomadic for a considerable time. But' a contemporary of Kalita’s (1325-1341), the Metropolitan Peter, took upon him, even at that period, the title of ‘ Metropolitan of All the Russias,’ and then among all the Princes, each claiming the primacy for Moscow, Riazan, Souzdal, Tver, arose a competition for the presence of the Primate in his capital, and, with it, a visible sign of his own pre-eminence. Michael Iaroslavitch of Tver gained the first advantage by forthwith dubbing himself ‘ of All the Russias ’ too. But Kalita soon retaliated triumphantly, and the Muscovite hegemony was founded a century and a half before the days of Ivan IV.

A hundred and fifty years later, religious unity was to dis­appear, owing to the constitution, close beside it, of a new religious focus—that of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire. The Florentine union completed the severance of the two centres. But by that time political unity, as maintained and fortified at Moscow, had acquired a fair chance of integrity and duration.

The monasteries, on their side, contributed their share to that simultaneous work of colonization, of which all modem Russia is the issue. The forward progress of the monastic establish­ments, generally speakir.g, took a direction contrary to that pursued by the ordinary colonists, who were impelled by ex­clusively practical motives. While these last turned towards the fertile southern lands, the monks, many of them ascetics,

inspired by a higher ideal, preferred the north-eastern countries, deserts and pathless forests, which but for them would long have checked the enterprise of their lay rivals. There they came into touch with the Finnish inhabitants, still sunk in idolatry ; and labouring on their twofold task, breaking up the barren steppes and instructing pagan souls, they pushed onwards, ever onwards. Such a man was Pheodonite, a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible. On the banks of the Pietchenga, aided by his comrade Triphunius, he taught agriculture and the truths of the Faith, at once, to bands of Lapps, who, hostile at first, threatening and ill-treating the pious hermits, ended by hearkening to their voice.

To the east, on the Tartar frontier, the religious apostolate marched abreast of the military conquest. Monastic establish­ments were pushed across the Soura as early as in the fourteenth century, long before the fall of Kazan, and from that time they followed, aided, and sometimes protected, the progress of the expansion of the nation. These monasteries, which every­where commanded great resources, and were often strongly fortified, served as points of support for the campaigning armies. That of St. Cyril, with its ramparts garnished with artillery and its eight-and-thirty great towers, was more im­portant, strategically speaking, than Novgorod.

And even if the affluence of the faithful towards favourite places of pilgrimage resulted in some unjustifiable trafficking at the fairs held on the various saints’ days, if the legality of the money advances made by the monks "to private individuals at interest generally reckoned at between 10 and 100 per cent, gave rise to painful controversies, a tradition which subsisted even down to the eighteenth century likewise held the wealth accumulated in these monasteries to be a sort of reserve fund, on which the country was entitled to draw in days of trouble. These treasures, like those laid up by the Egyptian priests, were not so jealously guarded as to prevent their forming part, in certain circumstances, of the common patrimony. Custom further demanded that no monastery should ever refuse food or temporary hospitality to any person. Even Princes and boiars took advantage of this rule, halted as they passed by these houses of God, and, having refreshed themselves, de­parted, laden with provisions for their journey. As to the poor, they looked on these establishments as being, in a sense, their own property. And the monasteries justified the pretension. On one single day, in a year of famine, 7,000 starving creatures were given bread at the monastery of Volokolamsk, and for months from 400 to 500 received their daily food. That was under Vassili Ivanovitch, father of the Terrible, and in the course of that year the prior Joseph sold the cattle and

even the wearing apparel of his community, and the monks did without kvass, and reduced their own food to the barest neces­saries. The establishment of permanent refuges anu hospitals within the monasteries dates from this period.

What was wanting to these priests, whose lives were so often heroic, who went from door to door begging the sustenance of thousands of unhappy brings, braved the elements in wild northern countries, or—and that was worse—faced, on the steps of the throne, the rage of Princes ? What did they lack to raise them up yet more, to make their churches and their hermitages, like those of Western lands, centres of higher culture or of elementary teaching, to enable them to be, not only the religious teachers, but the educators and civilizers of their people ?

History has long since answered this question. They were uneducated.

Up to the Mongol invasion, out of twenty-three Metropolitans holding Russian sees, seventeen were Greeks, and long after that the Greek or Bulgarian element predominated in the composition of the two clergies. Even after Constantinople had ceased to appoint them—that is to say, after the Florentine Union—the Metropolitans were still confirmed in their titles there, and the constant advent of Eastern monks, who came to collect alms in Russia, and the journeys, just as frequent, of Russian pilgrims to the shrines of Mount Athos and other neighbouring sanctuaries, kept up a constant stream of inter­course between the two Churches. Thus the religious life of the country was in perpetual touch with its original source. Now history has taught us what that spring, from which the Europe of the West herself had drunk in former times, had now become. I shall presently have to show what the Russia of the sixteenth century was able to draw from it, what elements of moral and intellectual culture it could supply. I will confine myself, at present, to one fact.

Between 1420 and 1500, the country had seen the rise of 150 new monastic establishments, between 1500 and 1588, of 65 more. Although the English traveller Fletcher ex­aggerated when he described sixteenth-century Russia as ‘ a land of monasteries,’ it is certain that foundations of that nature did then increase to a relatively considerable extent. To this the extreme liberty in connection with such establish­ments largely conduced. Any hermit who found means to build a little wooden church or oratory could, if it so pleased him, become a prior, or head of a community. He applied to the Sovereign, to the bolars, or simply to wealthy persons, for a gift of land, and the piety of the faithful, the value gener- , ally attributed to monkish intercession, did the rest.

But all these communities accepted the rule of St. Basil, as the Western communities for many years accepted that of St. Benedict ; and this feature, perpetuated and continued even to our own day, is surely a proof that the religious life, thus hardened in a single mould, was anything but intense !

Life means movement, and, besides, the motives ruling these communities had no connection, in many cases, with any longing for pious edification or for an ideal culture of the soul. Having exposed the face of the phenomenon, 1 must now turn to the reverse side. The facts to which I must refer are of universal notoriety, and have stirred a disapproval and caused a reaction even in the very bosom of the Church, the nature and origin of which I must describe, but which, in its results, has been powerless and wellnigh barren.

The ascetic idealists of this period, such as Maximus the Greek, Vassiane Kossoi, or Nil Sorski, closed their lives in a solitude other than that which they had chosen. All of them, like the heroic Pheodonite himself, to whose exploits I have already referred, and who expiated in a prison the crime of having set his contemporaries an example too sublime for them to follow, were attainted, anathematized, and driven beyond the pale of religion. Though the great majorityof their fellow- monks wore the same carb, they were very far from reaching the same heights. Though not content with eating the fruits of their pious trade in idleness, if not in debauchery ; though, as I have already shown, willing to give the poor their share, their horizon, none the less, was circumscribed within the limits of a narrow-minded devotion, conlined to most materia] practices. Many archimandrites and priors followed still less worthy leanings, using the monastic posses­sions for purposes of fruitful speculation, and adapling the rule of their order to habits of sybaritic idleness. Life in common was quite an exception to the general rule. The common table only fed a few brothers with the remnants of the sump­tuous repasts shared by the higher authorities, who swallowed up the common wealth, with their numerous guests—relations, friends, and wealthy gentlemen who elected to inhabit these luxurious solitudes. They led a gay life there, and drank deep. From the sixteenth century to the seventeenth, as Monsieur Prijov shows us in his ‘ History of Taverns ’ (1868, 11. 53), the monasteries were the chief manufacturers and depositaries of beverages of every kind. The company frequenting them was numerous and gay. Ladies were frequent visitors in the monks’ cells. Occasionally other visitors, too, were seen—little boys. In certain conventual establishments monks and nuns lived cheek by jcwl.

The reforming current of the sixteenth century was destined

to reach these communities, infected, like the Western com­munities of the same period, by the general corruption of morals. But here, where it did not find elements strong enough to support it and insure its victory, the reforming effort missed its aim, and the authority of the Church was irremediably damaged.

At the same time, and as the result of yet another cause, her social power was reduced and partly forfeited. Up to the period of the Tartar invasion, the subdivision of the country ir.to petty prin"ipalities, and the maintenance of the Church under the ultimate authority of Constantinople, had guaranteed an independent position to her chiefs. But at this moment they thought it wise to place themselves under the protection of another power, and the Metropolitan Cyril established his seat at the very Court of the Khans. This attitude was rewarded by a charter graciously bestowed by Mengou-Timour, and numerous iarliks, freely distributed by his successors. B it the obtaining of such favours involved a complete abdication of the old independence, and by the time Moscow took over the inheritance of the Asiatic despots the habit was formed. Ukases, following on the iarliks, claimed the same obedience.

Further, the Church, having co-operated, as I have shown, in the constitution of the national unity, did not hesitate to join in the work of destroying the appanages. The division of the country, as a fact, interfered with the exercise of her power. But the po’itical enterprise thus pursued in common inevitably resulted in a confusion of the two allied elements, and then to the subjection of the weaker to the stronger. The omnipotence acquired bv Moscow perpetuated this result, and the rupture with Constantinople deprived the gradually subjugated Church of that national character and external support which made the fortune of Catholicism, and continued its best defence against the enterprises of civil despotism. When, after the close of the sixteenth century, the collation of ecclesiastical dignitaries and of church benefices in Russia became matters entirely at the Sovereign’s discretion, this state of things was not the outcome of any kind of concordat. It was the natural evolution of the country’s institutions, which had wedded, and inseparably mingled, the two orders of interest and power.

Even in the fifteenth century the Sovereign, as the chief protector of orthodoxy, summoned the Conciles, and in these assemblies affairs of State were discussed, as well as questions touching faith or religious rites. On the other hand, the high ecclesiastical dignitaries were frequently called to sit on the Sovereign’s Lay Council, the Dounta, and shared all its delibera­tions. Between such a position and that of being enrolled with everybody else in the great army of the sloojilyie, under the

common law of ‘ service,’ there was but a step. Even the regular clergy did not escape it. While the archimandrites and priors of certain monasteries had their seats both at the lay and the religious council boards, the Russian monks, after the example of their Western brethren, were moved, at a very early date, to appeal to their Sovereign against the epis­copal authority, just as the others appealed to the Pope ; and the Sovereign lent a willing ear, until the time arrived when he felt himself strong enough to simplify all these relations by centralizing their jurisdiction in his own civil government.

Both orders of the clergy might certainly, by virtue of their ministry alone, have lifted themselves out of the downfall entailed on them by their common fate. But to that end, the intellectual dignity and moral value of their leaders, at all events, should have been on a par with the prestige of their sacred functions, and the light and heat shed by the flame of their august vocation should have kindled and burned as brightly in the centres of this autocephalous Church as in those of the West, where, even in Rome’s worst disorders, such men as Leo X. and Pius V. shed a brilliance that fell on every side. Alack ! our Cyrils and Ionas failed to discover any divine spark under the ashes of Byzantium !

Under Ivan III. the upper secular clergy still held out. A quarrel on some liturgical point set the Grand Duke and the Metropolitan by the ears. The latter abandoned his diocesan seat, left his churches unconsecrated, and thus forced the Sovereign to ‘ beat his forehead ’ in repentance. But when, under the successors of this Sovereign, himself not sufficiently strongly entrenched, as yet, in his omnipotence, it took more than a consciousness of outraged dignity to withstand a vic­torious despotism,—when St. Philip, the story of whose mar­tyrdom I shall have to tell, sealed his lonely profession of in­dependence and faith in disowned traditions with his blood, his voice found no echo, his example no followers. The Church, like all the rest of the nation, passed into the silence and the darkness, and there was another wheel in the great machine that ground up the intelligence and the wills of men.

CHAPTER II POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LIFE

i,--------------------------- THE CENTRAL POWER. II.—PROVINCIAL ORGANIZATION. III.---------------------------------

THE MliSTlflTCHESTV®. IV. THE COMMUNE. V.-- JUDICIAL

ORGANIZATION AND LEGISLATION. VI. THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM.

VII. THE FINANCES.

I.—The Central Power.

The machine was not built and set in motion in a day. When Ivan the Terrible came to the throne it already boasted a very complicated mechanism and a multiplicity of machinery— the result, it may be, of the ancient organization, domestic in some sort, adapted to the modest existence of the ap- panaged Princes, as admitted by Monsieur Klioutchevski (‘ The Council of the Boyards in Ancient Russia,’ 1883, 2nd edition, p. 19, etc.), or possibly, as Monsieur Serguieievitch asserts, distinct political organs. I cannot here enter into this discussion. Thorewere offices, or rather departments, the numbers of which Were perpetually on the increase, arid the duties of which were divided in most irregular fashiqn. This was because their creation and activity corresponded with tha progress of conquest and colonization. A certain depaff ment—one of the older ones—would have to deal with affairs ii a great many provinces. Such was the War Office (razriidnyi prikaz). Another, again, was responsible for the whole of the business of one recently-acquired province. This was the case of the Kazan office, after the capture of that town [Kasans'kW deartis); tht Office of Foreign A-ffcUi# (possolskii prikaz), naturally served the whole Empire. The powers of certam provincial bureaus—those of Moscow, Vladimir, Dmitriev, ancf Riazan—were restricted to certain fields within the limits of their provinces, and thus Combined: the distinguishing features of the iiistit<ittons belonging to t.ne two first categori Here, as elsewhere, the disorder of battle was apparent.

To work and control this varied machinery a central spring was needed. Where was it ? In the Sovereign’s hand ? Notr* so, apparently. At the bead of the departments was the Council of Bo'iars (Botarskaia) which bore a pretty close analogy to the ‘Council’ ot the first Capet Kings, or to the curia regia of tne Norman Kings of England Here, as there, it was the product of history, springing from the national association organized in the fifteenth century on the banks of the Oka and the Upper Volga, and consequent on the military formation then adopted. Head of this b^nd, the Prince of Moscow, like?¹

every other General, was bound to consult his lieutenants about any operations oi importance, and the Boiarskaia Dnuma, in its first form, was a mere Council of War, transformed, in later times, by the complication of interests it was called on to dis­cuss. Head of his patrimony, the Sovereign had to reckon, top, with the descendants of his former comrades, now settled, like himself, on hereditary domains, over which they exercised a partial authority. Thus, the competence of the Council of War took on a political character, and in its composition an aristo­cratic tincture became strongly marked.

in the sixteenth century sixty-two families, forty of which held princely rank, seem to have sat on it by right.*¹ But was it really a right ? No; an eligibility rather, utilized at the Sovereign’s will and pleasure. And here, already, appears the powerlessness of an institution which might have been regarded as a restriction on the absolute powex. The lack of corporative organization prevented it from attaining any sufficient power of resistance. Many boi'ars and Princes habitually appear at these councils, but with them we note a still more numerous company of functionaries who are neither boi'ars nor Princes—high officers of the Crown (okolnitchyie, from okolo, around, mem who are about the Prince), courtiers, (dvorianie), and even mere clerks (diaki). As a fact, it did not suffice to be of great family in order to be summoned on this Council. On a list for the year 1527 we do not see a single Galitzine, nor Kourakine, nor Vorotynski, nor Pronski, nor Khovanski, nor Prozorovski, nor Repnine, nor Soltykov. The names I have quoted are some of the greatest of that century. Nor did it follow that because a man had been called on one council he was to be summoned again. For one piece of business, twenty out of the hundred men on the list might be warned, and for another, only eight. There was no rule, and no usual course of things to take its place. The function of councillor, like the rank, depended on the Sover­eign’s will, and, in a sense, the function always continued some­thing apart from the rank. In this we have the germ of the

future organization of the tchine.

The competence of this body was extensive, and, in a way, unlimited. It was not confined to the enlightenment of the Sovereign. In concert wifh him, the Council wielded every power—legislative, judicial, and administrative. It governed, in the widest meaning of the word, and that whether collec­tively or individually. A doumnyi dvorianine who had just been taking his share in some debate on a question of foreign policy might be sent as provincial governor to Vialka. arm then to command a regiment at Sievsk, or, between two similar appointments, he might be delegated to represent his Prince as

cross-bearer in some solemn procession, or carry the dishes tent from the Sovereign’s table to some distinguished personage. And after all that, going back to his Council sittings, he might have to decide a lawsuit for which the Council had resolved itself into a Court of Appeal. It would seem, at all events, that an article of the Code of 1497 mentions a jurisdiction of this nature conierred on the Doumdi

To get through all this work, the Council must have found the two daily sittings mentioned by the chroniclers all too short. It sat, in summertime, from seven in the morning till one or two o’clock in the afternoon ; and then again, after an obligatory attendance on the Sovereign at Mass, dinner, and a siesta, from sunset till late at night. But, in practice, this heavy work only fell on a certain number of councillors at a time, and their intervals of service were widely spaced. As a general rule, the institution did no work at all. And was it really so much as a regular institution ? It was the fiction, rather, of a division of power which, from the sixteenth century onwards, especially, had but a shadowy and deceptive appearance of reality. Whether they really acted together or separately, the fiction still united every act of the Sovereign and his Domna. The master, even if absent, was supposed to be invariably present at the deliberations of the assembly, and even if he acted in­dependently. he was held to be acting in concert with it. Monsieur Serguieievitch is wrong, as it appears to me, when he pronounces against the theory of this mystic union ; it survived the Douma, and was perpetuated in Peter the Great’s relations with his Senate. But it was an idea, and nothing more. The fact—from the sixteenth century onward, more especially—is the existence of a personal and absolute power, exercised by the Sovereign assisted by another deliberative assembly, the composition of which was still more arbitrarily settled, while its more restricted membership left a yet wide? margin for absolutism ; ; private council, generally held ^:n the Sovereign’s bedroom; and only consisting of two or three boiars or confidential men of any rank- a reproduction of the commune consilium noticed, concurrently with the -napiiur consilium, in the organization of ?U the European monarchies, but vaguer and more uncertain in its nature, in this particular place, and more completely subject to the master’s will or caprice.

And ^:n certain provinces the master’s authority is undivided, even in appearance. In certain districts, as we shall presently see, jurisdiction, either as a special right belonging to the Sover­eign or as a privilege claimed by those amenable to justice, by virtue of special charters (tarkhany), is in the hands of his direct agents. In similar fashion, he alone has the right to consider the petitions addressed,by ancient usage, to the Prince,

and which became so numerous as to necessitate the establish­ment, in the sixteenth century, of a special office—the Tchelo- bitnyi priko.z, the germ of the future ‘ secret chancery ’—to deal with them.

Consequently, the Sovereign was, in actual fact, the real and only government, and his councillors, like his ‘ service men,’ were only so many soldiers whom he ordered about—pawns pushed hither and thither on the chess-board, without any possible resistance or control of theirs. In an army, the Council of War attains importance, makes itself heard, even imposes its decisions, as long as the campaign goes ill ; but when victory comes, the General-in-Chief, successful and conscious of his power, soon sends his staff to the right-about. A Napoleon’s plans are not subject to discussion. Moscow was victorious ; she passed from triumph to triumph, and the heirs of Kalita, having no account to render for the past, claimed the privilege of rendering none in future.

Such was the central situation, and a similar type of military organization was repeated round it.

II.—Provincial Organization.

It essentially depended on the possession of the land. The possession of land entailed two kinds of obligations on its proprietors. If they were peasants, they owed taxes ; if they held freeholds (vottchiny) or fiefs (pomiestia), they owed ser­vice, they were sloojilyie—that is to say, besides the civil functions with which they might be invested, they con­stituted the Sovereign’s army, quartered on their territorial possessions in time of peace, and instantly mobilized in time of war. Service began when a boy was fifteen. At that age the son of a pomiechtchik received a portion of the paternal domain, or, if the family was too numerous to permit of that, a fresh allotment. When the pomiechtchik died, his lands were divided up among his sons, the girls, too, receiving shares ^;n which they had a life-interest only, and which they had to relinguish if they married. If the land did not suffice, an additional allotment could be claimed. The exchange of pomiestia was allowed, on condition the State suffered no damage ; for its service, every man must be replaced by another. In the case of the vottchiny, the State nominally did not intervene in matters of inheritance, but it took care that each lot of land should be represented by a man capable of service.

The system was evidently more easily applied in the case of the pomiechtchiki. The Sovereign, who was master of their fortunes, had them much more completely in hand. Where­

fore the policy of Moscow invariably tended to replacing free­holds by fiefs, putting life grants in the place of hereditary’ domains. On the lands annexed to the Empire by force of arms this process of substitution was far easier, and was rapidly accomplished. The laws of war, admitting, as they did, of wholesale confiscation and the distribution of the confiscated lands, provided lor it. Twenty years after the annexation of Novgorod we find, in a document dated 1500, that in the two districts of Ladoga and Oriechek 106 pomiechtchiki held half the arable land between them ; most of these were of the humbler class, artisans and servants, and consequently all the more docile. The judicial ancestor of the ordinary type of landed proprietor of that country in the sixteent’ century is the dog-boy of the appanaged Prince of the four­teenth—obedience is in his blood.

Elsewhere, in countries where the work of unification had been done with a gentle hand, the votlchiny were still in the majority. They were much less manageable, and against them the furious onslaught to which the Terrible owes his title was to be launched.

The fomiestia class, which spread still more generally as the result of this struggle, laboured under another drawback. Owing to that insufficiency of land at the Sovereign’s disposal, to which I have already alluded, a landed proletariat came into existence. One pomiechtchik called out for military service complains that he has not the means to provide himself with a horse. Another, who, while he awaits the promised allotment of land, performs the functions of a church chorister, does not even possess the wherewithal to serve on foot. Yet the numbers are kept up, after all, and the Sovereign’s army costs him nothing.

But he must have an administration besides, and this costs nobody but the governed anything at all. To administer meant, in those days, to exercise justice :.nd keep criminals in order—nothing more—and those who did it were fed. Here, too, the general system was the same. By virtue of ancient privilege on most allodial properties, by virtue of special charters on other lands, the owners, soldiers, or even Church­men, sat in judgment—in other words, they traded, on their own account, on the rights of justice, which they turned to their personal profit. They pocketed the proceeds of pettifoggery, minted into taxes and charges of various kinds, and the pro­ceeds of public prosecutions, in the shape of fines paid by convicted persons, or, failing them, by their communes. On lands which escaped this jurisdiction the trade in judicial matters was divided between the direct agents of the State, acting for it, and other ‘ service men,’ to whom the State du-

legated its rights and profits, and who represented it in the guise of lieutenants (namieslnihi), bailies (volostnieli), and governors. To govern a town or province was to live on that town or province by means of charges levied on the dis­pensation of justice. This was called kormlenie, from kormit, to feed, and the governors were the kornilenchtchihi, far ex­cellence. When, at a later period, the economic life of the country" called for administrative agents in the true sense of the word, the thought of using the governors for this purpose never occurred to anybody. New needs brought new organs into being, and the old ones stayed on to be fed, and with no other raison d'etre.

The kormlenie, which was in perfect harmony with the territorial rights of the vottchiny, and much more a privilege than a function, was connected with civil rather than with political rights. A bo'iar’s widow might claim it, or his other heirs if there was no widow—any of the deceased man’s family, in fact. In the same way, while the governor turned his province to account, the bailie, within his own bailiwick, was not the governor’s subordinate, but his competitor. He kept certain classes of business and people in his own jurisdiction—he had legal power over the ‘ black ’ lands, for instance, whereas the ‘ white’ lands were ruled by his neighbour.

The abuses to which this system lent itself may be imagined. In theory, indeed, the expenses of judicial proceedings were defined, and profits limited to what they ought to bring. But there were extras, bribes which must be paid, the result of the wholesale trickery rampant in an organization over which no effectual control existed. This was the plague-spot on the whole system.

There was no rule—no rale laid down, at all events—for the recruiting of this double set of State servants. The Sovereign chose whom he would. Yet, practically, his choice was limited by the difficulty of finding, outside a certain social class, men fit to do the work. The Moscow policy strove to widen these borders and take in fresh blood, drawn from every class of society, even the humblest. These demo­cratic tendencies were checked by the lack of sufficient intel­lectual development. Dog-boys whose training permitted them to cut a decent figure in the guise of namiestniki were not common. And thus it came about that the social element, the hereditary principle, and the aristocratic spirit all blended with the political element and the principle of co-optation, and produced in the result a phenomenon the like of which has never been seen in any other European country: the miestnitcheslvo. The very name is hardly known outside Russia. 1 will endeavour to explain the thing.

III.—The Miestnitchestvo.

It means, theoretically, the right, not established by any code, but recognised by custom, whereby no sloojilyi ordered to serve with another of his class could be given a place (miesto) inferior to any held by himself or his ancestors with relation to the said comra.de or his forefathers. Take two men appointed to command two battalions of the same regiment. Both are sons of boiars, but the grandfather of one, being a General, has had the father or grandfather of the other under his orders. Here is a case of miestnitchestvo : the General’s grandson has an absolute right to refuse to serve with the com­rade suggested to him. There is no reason why his Sovereign, if such were his goodwill and pleasure, should not turn him into a stableman, and he would not dare to object, unless, sweeping the dung out of the same stable, he were to meet some other stableman whose father had been a scullion when his own progenitor was handling the saucepans. But he cannot be turned into a General willing to share his rank and command with that scullion’s son.

Now consider that the calculation of precedence thus claimed affected ancestry in every degree and branch, and conceive the complication and frequency of the disputes thus engendered. The political life of the Muscovite State has been full of them, and they have constituted the sole restriction, but a serious one, on the Sovereign’s absolute power.

Pogodine has sought the origin of the miestnitchestvo in the relations between the appanaged Princes. But this theory has few^r partisans now. In the first disputes of this nature of which we have cognisance, and which, indeed, coincide with the appearance of the earliest books on genealogy' (rodoslovnyia knigi), the family principle is more generally and strongly marked. The Muscovite Government, in its own. interest, respected and cultivated this principle, on which its dynastic establishment was based, and out of its endeavour to combine it with its contradictory⁷ system of a hierarchy based on ‘ service ’ came the miestnitchestvo. The Govern­ment welcomed it at first. The disputes it stirred, all directly and solely concerned with places conferred by the Sovereign, ran absolutely counter to the corporative spirit : they ex­cluded all idea of an aristocracy, properly so-called, and strengthened that of ' service.’ And at first they were mere private matters, and affected trifles only. One bolar claimed another boiar’s seat at a friend’s table ; the wives of two high functionaries fought over their places in church ; a Bishop— for the clergy were interested in the matter, too—refused to

eat out of the same dish with another and less well-connected prelate. In the ‘ black ’ clergy, indeed, there was a hierarchy of monasteries, and monks within the communities quarrelled over their places .11 the processions that followed the holy ikons. Merchants obeyed the general lead, and the great dramatist Ostrovski has demonstrated the survi vance even to our own dav of the habits then contracted in that class of life.

But a time came when, on a day of battle, in the very face of the enemy, two Generals began a squabble of this sort. This was at Orcha, in 1514, and the battle was a failure. A change was indispensable. The Government tried every­thing—the suspension of precedence for a fixed period during a campaign, for instance, and severe penalties in the case of any unjustified claim—but did not dare to lay its hand on the unwritten, but all the more strongly rooted, privilege. The aristocracy used all its powers, fired its last shots, set all its last haughty hopes upon the die, and forgot, while thus plunged in its calculations of nobility, that power was slipping from its hands. For many years, indeed, the highest places were given to the nobles, because at first the State could not fill them up otherwise. But when other candidates were to be had, the miestnitchestvo was powerless to resist a democratic levelling process harmonizing with the State’s own principles. By putting forward the posts bestowed by the Sovereign’s free­will as a factor in family calculations, it destroyed the generic element of its own social and corporate value; it elaborated, as a reinvestment, a collective body of another kind, more docile, more pliable, and but for which the Russia of the sixteenth century might perhaps have failed in her tremendous task; but it was not a class—it was a crew rather, a regiment, a convict gang.

This system, by setting up individual qualification against birth, certainly succeeded, in some measure, and on a final analysis, in bringing out another fruitful principle—personality ; and it would thus be most unjust to regard the miestnitchestvo, with Valouiev and some other historians, as an instance of Chinese immobility. The system itself was not unchange­able. It altered in the course of time : it developed ; it felt and exercised divers reactions. But though, by its passive resistance, it raised serious obstacles in the path of absolutism, it did not bring any such social or political force to bear as might, by paralyzing its action, have supplied its place, directed or controlled it.

Another force of this nature existed, in embryo at least, in the communal organization to which I have already referred.

IV.—The Commune.

The appearance of Baron von Haxthausen’s studies of the Russian commune as it now exists, with its autonomous administration and its collective proprietorship, was a revelation, even a joyful surprise, to Russia. It was like the discovery of a new world, proving the originality and excellence of a primordial institution, in which the nation felt it might glory in the face of astonished Europe. This proud conviction had a fall. Further inquiry proved a pre­existence of similar institutions in all countries, European and others—from Ireland to Java, from Egypt to India. The difference, then, between Russia and her Western neigh­bours was narrowed to one of age and civilization. But the pursuit of truth and the disappointments resulting therefrom did not end here. Students began to think they perceived that the Russian commune, which had been taken to be iden­tical with primitive forms of organization, delayed and kept in the rudimentary form by a slower development of social and economic life, was really a thing of recent growth. Far from being the outcome of the patriarchal communism of prehistoric times, was it not rather the result of a collective responsibility for the payment of taxes—a responsibility unknown to the free peasants of the sixteenth century, and imposed on the rural communities of a later date by the law of serfdom ? A fossil formation ? Not a bit ! A product of the political system which triumphed in Russia under Ivan IV. ? A national trait ? No, again ! A State insti­tution.

Thus, according to the point of view set forth by Monsieur Tchitcherine (‘ Essays on the History of Russian Law,’ 1858, p. 4, etc.), and still more recently by Monsieur Milioukov (‘ Essays on the History of Russian Culture,’ i., p. 186, etc.), we here have an instance, and a most striking one, of that reversed progress which, in some things, appears a peculiarity of the economic and social development of this country.

But is it a well-chosen instance ?

During the first half of the sixteenth century serfdom, as we have seen, was only an occasional condition n Russia. But the commune, with its association of tree peasants, already existed. Every peasant, in fact, was bound to belong to one of these associations. Those, who lived outside their borders were mere vagabonds. These associations were autonomous organizations, within which a democratic and communistic form of existence reigned. The assembly which discussed the common interests was composed of the elders of every household in a certain district, which included several

of these associations, and was called a volost. This in no way resembled the institution now known by this name. The ancient volost, which was something between the canton and the commune in France, and somewhat approached the American township, possessed far more extensive privileges. The assembly which represented it at this period had power to issue decrees (by-laws); it chose the mayors (golovy) and the elders (starosty) of the commune; it allocated the direct taxes im­posed by Government 011 trade and agriculture ; it appointed the members of each commune who were to help the judges to exercise their functions, or play the part allotted to the schoffen in ancient Germany, and to the nemd in Sweden; and finally, through freely-elected magistrates, it kept order and defended the common interests before the judges.

Such, at least, is the state of things of which traces are discoverable on the ‘ black ’ lands, owned by free peasants. But it is impossible to assert that the same condition existed on lands of the other class, concurrently with that judicial and police organization amidst which the privileged magis­trates wielded their authority. On the other hand, and on these very lands, even in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, signs and rudiments of collective possession or holdings have been detected. In the centre of the country more especially, the documents of the period make frequent reference to husbandmen, called sossiedy (neighbours), skladniki (from skladat, to put together), or siabry, who seem to have been peasants associated together to work a certain stretch of land. Monsieur Serguieievitch, though he interprets the name and manner of life of these husbandmen in a different sense, be­lieving them to have bound themselves together for the pay­ment of their obligations only, grants, in his ‘ Judicial Antiqui­ties ’ (1Q03, vol. iii., p. 61, etc., and 119, etc.), the existence of other agrarian communities. On the lands held by the higher clergy and by the monasteries, the history of which is much better known, the enjoyment of certain hired areas seems to have been common to all the tenants, inasmuch as the lot given to one family, the vit, or sokha, as in the case of the English virgate, did not constitute a right to occupy one particular space, enclosed within certain limits, but that to occupy and till five diessiatines, for instance, in each of the three fields belonging to the manor. On one property belonging to the Tro'itsa monastery (Serguieievitch, ibid., p. 440) we note, quite as an exception, the tillage in common of parcels of ground made over to associations of peasants. And on the lands confiscated by the father of Ivan the Terrible after the annexation of Novgorod, lands taken from boi'ars and given to qualified peasants, a common ownership in

meadows, lakes, and forests certainly sprang up, and showed a tendency to develop. But all this was local, rudimentary, or recent- a far cry from the full and general collectivity of the Russian mir or our days, with its periodical redivision of allotments, like the run-rig on certain modern manor lands in England and Ireland. In those days the mir only existed m the most embryonic form, and no possibility offers, so far, for tracing either its origin or its mode of development.

This development occurred in the fifteenth century. At that period the Russian commune was assuredly not a relic of the patriarchal organization of the old times, wiped out by the Norman invasion, or even before that, as some historians have admitted, by the admixture of foreign and Finnish elements with the Slav race. But were there any Finns in ancient Southern Russia ? The fact is not clear. Was this renovated commune a resurrection of the ancient communistic regime, called forth by the permanence of certain social habits ? Or was it the entirely new product of a spontaneous generative process, to be explained, as the Slavophils are inclined to explain it, by a special aptitude of the national tempera­ment for a communistic life ? These are knotty questions, and the demands of the national vanity do not facilitate their solution. That such an aptitude may exist is undeniable. Of that the artels are a standing proof. But in Germany, and more especially in England, as in the case of those guilds which have held out against the whole force of modem centrali­zation, the spirit of association has proved infinitely more energetic.

I am disposed to opine that the two principles of historic atavism and congenital predisposition, working on a popula- ticn in the case of which the inorganic stage had been exceed­ingly prolonged, combined to determine the production of this rudimentary organization on the very threshold of the modern epoch. The Russian commune of the fifteenth century has no family quality about it. It is open to all comers. Any peasant who pays his share of the common obligations can enter it. It is purely conventional, and this characteristic distinguishes it from the antique formations preserved, in their primitive peculiarities, amongst some other Slav peoples. Yet a certain administrative autonomy brings it back to this ancestral type. The nature and character of this autonomy are likewise open to discussion. Did the commune of the fourteenth century bear any part, and, if so, what part, ^;n the exercise of justice ? This is still an open question. But it is certain, nevertheless, that the judicial organization of that period, and the system, already described, of the kurmlenie, left little room for the exercise of any rival

power. This domain belonged to the ‘ service men.’ It was a private preserve. For in those days any man amenable to justice was still fair game.

But with the following century the scene changes. Com­munal autonomy suddenly widens its borders. It tends towards the absorption of the whole of the provincial adminis­tration, and of all the powers thereto attached. What has happened ? This—that the ‘ service men ⁵ have failed in their task. They have worked the land so hard that they have ruined it. By their exactions and extravagance they have not only done serious damage to private interests, for which the State cares little, but they have compromised the interests for which the State does care—they have destroyed or diminished its taxable property. And the State, wavering between the two poles of its own political theory, then in course of evolution, between the current of absolutism and the current of liberty, resolves to break down privileges it has itself con­ferred, and which have not borne their expected fruit, and with­draws functions the bestowal of which it now regrets. For the discharge of these, it calls on the elements of that communal organization it has long scorned and even misused. Charters, bestowed by a more and more liberal hand, place the communal starosts and wardens in possession of a power tending first to the diminution and then to the suppression of that once held by the lieutenants and bailiffs of the Crown. But for all that, the State does not drop its fundamental programme; it does not quite abdicate its despotism. Between this last, and the spirit of the institutions thus called to play a new part, it seeks a compromise, and finds it in the separation of the authority it concedes from the independence it refuses. These magis­trates, whose powers it has increased, will still be function­aries, men of its own, and the commune, thus widened and glori ■ fied, will be a State, institution—we shall watch this phase— until, under the law of serfdom, the approaching evolution gives it yet another form—the autonomy of the galleys, the association of the chain that binds one pair of legs to another.

To comprehend these successive changes we must devote a closer, though still a cursory, examination to the working of the particular parts of the machine affected by them.

V.—Judicial Organization and Legislation.

Till towards the middle of the sixteenth century this sphere is wholly ruled by the idea that the administration of justice is a privilege, a valuable asset. Fiscal agents and Crown officers on the ‘ black lands,’ property-owners on the ‘ white,’ all feed or are fed at the same manger. Decrees are pretexts,

first and foremost, for levying taxes; the repression of crime is, above all things, a financial operation. Even though cognizance of certain crimes, such as murder and brigandage, is reserved to the State, it is all a question of cash, even there. These affairs bring in more money, and the State keeps the best morsels for itself.

Wherefore, in the Code of 1497—after the Rousskata Pravda, the earliest copy of which dates from 955 or 962, legislation has come to a standstill—the provisions for criminal cases rank first. In civil cases the legislator generally defers to custom. He hardly mentions the relations and obligations arising out of family ties or contracts, and is absolutely silent concerning all other judicial relations. As regards public rights, he gives nothing, or hardly anything. There is some dim conception of a right of guardianship over the common people, vested in the State, evidenced by an injunction that no man must be deprived of his liberty without the Sovereign’s consent. The legislator’s chief anxiety has been to organize the work of justice, and organization, in his view, consists in the reckoning up and allotment of expenses and taxation. The Soudiebnik is a penal code and a book of profits, very little else.

In the number and severity of the penalties suggested, the Tartar influence is clearly seen. The Rousskaia Pravda was a far gentler Code, and a more liberal one, too; it gave the culprit power in many cases to buy himself off. The new Code ignores this privilege. The words bity knouty, biti batogy, recur in almost every line. In the application of these penalties, and in the whole of its legislation, the idea of equality, which is very apparent and accords with the democratic tendencies of the Code, is at war with the contrary principle of vested rights claimed by the Byzantine spirit of the Church. Judicial practice itself was thus drawn from the civil sources of the Greek legislation—from the laws of Constantine the Great, Justinian, and Leo the Philosopher, from the Eclogues of Leo the Isaurian and Constantine Copronymus ; so that if these tribunals are responsible for the peasant as well as for every­body else, the peasant will be hanged, and the boiar only whipped or put in prison. In most cases, too, he will be tor­tured to make him confess his crime. The accused person is always put to slow torture : his ribs are broken in, nails driven into his flesh. This is the sixteenth century !

Up till the seventeenth, this same Code, lingering far behind the rest of Europe, will accept the judicial combat, also part of the habits of the country. At Novgorod the law even per­mitted such combats between two women who accused each other, while at Pskov a more gallant statute allowed the fair

sex to find male substitutes, the same privilege being extended to old men, infirm persons, and monks.

Ivan IV.’s Code was to provide for a similar equalization of the combatants’ strength. But at that moment the judicial combat was beginning to change its nature. It had long been looked on as a merely human expedient, held in scant respect, and ranking lower than confession and testimony among the means available for demonstrating the truth. As a mark of distrust and scorn, the oath and the casting of lots were added to it. Before proceeding to the combat the oath was taken, and the oath was deferred till after the casting of lots. The idea of Divine intervention did not present itself save in a latent condition; but now it began to rear its head and gather strength. The judicial combat was taking on the form of a Divine judgment.

In this fact some people will recognise another instance of Russia’s reversed march in the path of progress ; it will be recollected, in any case, that the ordalie proscribed in France by the edict of Louis le Debonnaire, in 829, was forbidden, and forbidden afresh by the French Parliament in 1400. And, indeed, this ordalie was not quite the same thing. It essentially depended on the idea of a celestial arbitrament, which was not associated with such encounters, in Russia, till a late period. It was a mere legacy, in her case, of a barbarous past, when each man did justice for himself, and when the decision of every quarrel depended on the personal valour of the disputants. Thus, far from favouring its maintenance and application as she favoured the various appeals to the Divine judgment in other places, the Church, even while labouring to endue the custom with a religious meaning, opposed its practice. She succeeded by this means in withdrawing its two accessories —the oath and the casting of lots—which were finally made, independent forms of proof. At a fairly early date, this last was currently employed in ecclesiastical business. The sentence was drawn like a lottery-ticket. Before the common law tribunals similar judicial methods were pursued, down to the close of the sixteenth century, according to a procedure of which Henry Lane, an English commercial agent, gives a curious account in connection with a lawsuit in which he was interested, in the year 1560.

It was connected with a sum of 600 roubles claimed from him by a Kostroma merchant. The matter was to have been decided, in the first instance, by a single combat, for the pur­poses of which Lane had provided himself with a redoubtable champion in the person of a fellow-countryman of his own, employed, like himself, by the English trading company settled in Russia. This man. whose name was Romanus Best, was

destined to become the founder of an illustrious Russian family, the Bestoujev. But the Kostroma man, thinking his opponent too dangerous, no doubt objected to him, and recourse was then had to the casting of lots. In the presence of two high officials, who acted as judges, and a numerous audience, the two parties were first of all invited to come to terms. Then, neither being wilhng to yield, the judges, turning up their sleeves, exhibited two balls of wax, and one of them hailed a member of the crowd. ‘ You there, with such a coat and such a cap, come here !’ The man advanced, held out his cap, into which the two balls were put, and then another man, chosen in the same way, drew them out, one after the other. The first drawn won the battle, and as it turned out, the English­man got his verdict; whereupon the audience applauded, quite convinced of the excellence of the cause thus gained, and of the uprightness of English merchants in general (‘ Hakluyt Collection,’ ii., p. 209).

The reasons which prevented the State from putting the same confidence in ordeals of this nature in cases affecting itself are easily divined. It therefore devised others, and amongst them the povalnyi obysk, a sort of inquiry into morals, in high favour in the days of Ivan the Terrible. In this the voice of the people—vox Dei—was supposed to intervene, and to that end a great mass of testimony was indispensable. False witness was severely punished, knouted without mercy. But the effect of this penalty was that most men would not open their lips. As for documentary proof, that did not make its appearance till the end of the sixteenth century. The carrying out of the sentence, in civil matters, often involved very peculiar practices. The condemned party, if a bankrupt, was delivered over to his creditor ‘ with his head ’ (golovoiou) ; in other words, the debtor became his creditor’s thing, his slave, till the debt was paid. The solvent debtor who refused to pay was subjected to the fvavieje. This means that the recalcitrant was led out in front of the house in which the court sat, and there whipped on the fleshy parts of his legs from morning till night. The severity and efficacy of this display of force were both very un­certain, and depended on the fees given the executioners by the two parties. One debtor would get off without great damage, another might be maimed. The duration of this punishment, undetermined at first, was fixed, between 1555 and 1628, at one month for a sum of 100 roubles; at the expiration of that time the debtor was to be made over to the creditor. But men of mark possessed the privilege of always being able to escape the pravieje, either by finding substitutes or simply by default.

The extreme venality of the judges was another and a more serious obstacle in the way of an equal-handed administration

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of justice ; over this abuse custom spread a generous cloak of tolerance. In theory, bribes (viatki) were severely forbidden, but in practice, parties presenting themselves at the bar of justice had to lay an offering ‘ for tapers ’ before the holy pictures, and at Easter, magistrates of every degree had a right to receive ‘ red eggs,’ accompanied by several ducats each. Vasbili, father of the Terrible, heard that a judge, having accepted a sum of money from one of the parties to a suit, and another and smaller sum from the other party, had then given his verdict in favour of the man who had paid him most. The magistrate, summoned before his sovereign, admitted his act. and thought to justify it by saying, ‘ When I have to deal between a rich and a poor man, I never hesitate about believing the rich man’s word, for his interest in deceiving me is smaller.’ Vassili smiled, and was merciiul.

Let us, in our turn, shew mercy to a society in which the struggle for life was embittered, in every class, by the uncer­tainty affecting every condition, and let us try to realize the nature of an economic regime under which the inception and maintenance of the -pravieje were possible.

VI.—The Economic System.

Apart from the ndustrial and commercial centres to which reference has already been made, the Russia of the sixteenth century, like the Russia of the present day, was an essentially agricultural country. Yet the art of cultivation tarried in its earliest stages of development, and was limited to the most elementary of methods. The province of Jaroslavl, to the north of Moscow, and the banks of the Oka, from Riazan to Nijni- Novgorod, on the south-east, were reckoned amongst the most productive parts of the country. According to Herberstein, indeed, the lands along the Oka yielded something between twenty and thirty fold. Northward, again, in spite of the severity of the climate, the land along the banks of the Northern Dvina, fertilized by spring floods, produced very large harvests. But little wheat was grown there. The most usual crops were rye, oats, and buckwheat, consumed for the most part in the country. There was a certain amount of exportation to the west, by the seaport of Narva, and at a later date by Arkhangel, and overland into Poland. But this trade could not attain any great volume, for the needs of Europe were not then what they are now. The State paralyzed this, like every other traffic, by its monopolies, and, finally, any large exportation of corn was discouraged as likely to impoverish the country. Prices, too, were so ruled by the yield of each harvest, and by the relative remoteness of the places where it was grown, by

war and other troubles affecting the country, that they varied by ten degrees, and all dealings with foreign markets were affected by this fact. On the whole, however, prices ruled very low.

Here I must parenthetically explain the monetary system of the country. The unit then, as now, was the rouble (from roubit, to cut), and each rouble consisted of 100 kopecks. Now, this rouble was supposed to weigh 16 silver zolotniki, weighed, therefore, in precious metal, almost seven times as much as the rouble of the present day, and was reckoned by the English merchants to be worth 16s. 8d. of English money. But after the fifteenth century especially this value suffered a gradual depreciation, resulting from the Muscovite policy, which was even then inaugurating a system the consequence of which now appears to us in a rouble which has fallen to the value of two shillings and a few odd pence. The kopieiki were originally called diengi (from the Tartar word ding, money), the present name not having been adopted till towards the middle of the sixteenth century, when these small coins were stamped with the figure of a warrior with a lance (kopie). Even under the father of Ivan the Terrible, the idea of cutting up the rouble into 250 diengi had been adopted, and, under the pressure of financial necessity, during Ivan\ minority, this number was increased to 300. There were two sorts of roubles at that period, for the Novgorod rouble still retained its original weight, and was worth twice as much as the Moscow rouble. This makes it very diffi­cult to calculate the price of food-stuffs from any document of the period. .

The small change of the country also included altiny (from the Tartar word alt, six), six-kopeck pieces ; grivny, twenty- kopeck pieces ; poltiny, or half-roubles {poltiny, half); and copper coins called poloudiengi or pouli (half-kopecks). The silver dienga, an irregularly-shaped, rather oval coin, borrowed from the Tartars, was so small that it was easily lost. Shop­keepers settling their accounts generally put them in their mouths, fifty at a time. According to several foreign travellers, such as Herberstein and Fletcher and the chroniclers of the period, and according, too, to the calculations of Monsieur Rojkov (loc. cH., p. 202, etc.), the average price of the tchetviert of rye (25 bushels—the tchetviert of those days was half that size) varied, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, between 10 kopecks, the lowest, and 69 kopecks, a high, price. And all other produce was subject to the same fluctuations. This, as compared with present prices, makes an average of 93'9, and we may conclude the purchasing power of the rouble of that day to have been ninety-four times greater, and its value therefore ninety-four times higher, than that of the rouble of ours,

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But at the close of the century the proportion drops to about 20 to 24, and it is impossible to fix it with any precision.

The price of labour naturally depended on the price of corn. In 1598, we find peasants binding themselves to furnish sawing- wood, to be cut and carried for the building of a bridge, for an agreed price of a dienga and a half. In 1573. an obja, a piece of ground which one man could till with a horse, was to be bought for between 8 and 10 roubles. A house cost 3 roubles. Four cows and twenty sheep were to be had for 4 roubles 16 altines, and a horse for from 1 to 3 roubles.

Crops were taken in a three-years’ rotation—rye, oats, and fallow. The peasant who settled on an olja sowed two and a half to three and a half tchetvierti of rye and as much barley, and, if his harvests were good, made as much as 3 roubles a year. His keep having been taken out of this income, he still had to dress himself. A full suit cost him half a rouble, without the belt and gloves, indispensable in cold weather, and for which he had to give 24 kopecks and 6 kopecks. Then he had his taxes, some 75 kopecks to 1 rouble, as it seems, by a reckon­ing taken in 1555.

But all this only relates to the ‘ black ’ lands, on which the free peasants lived. On the ‘ white ’ lands the advances given by proprietors towards the farmers’ preliminary expenses, and the succour they distributed in times of famine or murrain, made the husbandman’s lile easier, but endangered his freedom. The peasants settling on communal lands generally obtained a remission of taxes for the first four or even eight years of their tenancy, but they could not reckon on any other advan­tage. The monastery lands were looked on as an El Dorado, and I have already explained why. Yet, though the monks, less heavily burdened themselves, were in a position to be more lenient with others, the name strada (stradat, to suffer), com­monly applied to the forced labour demanded by these land­lords" would seem to prove their El Dorado was no paradise.

I have already mentioned one of the causes which acted as an obstacle to the development of the agricultural industry. That celebrated household book, the ‘ Domostroi,’ composed by Pope Sylvester in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, to which I shall make further reference, sheds a curious light on this point. According to this book, all industrial activity seems to have been essentially domesticated. Under the roof of every boiar of that period we see a cluster of workshops, which supply all the home needs of the establishment, and make any external development of the same trades a matter of impossibility.

Yet carpentering, joinery, boat-building, that fashioning of small wooden utensils and objects which has attained such ex­tensive proportions in the particular form of industrial

activity now known as koustar, had existed and been general in the country from a very early date. At Kosmodi6miansk, near Nijni-Novgorod, there was a celebrated industry in chests, and there were others, famous for their red-leather and seal­skin appointments, at Kholmogory. The sledges made at Viazma and the wooden spoons produced at Kalouga were also highly renowned, but none of this was exceedingly profitable merchandise. The Kholmogory chests were used to carry wares to Moscow, and then sold there at very low prices. A hundred Kalouga spoons were worth 20 altines, and a Viazma sleigh was to be had for a poltina.

Trade, though comparatively stronger, was still starved. In the matter of exports it was almost exclusively confined to raw materials. The first place was held by furs, and 500.000 roubles’ worth were sold in Europe and Asia every year. The finest sables came from Obdorsk, in the present Government of Tobolsk. White bearskins came from the banks of the Pietchora, and sealskins from the Kola Peninsula. A fine sable skin cost as much as thirty gold florins ; a bo'iar’s cap trimming, in black fox, was worth fifteen. But ermine was little sought after in those days, and an ermine skin could be bought for 3 or 4 di6ngi. Wax held the second place in the external trade of the country ; about 50,000 pounds were ex­ported every year. Tallow came next, a considerable quantity, some 30,000 or 40,000 pounds, being sent annually out of the provinces of Smolensk, Jaroslavl, Ouglitch, Novgorod, Vologda, and Tver. Within the boundaries of Russia tins commodity was not very largely consumed, for the rich used wax candles, and the poor burnt torches made of resinous wood. The honey so abundantly produced in the provinces of Riazan and Mourom, and, later, round Kazan, was principally employed in brewing the favourite beverage of the country, but a certain quantity was also sent abroad, Pskov and Novgorod, Jaroslavl and Vologda, exporting as much as 10.000 pounds a year. For elk- skins, too, much praised by Fletcher, there was a foreign de­mand. The finest elks were to be found in the forests near Rostov, Vytchegda, Novgorod, Mourom, and Perm. The oxen were too small to be of much mercantile value. The neighbourhood of Arkhangel sent seal-oil to the foreign markets, and the fisheries of Jaroslavl, Nijni-Novgorod, Bielooziero, and Astrakhan—after the conquest of that country—furnished abundance of fish and fish-roes, already much sought after by English, Dutch, and French merchants. These were sold even in Italy and Spain. In his ‘ Treatise on the Sarmatians.’ published in 1521, Matthew Miechovski speaks of the whale- fisheries in the White Sea. But it seems strange that efforts which have so frequently failed in later times should have been

successful at this period. Most probably, as Monsieur Zamy- slovski opines, all that was then done was to turn a few stranded whales to account (see his study in the Revue du Min. de I’lstr. PuM., published May, 1882, p. 67). Certain varieties of birds had a constant sale abroad—gerfalcons, especially, brought very high prices. Flax from Pskov, and hemp from Smolensk, Dorokho- bouje, and Viuzma, all found foreign purchasers, and so did the salt from the Starai'a-Roussa salt-works, and the tar from Smolensk and Dvinsk. Persia took all the walrus teeth, using them both for industrial purposes and in the preparation of miich vaunted remedies and antidotes against poison. Mira, found in great quantities on the banks of the Dvina and in Carelia, was used instead of glass all over the country, and was also exported with other mineral products, such as saltpetre, prepared at Ouglitch, Jaroslavl, andOustioug; sulphur, taken out of the lakes of Samara ; and iron from the mines of Carelia and those near Kargopol and Oustioujna.

Some manufactured articles, though principally consumed at home, found a certain number of purchasers abroad. Tar- tary took saddles, bridles, linens, cloths, and garments, and sent back Asiatic horses in their stead. The European mer­chants brought ingot silver, gold thread, copper, cloth, looking-glasses, lace, cutlery, needles, purses, wines, and fruits. Their Asiatic comrades sold silk stuffs, gold tissues, carpets, pearls, and gems. Both were bound to bring all their merchandise to Moscow, where the Sovereign, having made his own selection in the first place, gave them leave to offer the rest for public sale. Peter the Great’s daughter was to claim this privilege, with regard to the merchants who brought fashions from France, in later days.

The meeting-place of all the merchants was at the confluence of the Mologa and the Volga. Here, in ancient days, had stood a little town, called the ‘ town of the slaves ’ (Kholopii gorodok), of which a church was the only remaining vestige. This town had been founded, according to tradition, by Novgorod slaves, who had tied from the rage of their masters, whose honour they had cruelly outraged during an absence which had proved too long for the virtue of the wives they behind them. The fair held on this spot was the most famous in all Russia. It lasted four months, and filled the huge estuary with such an army of boats, packed close together, that men passed dryfoot from one shore to the other. German, Polish, Lithuanian, Greek, Italian, Persian merchants, crowded along the shores, and exposed their wares in a huge meadow, circled with temporary inns and wineshops. These last establishments numbered as many as seventy, and the bartering round about them was so extensive as to be worth 180 pounds of silver to the

Sovereign, year in and year out. These operations, indeed, were nearly all carried out in kind, and no coin passed. Coined money was an uncommon thing, as a rile, monopolized by a few rare capitalists, and especially by the Sovereign, the greatest hoarder in the country.

The only rival of this fair, as regards business and extent, was that held at Lampojnia, to which I have already referred, and which did a special and considerable trade in furs bought from the Samoyedes. For an axe, these savages would give as many sable skins as could be passed, all bound together, through the hole into which the wooden haft fitted. The Lithuanian merchants had their own special meeting-place, close to a monastery of the Trinity—not the celebrated abbey of that name in the province of Moscow—on the banks of the Dnieper, in the province of Smolensk.

These exchanges with foreign countries were detestably one­sided. for the Russian products were generally sold at very low prices, and foreign merchandise was very dear. An archine (²7t% inches) of velvet, damask, or satin, cost a rouble, a piece of fine English cloth 30 roubles, a barrel of French wine 4 roubles. Gold crowns were also imported merchandise, the coinage of the country not sufficing for its needs, and these paid duty like any other commodity.

The Russian merchants of that period, though their clever­ness and spirit of enterprise were much admired, otherwise enjoyed a sufficiently evil reputation. Foreigners were never tired of complaining of their cunning and bad faith, and this without exception, save as to the men of Pskov and Novgorod, though, even in their case, the fame of their ancient honesty was tarnished. The local proverb, ‘ Merchandise is made for the eyes,’ was freely applied, and so was the habit of raising the price asked for a thing tenfold if the would-be purchaser hap­pened to appear rich and simple-minded. Wholesale merchants generally employed experts, but these very frequently tried to get money out of both parties to the bargain. Foreigners noticed that the more a merchant called on God, and took Him to witness as to his own honesty, the more he was likely to cheat them. Dishonest dealings as to the quality, origin, and weight of merchandise, the sale of imitations, the substitution of one article for another, just before it was delivered—these were common practices.

The success of foreign traders—the sort of privilege over the Muscovite markets, won as early as in the fifteenth century, by various importing and exporting houses, German, Flemish, and Dutch, previous to the real monopoly of the English com­pany—are in great measure explained by these odious proceed­ings. Not, indeed, that the foreigners did not end by imitating

them to some extent. Herberstein admits that it was no un­common thing to see them selling an article not worth more than one or two ducats, for twelve.

The Russian, ignorant, and cheated himself as often as he cheated others, fleeced by the State, which did not give him proper protection, deceived by the very foreigners who com­plained of his dishonest dealings and themselves did likewise, looked on trade as a warfare, in which stratagem of every kind was legitimate and almost necessary. The bonds and burdens laid on his industry by the greed and clumsiness of those who ruled him were endless. The Empire was cut up into little commercial provinces, each covering a radius of from ro to 20 versts round its central town or village. Within the limits of each province no exchange was allowed, except at the central point. This was to prevent any shirking of taxation. The taxes, huge and innumerable already, were aggravated by a system of farming which opened the door wide to abuse and exaction. The merchandise, before it reached its market, had to pass under the Caudine Forks of an exaggerated fiscal system. There were toll-bars on the roads, there were dues for crossing rivers, there were Custom-houses at the gate of every town. If the town was a river-town, there were charges on the em­barkation and landing of goods. If it contained a gostinnyi dvor, the merchant must take up his quarters there, and pay the regulation tax. Dues for going in, dues for coming out, storage dues, and dues on the sale of everything that went out of the warehouse. If a horse was sold, there were dues on the brand and the written contract; if it was a pound of salt, there were dues on the weight.

Imagine a peasant coming into the market with the results of his humble toil. There must be a great deal of that to make up a rouble’s worth. A horse, or two cows, or twenty geese, or ten sheep, or some ten tchetvierti of rye, or four sleighs. And he has already spent eight or ten diengi on his way in—more than the value of one day’s work. By the time he has sold his horse he will have spent another fifteen.

The system, indeed, was by no means peculiar to the country. It was the common rule at a period when France still preserved the remnants of a not less irksome and oppressive feudal system, under which the ancient telonium, converted into the tonlieu, and the antique vinagrum, now called the vientrage, fleeced merchants as they passed through each territory; and in the year 1567 there were between 100 and 150 crossing- places on the Loire alone at which fees were paid ; while (see'[Lavisse and Rambaud, Hist. Generate, iv., p. 201) a case of mercery goods, sent from Paris to Rouen, paid pedlar’s fees before it left the city, paid again at Neuilly, at St. Denis,

at Chatou, at Le Pecq, at Maisons, at Conflans, at Poissy, at Triel, at Meulan, at Mantes, at La Roche-Guyon, at Vemon, at Les Andelys, at Pont-de-1’Arche, on Rouen Bridge, and, if it was to be sent to England, paid again, at Rouen itself, the droits dc vicomte, de reve et da haut passage, not to mention the Admiralty shipping license, freight, pilot’s fees, and all the rest.

Yet in France Louis XI. had endeavoured to reduce the number of these dues, which had enormously increased during the anarchy of the Hundred Years’ War. "They were largely the outcome of anarchy. In Russia, on the contrary, they were the result of a system which grew worse and worse as the needs and demands of the State increased, and which was com­plicated and encumbered by a mass of minor regulations sug­gested by economii' ideas, of which I have already pointed out the dangerous tendency. A Lithuanian merchant who had brought a quantity of cloth-stuffs to Moscow, and there taken over a corresponding quantity of beeswax, added a few trifling silver articles, and saw the whole of his merchandise seized, because the exportation of the precious metals was forbidden.

Trade still had to suffer from the general poverty of the urban centres. The towns were built of wood as a rule, and paved, when they were paved at all, with the same material. And once in ten years, for the most part, they were burnt down. After the fire of 1541, which consumed the whole of the Slav quarter at Novgorod—some 908 houses— another, in .1554, devoured over 1500 dwellings. One of the chronicles of the city—the second—is hardly more than a calendar of these periodical misfortunes. No precau­tions were taken to prevent a recurrence of the disaster. It was not till 1560 that it occurred to anybody to establish, near the dwellings, some of those troughs filled with water and those hooks shaped like huge brooms which may be seen to tliis day in the country parts of Russia at the entrances of the isbas, which are in constant danger of destruction. In 1570, the Government issued an order that no bath was to be heated in summer, and no bread baked, even, except in outdoor ovens.

To this may be added the condition of tlie roads in a country which, for want of the necessary materials, has to do without metalled highroads even now. From the port of St. Nicholas, on the White Sea, when the English landed there, to Vologda, where they opened their first counting-house, they had to travel fourteen times twenty-four hours by water, and eight days by road in winter; in summer-time the land road was impracti­cable for a long period. The journey from Vologda to Jaroslavl was reckoned at two days, that from Jaroslavl to Arkhangel at twenty, all by water. Between Novgorod und Narva, a most

important line for foreign exports, the land road consisted of mere paths running through forests and over marshes. There were no inns, and very few villages. The country between Novgorod and Moscow was a desert, and summer travellers had the greatest difficulty in getting from Moscow to Vilna. The only tolerably convenient and pretty nearly practicable road at every season of the year was that between Pskov and Riga, on the western frontier. Thus, in summer-time heavy merchandise was transported exclusively by water, and in winter over the frozen snow. It was no uncommon thing, in the winter season, to meet 700 or 800 sledges, all laden with grain or fish. They travelled in large bands, as a rule, fearing the armed attacks so frequent in those days.

This state of insecurity was general. On the east, Tartars made perpetual incursions into the country, stripping and murdering travellers. In the south, there were Cossacks and robbers everywhere. On the Volga, pirate bands even defied the military expeditions sent out year after year to put them down.

Foreign travellers have noted one feature which, in connec­tion with those to which I have just referred, strikes us as surprising—excellent posting arrangements. When the roads were good—in winter, that is to say—the 524 versts between Novgorod and Moscow could be covered in seventy-two hours, at a very moderate charge—6 kopecks for a stage of 20 versts— and the traveller could get as many relays of horses as hewanted. A tired horse was quickly replaced—left behind, and a fresh one taken in its stead, in the nearest village, or from the first passer­by. This was the Tsar’s service, and the traveller only had to show a way-bill signed by the proper authority to insure his being served in this fashion. In summer, indeed, the scene changed. The horses were out at pasture, or working in the fields, and hours would slip by before the necessary team could be collected. But at that season travellers preferred the water­ways, on which there were boats and rowers, also belonging to the State.

This was a legacy from the Tartar conquest, which partly owed its startling successes to the extreme rapidity and clever handling of its transport. It must not be forgotten that France had no posting system till Louis XL established one by edict in 1464, and then with an exclusively political object, to convey the King’s couriers. Russia has ever been a country of sur­prises.

But this single advantage did not compensate, in the sixteenth century, for the other causes of inferiority which paralyzed her economic life. In the year 1553, 25,000 corpses were buried in the cemeteries at Pskov, without reckoning the unknown

number left to rot in the open country. This was the plague, a scourge as periodic in its visitations as fire. In the spring of 1565 it was raging at Louki, at Toropiets, and at Smolensk ; in the autumn it was at Polotsk. The following year it was to ravage Novgorod, Starai'a-Roussa, Pskov again, Mojai'sk, and even Moscow itself. Before the plague, or behind it, or with it, as in 1570, came famine. And the means devised to stamp out the disease were as fierce as the pest itself. In 1551 the Pskov merchants suspected of being infected were driven out of Novgorod, and those who resisted were burnt alive. So were any priests who dared to visit the sick.

As a matter of fact, famine was endemic, the normal condition of the country. The Englishman Jenkinson, a clever business man and a sagacious observer, mentions eighty-four persons as having perished under his eyes, within a very short period of time, for lack of sustenance—of a little straw, in other words, for dried and pounded straw was the ordinary winter food of many of the natives, who lived in summer on grass, roots, and the bark of trees (Hakluyt, i., p. 323). The foreign observer complains, in this connection, of the inhumanity of the inhabitants of the country, who were unmoved by the sight of their fellow-creatures falling down and dying of hunger in the streets. This trait occurs whenever the general poverty induces a general hardening of the human heart. In sixteenth- century Russia, wealth, even ease, was an exceptional pheno­menon.

Apart from the monasteries, hardly any family, except the Stroganovs, owned any considerable fortune. Fletcher reckons that this house, besides its landed properties, which were huge, its farming establishments, which ran from the banks of the Vytchegda to the Siberian frontier, and its industrial establish­ments, in which it employed 10,000 free labourers and 5,000 serfs, owned 300,000 roubles in hard cash. It paid 23,000 roubles of taxes to the State, but the State was ruining it by its perpetually increasing demands, and to the State system must be ascribed the fact that the Stroganovs were such an exception to the general rule.

The State and the Church, a Baal with two faces, devoured everything, sucked the national riches, and dried up their fount—the State by its exactions, the Church by the usurious interest on her loans. Everybody was in debt, and the poorest paid the interest on what they owed in labour, thus rendered valueless to the general economy, and contributing nothing towards the building up of the public wealth. The formula whereby the man, the woman, and sometimes the whole family, children included, undertook to labour ‘ for the in­terest ’ (za rost sloujiti ve dvoie po vsiadni) occurred more and

more frequently in the constantly increasing number of con­tracts between borrower and lender.

The scarcity of coinage, to which I have already referred, was in itself a symptom of the general distress. Until the close of this century, according to Guagnino, squirrel skins were used as currency, and, indeed, Peter the Great paid his functionaries their salaries in the same fashion. Yet there was a free coinage in the sixteenth century, the State only intervening to verify weights and designations. Some artisans, indeed, were given the right to stamp their own names 011 their coins. A great deal of ingot silver was also used, and the ancient Novgorod coins, of which Chaudoir gives us facsimiles in his book (Aftercu sur les Monnaies Russes, 1836), were nothing but ingots, either. The habit of regarding gold and silver as merchandise was long to linger in the Russian mind. But there was a shortage in the supply of raw material. Though the mines, contrary to the assertions of Paulus Jovius (Pauli Jovii Descrifttiones, i., 1571), were not entirely unproductive, though even in 1482 Ivan III. was asking the Hungarian King Matthius Korvinus to send him engineers to work fresh ones, and though argen­tiferous soil had been discovered in 1491 on the banks of the Tsylma, an affluent of the Pietchora, the supply of metals was trilling, and Russia depended, in this respect, on foreign countries. As to gold, the only coins in circulation were foreign—Hungarian, Dutch, Polish, and Florentine ducats, and English shiff-nobles and rose-nobles. And amongst the silver currency, numbers of Dutch florins, Germr.n thalers, generally known as efimki (Joachim’s Thaler), and English shillings figured. Gold pieces were so rare that any event which brought about a larger demand for them, such as a marriage or baptism in the Sovereign’s family, or the despatch of a foreign mission, resulted in a sudden rise in value, sometimes amounting to doubling the value of each gold coin. On such occasions as marriages and christenings the Sovereign received gifts of ducats from the boiars and the representatives of the various constituted bodies ; and Ambassadors, even in Poland, needed gold pieces if they were to make any decent show.

The Sovereign always had all he needed in his cellars. He was the very wealthy master of a very poor country. He dazzled everybody, even the Western world, by his riches ; but it is impossible to come to an absolutely clear understanding of the amount of these, nor of the manner in which they were acquired. I shall consequently limit myself to a very few brief remarks upon this subject.

VII.—The Finances.

We have no information touching the Muscovite Budget until the close of the sixteenth century. In the last years of that century, under the son of Ivan IV., Fletcher calculated the revenue of the Empire at 1,400,000 roubles, of which

400.000 were supplied by direct and 800,000 by indirect taxation. Taken in connection with such documents con­cerning the reign of Alexis as we possess, these figures seem near the truth, and lead us to suppose the receipts under the Terrible to have been about 1,200.000 roubles. In England, at that period, there was no direct taxation at all, and con­sumers’ taxes only brought in 140.000 crowns, Henry VIII.’s whole revenue not exceeding a million of crowns. Taking the rouble of those days at 16s. 8d., Ivan IV. asked four times as much from his subjects as Henry VIII. demanded of his (see Philippson, Wcsteuyopa irn Zeitalter von Philipp IT., 1882, P 59)-

In reality he got a great deal more out of them. The great resource of the Muscovite Sovereign was the land, which was parcelled out among his ‘ service men,’ and supplied all the essential needs of the State, the upkeep of the army and ad­ministration. Thus it was that the Sovereign was able to hoard up riches. War material and the pay of the few troops who formed the nucleus of the regular army did, indeed, involve a fairly heavy outlay. Three-quarters of his revenue, according to some authorities, were swallowed up by it. But, at all events, he was able to put by the remaining quarter, for to keep up his Court the Grand Duke, like every other European Sovereign, had his own patrimony—thirty-six towns, with the villages and hamlets depending on them, and these, besides a money payment, sent him corn, cattle, fish, honey, and forage, which not only supplied the necessities of the Court, large as it was, but were sold in considerable quantities. Ivan IV. thus made an additional income of 60,000 roubles a year, and his successor, a more economical man, increased the sum to

230.000 roubles.

These features have come down, in a measure, to our own times. They formed an integral part of a regime which has stood the brunt of centuries, and has insured the country which had the docility to submit to it material greatness and strength at all events, if not prosperity, together with an enormous power of concentration and expansion. The. secret of this docility remains to be discovered. We may discover it, perhaps, in the course of our endeavour to understand the mind of a people which, with such means, has accomplished so gieat things.

CHAI’TER III INTELLECTUAL LIFE

I. CAUSES OF ITS WEAKNESS. II.—INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS.

III.—LITERATURE. VI.—ART. V. THE RENOVATING MOVEMENT.

I.—The Causes of its Weakness.

The Mongols who overwhelmed Russia in the thirteenth cen­tury are generally regarded as the authors of a crime against civilization. The rupture between Muscovy and the western countries, the sudden check in the development of the national culture, are taken to be their work. For many years I shared the common error, and I confess it without shame; appear­ances all pointed that way, and the history of the invasion is still exceedingly obscure. The first testimony against this view which attracted my attention was all the more conclu­sive in that it was bome by one of the Princes of the national Church ; and it is a well-known fact that, until the eighteenth century at all events, the whole intellectual life of the country was almost entirely concentrated in that Church.

‘ Judging by the state of her knowledge and the progress of her development during the two centuries which preceded the Mongol invasion,’ writes Monsignor Macarius in his ‘ History of the Russian Church ’ (v. 285), ‘ we do not believe her pro­gress during the two following centuries would have been any more rapid even if the Mongols had not come among us. . . . These Asiatics did nothing to prevent the clergy, especially the cloistered clergy, from pursuing their learned studies. But the Russians of that period do not seem to have felt any need of a higher culture. They followed in the path of their ancestors, and their longings were confined to being able to read easily, and understand the sacred texts. . . .’

Recent inquiry, too, has destroyed the illusion according to which a flood of Eastern barbarism was supposed to have swept, with the invaders, over all the elements of European culture. The comrades of Batou, and of the great head of his staff, Soubatoi, were not, as Monsieur Leon Cahun has most excellently set forth in a book which is a revelation (Introduction a, VHistoire de PAsie, 1896, p. 343, etc.), such desperate barbarians as all that. They were first-rate strategians and wonderful organizers, worthy representa­tives of a civilization which was to astonish Henry of Castile’s Ambassadors to Samarkand a century later (1405), and spread the use of Ouloug-Beg’s astronomical tables all over

Europe. They were no deliberate wreckers, either, except in cases of military exigency; nor oppressors, beyond the taxation they imposed; and their very numbers precluded them from submerging others. The legend of the over­whelming flood is a melodramatic invention : Soubato'i won his victories, in every case, with very small, but exceedingly well-equipped, mobile, and splendidly commanded bodies of troops.

The truth appears to be that he found nought but ruins everywhere—a rotting Empire, a country parted from Europe already, and cast, both from the political and intel­lectual point of view, ;nto an almost utter isolation. Since Jaroslav (1016-1054) had married one of his sisters to Casimir of Poland, another to the King of Norway, and a third to Henry I. of France, no similar alliance had carried the tradition down to the heirs who fought over the great Kiovian Prince’s legacy ; and even as early as 1169, Kiev had been sacked by barbarians who did not come out of Asia. All the small Russian Princes strove for the possession of the old capital, carrying fire and sword with them. And the truth is this— that, by reason of her spiritual alliance with Byzantium, Russia, thus devastated and dismembered by her own children, was bound to a corpse, held in vassalage by the learning of the Greeks at a moment when doom had fallen on the antique culture, when the ancient schools were closed, when the intro­duction of the Oriental view had stifled that free inquiry essential to all progress. The contemporaries of Photius ascribed (a.d. 891) the patriarch’s knowledge to the spells of a Jewish page-boy, and the learning of Archbishop Theodore (Santabaren) was confused by Leo the Grammarian with evocations of the spirits of the dead. Historiography was reduced to the collecting of legends, the teaching of philosophy was forbidden, intellectual activity was circumscribed within the sphere of religious polemics—marked phases, all these, of an irreparable decay. Even in the twelfth century the eastern monasteries proved themselves incapable of utilizing the scientific materials at their disposal.

The intellectual isolation of orthodox Russia was the direct outcome of her affiliation to her Byzantine alma- mater. Out of the 240 writers who appeared in Russia up till the close of the seventeenth century (without reckoning the Catholics of the south-west), 190 were monks, 20 belonged to the secular clergy, and the remain­ing 30 dealt chiefly with religious subjects. Thus literature and science were almost exclusively Church property. And this Church, even in the thirteenth century, was a closed body, shut up in itself. Orthodoxy forbade all contact with

unbelievers to such a degree as to impose on Russian Sovereigns that custom of washing their hands after giving audience to foreign Ambassadors which so sorely offended Possevino at the Court of Ivan the Terrible. This isolation was aggravated by the adhesion of the Metropolitan Isidore, the. elect of Byzantium, to the Florentine Union, and by the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, which last, though the triumph of Islam was taken to be a well-deserved chas­tisement, cast suspicion on the East itself. And at that period the legend of St. Andrew’s sojourn in Russia, and con­sequently of the antiquity and indepnedence of local ortho­doxy, sprang into life, and spread with great rapidity. The idea of a national religion expressive of the original features of the Slav spirit became general in every mind.

And yet the national Church, instead of beaming with an ever-brightening light, relapsed into constantly deepening darkness. We do not find a trace, at the close of the fifteenth century, of the monastery schools, the previous existence of which is proved by numerous witnesses. At the beginning of the next century St. Gennadius, Archbishop of Novgorod, notes with sorrow that the men presented to him for ordina­tion can neither read nor write. Even oral instruction had disappeared, the pulpits were dumb, and, according to foreign travellers, hardly one native out of ten could say his Pater. A century later, in 1620, a learned Swede, John Botvid, seriously discussed the question of whether the Muscovites were Christians at all, or not.

The monasteries, to be sure, did go on collecting books : some of them even possessed librarians. But reading became the speciality of a small and select group. It rose to be a science, and more and more the only science in existence. To read all he could, and even learn the things he read by heart—was not that as much as any man might do ? The learned man was called a knijnik, a man of many books (kniga, book). But what books ? In the monastic libraries a place, and even the place of honour, was given to the Apocrypha— ‘ Adam’s Manuscript, confided to the Devil,⁵ ‘ The Last Will of Moses,’ ‘The Vision of Isaac,’ . . ., these enjoyed the same credit as the canonical books. Maximus the Greek, the corrector of the sacred texts summoned from the East at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was the first who dared to protest against the belief that the sun did not set for a week after our Lord’s resurrection, and that, somewhere on the banks of the Jordan, a viper still guarded Adam’s last will and testament. The catalogue of the library of the Tro'itsa in the seventeenth century is still in our hands. Ancient literature is therein represented by 411 manuscripts.

This is very much the total reached by the Glastonbury library in the thirteenth century. But how different the composition ! At Glastonbury the first rank is held by the Roman classics, historians, and poets. At the Troi'tsa we find 101 Bibles, 46 liturgical works, 58 collections of the Fathers of the Church, 17 books on ecclesiastical law, and one solitary book on philosophy. The works on asceticism are the most numerous of all. Until the seventeenth century the ancient Greek and Latin authors were unknown to Russian readers. In profane literature chronicles were the favourite reading. But what chronicles ! Those of Malala (or Maleles), with his quotations from Orpheus ! The still more popular chronicle of George the Hamartolian, with its detailed descrip­tion of the garment of a cert;'in Jewish priest who went to Judaea to meet Alexander the Great ! The authorities on geography and cosmography were George Pissides, and, above all, Cosmas Indicopleustes, whose conclusions as to the dimensions of the earth, founded on the form of Moses’ tabernacle, were undoubtingly accepted, and whose teaching, a mixture of the Apocrypha, Ptolemy, Aristotle, and the dreams of the Manichaeans and Gnostics, disseminated con­ceptions of the most preposterous nature. In philosophy, students held by John the Damascene and his theory of the reduction of science to the love of God. But the book of all, read, up till the eighteenth century, with the works of the con­templative school, of Basil the Great and Denis the Areo- pagite, was the ‘ Bee,’ an incoherent compilation of Scripture quotations, extracts from the Fathers of the Church, and a medley of detached thoughts from Aristotle, Socrates, Epicurus, Diodorus, and Cato—a literary omnium gatherum.

Under the influence of the notions thus acquired, the predic­tion of an eclipse was held to be sorcery; books on mathematics —and arithmetic and astronomy, geography and music, were all confused together under this title—were proscribed as im­pious, and the knijnik was shut up within a narrow horizon, above which the light of European science could not rise, and forced to trample the same ground, ever and always, far from the current on which his Western neighbours were being borne onward.

• During the sixteenth century, indeed, a beam of light, a breath of air. entered this dungeon. Maximus the Greek, an Albanian monk who had studied in Greece and Italy, was in some sense a European. Though his literary activity was confined to religious and moral questions, he brought to Russia, on the soles of his shoes, a little of the dust gathered at Milan, Florence, Venice, Ferrara, and especially at Padua, where the mighty struggle between the partisans of Plato

and Aristotle, the current which had impelled intellectual circles to copy pagan customs and attack the theology of the Middle Ages, had not failed to affect him. At Venice he had known the famous typographer, Aide Manuce ; at Florence he had stirred the still smoking ashes of the pile on which Savonarola had met his fate ; he had realized something of the great scientiiic importance of Paris. None of which prevented him from being absolutely devoid of that critical instinct wliich is the great lever of the Western world of in­tellect, and deeply tinctured with an absolute scepticism as to profane learning, which led him to condemn a Russian translation, then just appearing, of the celebrated Lucidarius,-— a twelfth-century work, ascribed to St. Anselm of Canterbury, or to Honore d’Autun—and wherein certain problems in cos­mography and physics were treated in a comparatively sensible spirit. He forbade its inclusion in the libraries, from which the Greek and Latin classics were banished.

A legend has grown up around a collection of these same classics, supposed to have existed, with a great number of other profane works and some Hebrew manuscripts, at the Moscow Kremlin, as early as the fifteenth century. The pre­sumed existence of this library, revealed by the researches of two foreign savants, Klossius (1834) ^and Tremer (1891), has provoked, in mo re recent times (1894), a controversy in the press, and even a search in the subterranean chambers of the ancient palace. This has brought no result. Whether it was that the Livonian chronicler Nyenstaedt, who wrote the first book in which the library is mentioned, and Professor Dubielov, of the University of Derpt, who, in the year 1820, invented a catalogue which nobody has ever been able to discover since, were imposed on themselves, or imposed on others, the story, it seems pretty certain, has no foundation in fact. At a much earlier period, indeed, a similar legend had ascribed the possession of a quantity of Byzantine manuscripts —made over to their safe keeping, by the Emperor John, just before the Siege of Constantinople— to the Muscovite Sovereigns. Wherefore, in the year iboo, Cardinal San Giorgio sent Peter Arcudius the Greek in the train of a Polish Embassy to verify the story, which he dis­covered to be false—a pure invention. Ivan IV. and his predecessors did certainly own some books and manu­scripts ; but up till the close of the fourteenth century, we only hear of the authentic existence of one single work in a foreign language, a German herbal, in the whole of their collec­tion of liturgical books, instructions, chronicles, and astro­logical treatises.

' 'rder the twofold influence of the original Byzantinism and the inherent materialism pervading every class of society,

intellectual life, still in the earliest phases of its development, was destined to waver, for long years yet, between two opposite tendencies, which, nevertheless, occasionally combined, as we shall see, after a very curious fashion. These, an asceticism void of all ideal and a coarse sensuality, were the twin roads that led to general nothingness.

II.—Intellectual Currents.

From the elementary and barren independence—the inde­pendence of savagery—in which it had lived till Christianity was introduced, the country had suddenly fallen under the yoke of an austere morality—as savage after its own fashion—which forbade liberty to know, liberty to create, and even to exist, in every quarter. Under this rule, all those living forces which have ennobled the human race were condemned, and even accursed. The world of free knowledge was accursed, as a centre of heresy and corruption ; the world of free creation was accursed, as an element of corruption ; and accursed, too, as an element of scandal, was free life, with its joys, its merri­ment, its profane delights. The bards have disappeared from the courts of Princes ; the lively tone and poetic turn of thought of the chroniclers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries give place to dry didactic narrative, that disligures and even pro­scribes the very documents on which it is founded ; even any conversation that does not turn on religious subjects is anathema. Abstinence in every form has become the essential rule of life. In certain families, the very young children are made to do without milk, and by the time they are two years old they are expected to observe all tiie fasts. Meat is only allowed three times a week, and conjugal rela­tions are likewise forbidden on three days in each week, on feast days, and during the whole of Lent. The Russian com­pilers from Byzantine writers were well acquainted with Cato’s dictum, ‘ We rule the world, and the women rule us.’ It occupied a prominent position in the * Bee,’ as also did the saying of Democritus, married to a tiny wife, ‘ I have chosen the smallest evil.’ The Church, guided by these principles, looked on woman as the devil’s chief instrument in his work of destruction, and therefore woman, too, was accursed, and accursed, with her, all forms of art, of which she has everywhere and always been the chief inspirer.

In the religious life, this tendency led directly to the stupid formalism of the ecclesiastical doctors, who perceived eternal truths and immutable doctrines in the trimming of a beard or the cut of a garment. After the Florentine Union and ihe erection of the national Church into the sole guardian

of the sacred traditions, form became the tabernacle, the holy ark which sheltered the true faith. Outside it, nothing save rationalism, Latin, Catholic or Protestant—all sources of heresy and impiety. Argument, reasoning, were forbidden, and by this elimination of the essential leaven of all progress Moscow placed itself on a lower intellectual basis than that of Byzantium, where the right of dogmatic controversy was always preserved. Here, from the twelfth century onwards, the only problems discussed are such as these : ‘ Can a priest who has not slept since he has eaten food celebrate the holy sacrifice ? Can he do so if he finds a woman’s handkerchief sewed to his garment ? . . .’ The very sermons, such as are preached, only deal with ritual questions : ‘ Must the celebrant move with or against the sun ? Should the sign of the cross be made with two or three fingers ?’ The first Concile called by Ivan IV. considered this question, and pronounced sentence of excommunication on those who crossed themselves with two fingers.

The identification of faith with rite reduced piety to the accomplishment of certain external practices, the keeping of fasts, long prayers in church. Confession, which implied an act of internal religion, was relegated to the second rank. The most devout did not present themselves at the tribunal of repentance oftener than once a year ; the most scrupulous did not make it a case of conscience to keep back none of their sins. Ceremonial took the place of everything else. It grew more and more extensive, and was attended by a more and more theatrical display. On Palm Sunday the Metro­politan, riding upon an ass, went in procession to all the churches, bestowing his blessing on the crowd that cast its garments under the hoofs of his symbolic steed; and on the feast in memory of the three Hebrews cast into the fiery furnace, the place of the pulpit was filled by a huge stove, into which three white-robed youths were thrust with many a complicated rite. The performance stopped short here, and they were not actually burned.

Religious feeling continued very intense ; it wandered into muddy paths, and floundered into sloughs. While the Domostroi enjoined the repetition, six hundred times every day, of a certain prayer, the effect of which, after a per­severance of three years in the process, was to be a triple incarnation of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in the person of the individual Ubing it, the question whether it was not a sin to cross the threshold of the hoixse inhabited by a woman lately brought to bed, or whether the milk of a. cow that had just calved was unclean or not, was much debated. While sensualism thus lay in wait for pious souls and overtook

them at the comers of bye-ways, superstition laid other snares for them. The Finnish element, still half pagan, came to the front in the constantly - increasing ceremonial of the Church, openly ruled by the pagan spirit. In the north, up till the eighteenth century, the beliefs and customs, and all the structure of the ancient worship, were to preserve their authority over a population which Its ethnographical pecu­liarities rendered less amenable to the Slav conquest, and less easily influenced by Christianity. In this zone, for many years, the progress of the two powers was only marked by islets here and there, colonies scattered hither and thither over the huge territory. Even quite recently, Keppen’s map has shown us how the characteristic traits of the Tchoud race predominate in the case of quite half the population ; and this race was superstitious above all others. In this part of the world Nature has always laid a heavy hand on man. Track­less forests, rocks that pierce the clouds, deserts heaped with stones, an endless succession of lakes and bogs—there is something terrifying about the landscape. Our ears are deafened by the roaring of cataracts or the perpetual howl of the angry winds ; aurora borealis cast their lurid light around ; V-'iil-o’-the-wisps, flickering over the faces of the stagnant pools, startle the imagination ; fierce or venomous creatures, bears and vipers, threaten man with death at every step. Out of all these the Finn had built himself up a religion that was nothing but one long shuddering terror. His gods were the sons of Ahriman, rather than of Ormuzd. Every stone, everj" tree, was the home of some evil spirit. And only one weapon availed against them—sorcery. His priest was priest and sorcerer in one. An artificial imitation of the noises of hostile Nature calmed the spirits’ never-ceasing irritation. This was the very essence of the faith spread over the huge continent that stretches from the Ural Mountains to the seas of China and Japan, from the dreary shores of the Frozen Sea to the lonely heights of the Himalaya, and it is the secret of a liturgy which, within those geographical limits, was a mere tempest of unchained elements, of noise and movement. The sorcerer-priest, the Chamane of the Ostiaks, danced round the fire beating a drum, and his audience did their best to drown his noise with that they made themselves, till the pontiff, faint and giddy, was seized by two men and half-strangled by the cor they twisted round his neck. The deafening noise, the leaping flames, the convulsions of the priest’s body, and the compression of his throttle, threw him .nto a trance, in the course of which the spirit was supposed to reveal itself to the medium.

No doubt these rites, the unconscious aim of which was a

dominating power over Nature, had something to do with the great tide of freedom on which the human instinct, everywhere, has swept to claim its just superiority, and conquer its noblest privileges; but in this time and place the process of evolution was in its earliest phase, and Northern Russia was content for many a year to stammer its religious feeling, to con the alpha­bet of freedom, to practise with it in the most rudimentary of forms. In the middle of the sixteenth century the Finnish tribes of the Vodskaici-Piatina—the present Government of St. Peters­burg-worshipped trees and stones, and made their offerings to them. To these folk the world was still peopled with fantastic beings : a winged viper with a bird’s head and a proboscis that could blow destruction over the face of the whole earth ; a ten-headed dragon ; a plant that looked like a sheep, and produced lambs. The Russians of that period showed caps trimmed with the fur of these monsters to their foreign visitors.

The orthodox clergy, while generally opposing these super­stitions, favoured them occasionally. Some of its members themselves composed books of spells, contrived to introduce them into the ecclesiastical literature, and made a great deal out of them. Men who called up spirits were to be found in the very monasteries. Ivan the Terrible, at the close of this century, had sorcerers in his household. In the most pious Christian families, certain pagan deities still held their ground— the rod and the tojanitsy, amongst others, which presided over birth and death, must receive offerings; and amongst these offerings was the koutia, the funeral dish, adopted by the Church.

Under the influence of these superstitious beliefs, the most trifling incidents of life took on mysterious and prophetic meanings. The cracking of a wall, a buzzing in the ears, an itching finger, presaged a journey; the quacking of ducks, a quiver of the eyelashes, betokened the approach of fire. The generic name of Rafli was given to a whole literature devoted to the interpretation of these portents and to the meanings of dreams, which were considered of great importance. Preg­nant women gave bread to the bears led about in troops by wandering jugglers (skomorokhy), and judged the sex of the unborn child according to the creatures’ growls. These skomort/khy, generally sorcerers themselves, and magicians, too, — priests of the half-Christian, half-pagan faith held by the inhabitants of the country—enjoyed a prestige which all the thunders of the Church could not destroy. They armed a man against his Sovereign’s displeasure by making him carry an eagle’s eye wrapped in a handkerchief under his left armpit. They took up a little earth under the feet of one who was to be got rid of, and the man was suiely doomed to death. For

when that same earth was cast into the fire, he dried up with it. This did not involve any oblivion of the angels, who were invoked at the beginning of every piece of work, and St. Nikita had a special power of driving the demons out of a house where his help was sought. Paganism and Chris­tianity, religion and superstition, were all mingled and con­fused together. At the midnight festivals held on certain feasts, on St. John’s Eve, Christmas Eve, Twelfth Night, and St. Basil’s Day, both God and the devil had their dues. On the Saturday before Pentecost, the people danced in the graveyards, howling dolorously. On Holy Thursday they burnt straw to call up the dead, and going to the churches, fetched, from behind the altar, a pinch of salt, an infallible cure for certain ailments.

In the sixteenth century remnants of superstition lingered in the best-managed Courts all over Europe, and even at the Vatican. Apart from the astrologers whom Paul II. consulted on every important occasion—but these were held to repre­sent a science—was it not the settling of an owl that warned Alexander VI. of his approaching end ? But in Russia the same century witnessed the fullest blossoming of such beliefs, the sole basis of an intellectual life which possessed no other substantial aliment. On it, till the very threshold of the modem epoch, literature largely subsisted, and what remained was not calculated to stay its readers’ appetites.

Ill.—Literature .

^r The writers of thejjfourteenth and fifteenth centuries confined themselves, as a rule, to mechanical works of compilation. Stillborn works, these! Not a living touch concerning manners and customs, even in the lives of the native saints ; mere chronicles, with the style and contents of an official journal. The most remarkable of these collections—the Stiepiennaia-Kniga, or ‘ Book of Degrees,’ wri^ften by the Metropolitan Macarius, only rises a little above the average, because its author has endeavoured to establish some agree­ment between the acts and genealogies of the various Sover­eigns. It is a work with a political tendency, and, as such, less commonplace than its fellows. It inspired the Terrible with the idea of tracing his descent from Caesar Augustus ! A work of religious edification, too, which strove to show the Divine intervention in all things. Yet the Churchman who com­posed it, as we shall soon perceive, was nothing but a compiler in the broader sense.

Both in matter and in form, the literature of this period is inferior to that of Kiev. Ail poetry, all naturalness and sim­

plicity, all freshness and charm, have disappeared. No spon­taneity is left. Inspiration is replaced by calculation, and the search after the beautiful, when it occurs - and this is very rare— fails to reach art, and only attains to artifice. Not a linerevealing a touch of emotion, or that depth of feeling which might atone for superficiality of thought. No poem at all—and yet this is the epoch of Chaucer and Villon, of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Not an attempt at scientific or philosophical inquiry, though in Italy the birth of Galileo is near, and the coming of Bacon, in England, of Montaigne, in France. And the epoch of Shake­speare and Cervantes,of Giordano Bruno and Descartes,of Robert Estienne and Du Cange, is just about to open. Even close by, in Poland—though that neighbour country is nearing the downward slope of an irreparable decadence—the sixteenth century can show a pleiad of artists and thinkers, a political literature which is prodigiously fertile, at all events, and one writer of genius, Rej. The language is formed, style is shortly to reach perfec­tion in the sermons of Skarga. Batory is soon to carry about his printing-press even 011 his campaigns in the heart of Muscovy. In Russia the art of typography, like every other art, is as yet unborn. Printing in the Russian language does exist, indeed, or shortly will, but the printers are at Cracow, at Venice, at Cettigne, at Tubingen, at Prague, at Vilna. When they come to Moscow the people will try to kill them, and their house wil¹ be burnt down. And what could they print if they were here ? Books of hours, psalters, Bibles. Up to the end of the sixteenth century there will scarcely be any change in the repertory; the only works proving some indepen­dent thought will be called ‘ The Articles of the True Faith ’ (Tubingen, 1562), ‘ Short Tales for Sundays and Feast-days ’ (Tubingen, 1562), ‘ Of the Justification of Man before God ’ (Nieswiez, in Lithuania, 1562).

There is the popular poetry, indeed, but except in the field of history, soon to reflect the mighty personality of the Terrible, and bear witness to the new impulse the national genius received from him, even this poetry subsists on the legacy of the ancient Russia of the days of Kiev.

Literary activity posterior to the destruction of the old Russian Empire was manifested, in the first half of the sixteenth century, in two works, which between them summed up all the acquired knowledge and current ideas of the nation, the whole of its intellectual possessions. One of these, finished in 1552, but begun in 1529, is an encyclopaedia ; the other, which, by its conception and its composition, hails from an already remote past, takes the form of a household book. This is the celebrated Domostroi, which is balanced, on the other side, by the ‘Tcheti-Minei’ of the Metropolitan Macarius. These ‘Tcheti-

Mine!,’ or readings for every month (from fiyv, month, and tchitat, to read), are a collection of instructions, a sort of com­position very common in the fifteenth century, but which in this case takes a singularly extended form. As a rule, these instructions only aimed at supplying edifying reading for every day in the month, appropriate to the memory of the saint mentioned in the calendar for that day. Macarius set himself the task of gathering the whole literature of his country into twelve huge volumes. Sacred books, with the commentaries on them, lives of the Russian saints {pateriki) and of the Greek saints (sinaksary), the works of the Fathers of the Church, earlier encyclopaedic works, such as the ‘Bee,’ travels—he used them all. He did not exhaust the whole of his material. Either by deli berate omission or by a copyist’s error, several books of the Bible are not present. In the case of the Song of Solomon, the former conjecture seems the most probable. The work, as it stands, is an unrivalled authority on the intellectual history of that period, and the hagiographic portions of the book bear curious testimony to the process then in course of accomplish­ment in the national mind. The saints of the ancient instruc­tions had been local heroes and wonder-workers. Those of Novgorod were unknown at Moscow, and vice versa. Macarius shows them all united in a glory and a worship shared by every comer of the Empire. Here we have the triumph of the Moscow policy, asserted in the Christian Olympus which invaded the churches of the Kremlin, and shared the secular glories of the united monarchy.

The Metropolitan, as may be imagined, was not able, to do more than oversee, the preparation of his work. Surrounding himself with a carefully chosen band of fellow-workers, he founded the first literary circlc ever known in Russia, and gave the initial impulse to a movement which grew around him and survived him. He ascribed great importance to style, and insured the predominance of his own tongue—the ecclesiastical Slavonic—inthenational literature, instead of that popular form of speech in which the lives of the saints had been originally written. But the critical spirit must not be looked for in his works, any more than in those of Maximus the Greek. He never troubled himself to verify the authenticity of the texts he piled up in his book, and side by side with the most silly inventions he introduced biographies of absolutely imaginary saints, including those of forty canonized, all in a lump, at the Conciles of 1547 and 1549. But in this matter, again, the Mos­cow policy gave the law ; it must have a heaven to suit itself, blazing with a glory suddenly widened by the huge area of the provinces lately added to the common stock.

Macarius, in Ids own person, was a writer of many books.

Besides the Stepiennaia-Kniga, which I have already men­tioned, and a great number of epistles and instructions, the authorship of the Kormtchaia Kniga (kormtchyi, pilot) — a collection of Russian canons, of all canonical or reputedly canonical works, a book of monastic regulations, another compilation, in fact, is attributed to him. But the writer was an orator too. He unsealed the lips of the Church, which had been silent so long, and two or three of the sermons which have come down to us—well composed, and written with a simplicity at war with every literary precedent of that time, so much so as to lead one to think they must have been extemporary—usher in the coming of a new literary world. His third sermon, preached in the presence of Ivan the Terrible after the taking of Kazan, is the most laborious and least suc­cessful of them all—a regrettable return to the worst practices of the past. His general lack of culture forbade any attempt at art, properly so-called, on the part of this really gifted man, and on this occasion, when, in his desire to be worthy of the great historical event lie was to celebrate, he aimed too high, he missed sublimity, and his fall was heavy and clumsy.

The Domostroi has been likened to many other and appar­ently similar w^rorks in Italian, French, and even Hindu. I am inclined to assert that it escapes all comparison. It is unique. In the first place, the book possesses this peculiarity—that it does not correspond with any precise epoch or settled sphere. It is, as I have already indicated, a work of compilation and a w^rork of retrospection, and this is what makes it so widely representative. Its groundwork was probably borrowed by Pope Sylvester from yet older works, composed at Novgorod, the habits of which place the book pretty faithfully reflects. The domestic life it reproduces is just that of the local aris­tocracy, a little world of bo'iars, half-landowners, half-mer­chants. To this secular portion of the work is added an ap­pendix devoted to religion and morals, and there, amongst other borrowings from ecclesiastical literature, and from a didactic literature held in high honour in the monasteries— which comprised, notably, a set of Lenten bills of fare—the Moscow spirit inspires and rules the whole of the contents. The last chapter only—an instruction addressed by the Pope of the Church of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin to his son Anselm—is believed, and rightly, to have been Sylvester’s personal work. And even in it, the author only sums up the teachings contained in the preceding chapters. These teach­ings deal with a good Christian’s duties to God and to his neighbour, his Sovereign and his servants. Some, such as that of holding the breath when kissing the sacred pictures, are

rather quaint; and others cast a peculiar light on the part played by the female sex in the Muscovite household—the woman is not to go to church unless her avocations permit it.

We shall see they left her very little leisure ! The head of the family is expected to show greater assiduity, but the recital of his duties and functions unpleasantly recalls the national legislation. It reads like another penal code. The husband, father, master, is commanded to use discernment in the matter of punishment, but .without any undue weakness. He must avoid striking guilty persons on the head or ‘ beneath the heart ’ ; he must not use his feet nor any instrument likely to break the skin. Certain contradictions appear amidst these precepts. Thus, in one place the use of the stick is forbidden, while in another we are told, ‘ If thou strikest thine unruly son with a stick, it will not kill him.’ This is the drawback to all compilations. The family relations between the beater and the beaten seem to have been limited, in any case, to an allotment of the blows to be inflicted or endured. Some consideration is allowed in the wife’s case. The husband is to take her apart, far from curious eyes, and, having stripped her of her shift—this point is insisted on, and is of capital .mportance, indeed, in a book in which the idea of order and economy holds so large a place—without any anger, holding her hands kindly, but using all the requisite strength, he is to toy upon her shoulders with his whip, and :s bound, the correction once . administered, to behave affably and affectionately, so that conjugal relations may not suffer by these interludes !

Their tolerably frequent recurrence seems highly probable. For if the functions ol the man who beat the woman seem to have been practically restricted to performances of this kind, those of the woman he trounced were numerous and suffi­ciently severe. Having risen earlier than anybody else, she was bound, after her morning devotions were accomplished, to assign and overlook the tasks of all the servants, and set them a good example by being constantly at work herself. She must be skilful in all manual occupations, an expert dress­maker, laundress, and cook. Neither her husband nor her visitors must ever And her sitting with her hands before her. She must not joke with the women about her, nor exchange idle talk with them, and she must never open her door to the gossips of the neighbourhood, to fortune-tellers, nor even to female pedlars.

This is but an -'deal rule, evidently, a picture turned upside down, as it were, which must be twisted round again if we are to obtain any clear view of the realities corresponding to it. This remark applies to more than one page'of the book, to the paragraph which counsels women to drink notliing but kvass,

and to that which enjoins that servants shall be treated with humanity and gentleness, well dressed and well fed. But at the same time the outline of the servant sent out to deliver a message rises up before us like a cinematographic picture. This model messenger, when he reaches the door of the house to which he has been sent, wipes his feet, blows his nose—most probably with his fingers—coughs, spits, and finally observes ‘ May our Saviour be praised !’ If nobody says ‘ Amen.’ he will repeat the remark thrice, raising his voice each time, and will then knock gently. Once inside, he will deliver his message, without blowing his nose, coughing, or putting his fingers in his nose, and then hie him home as quickly as he may.

The most salient feature of all these pictures, as of the com­mentaries attached to them, is the materialism pervading the domestic and social life they represent. The education of children is restricted to teaching them to dread their God and to perform manual tasks, and an extraordinary importance is attached to small household details, to the making of garments, the using up of scraps of material, the arrangement of trusses of hay and straw mats. The same tone marks every reference to social intercourse. Guests invited to a banquet must be care - ful not to drink too much, or sit too long at table. These are the essential points to be observed.

The book improves at the end. on which Sylvester has set his personal seal. But even here its radical dualism—asceti­cism on one side, sensualism on the other—comes to the front. Is the son to whom the author suggests a model of Christian existence a worldly man, a layman ? At first sight one might be deceived. Not to sleep over the time for matins, never to forget the hour for going to Mass, to sing matins, complines, and nones every day, and never get drunk when he ought to be going to vespers—these are all things which may be very properly expected of a monk, as monks were in the sixteenth century. But no ! The man of whom these things are asked has a house of his own, to which he is desired to bring priests who will celebrate molehni (services) ; he goes, to market, and is admonished to give abundant alms there, not forgetting his own interests meanwhile. And this mixture of the Divine and the profane, of a virtue carried to extreme austerity and a practical wisdom verging on the cynical, runs from one end of the book to the other. To love one’s fellow-creatures sincerely; to judge no man; not to do to others what we. would not have them do to us; to open the door of one’s house wide to the poor, the sick, and all who are distressed ; to bear ill- treatment uncomplainingly; to succour one’s very enemies; and to keep one’s body pure by dint of necessary mortifications —all this, indeed! But also, if disputes arise, to lay the blame

on one’s own servants, though they are in the right, and strike them, even, to avoid a quarrel; to try to please everybody; and above all things, not to neglect recipes for good Lenten dishes.

The author of this book understood nothing, it is quite clear, of the spirit of Christianity, devoted as he was to its forms. His great i lea was to compose a manual of opportunist philo­sophy, and with all his assiduous study of the Scriptures he got no further, in some matters, than the Old Testament. There was more of the Pharisee than ol a disciple of Christ about him, for the Christian lite he suggests as an example is his own. And this is not merely hinted. He takes care it shall be known that he has freed his serfs and brought up many orphans, and that the well-merited floggings he has inflicted on hus servants have won him their universal love and esteem. This chapter, in Sylvester’s own hand, is an Imitation of Sylvester. We shall see its author did not invariably succeed in pleasing everybody.

Taking the book as a whole, it combines the evangelical ideal, that of humility and love, with the Biblical ideal, that of the power of the family, which it makes the motive princip^ of every relation, social or domestic. And in this respect the Domostroi gives us an exact conception of a society in which the family is not the centre only, but the sole rallving-point of social life, ruled by a head in whose person that family is summed up and absorbed. The head of the family is not only the master, to whom everyone owes obedience, but the being to whom everything is referred and on whom everything depends. And this was precisely the state of things existing, not only at Novgorod, but at Moscow, in the sixteenth century. The Domostroi, though partly an exposition of manners arid customs, is also a code of laws. It imposes certain restrictions on the all-powerful will of paterfamilias. We have seen, alas! how frail and inconsistent these restrictions were. The absolutist spirit of Moscow made short work of them.

The book, in spite of its Novgorodian origin, is essentially Muscovite. Similar features may have been noted in Vladimir Monomachus’ ‘Instruction’ (twelfth century); in the Dottrine del to Schiavo di Bari (thirteenth century); in the Treatise drawn up t . Egidio Cclonna for Philippe le Bel, in Francesco Barberir.i’s Regimento dcllc Donne ’ (fourteenth century); in the Paris Menagier (circa 1393); in certain Tchek writings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and even in the Indischc Hansregeln published by Fr. Stengler. The human race is very much the same through all the ages, whatever the degree of its civilization or the latitudes it inhabits. But all this notwith­standing, we are in presence, here, of a society of a very special kind, in which we look in vain for the delicate and sentimental relations between husband and wife depicted by the Italian

■writers, or the luxurious living so fully described by the French chronicler. Baldassare Castiglione’s Cortcgiano, which stands nearest, chronologically speaking, to the Domostroi, intro­duces us to a society in which life, even among artisans, and in the close quarters of the workshop, takes on a certain elegance and artistic distinction ; and an abyss instantly yawns between the two pictures on which we gaze. As Monsieur Pypine has justly observed i* Hist, of Russian Literature,’ ii., p. 211), one direct link only is discoverable between the Muscovite work and the literary productions of other countries, and this connects it with that Greek literature which has left its mark on all the Russian thought of that period, and which supplied most of the writers who were Sylvester’s contemporaries and fellow-countrymen with materials, or inspired them.

The impression produced by this book, which had dropped into oblivion, and was only disinterred, in 1849, by ^one the leaders of the Slavophil school/ was most curious. Ivan Akssakov began by rising in revolt. How could a work so absolutely contrary to the national spirit have been conceived and written on Russian soil ? ‘ I would hunt a teacher who dared to suggest such lessons to me to the other end of the world!’ But, thinking it over, he recollected habits and customs he had himself noticed among the Moscow merchants. What! did the Domostroi still live on among them ? And forthwith, one discovery leading to another, Akssakov remem­bered certain chapters of Tatichtchev’s book on ⁴ Rural Ad­ministration ’ (1742), and his own indignation at the idea that they constituted a proof of the influence of Germany on the national habits and customs. ⁴ How deep i went !’ he had said to himself. And then the Domostroi opened his eyes ; in its pages he found, identically reproduced, the very features which had so offended him (‘ Works,’ p. 270, etc. ; ‘ Letters,’ 1850).

I have said nothing concerning the style of Sylvester’s book. There is nothing to be said about it. The author had no artistic quality at all. But was there such a thing as art in the Russia of those days ?

IV.—Art.

Secular literature was scarcely known there till the writings of Ivan IV. and Kourbski appeared. And until that period, art, too, remained essentially religious in character. Its chief exemplifications were churches, the ornamentation of religious books, and ikons. What was the value of these productions, and in what measure did they constitute an expression of the national genius ?

The artistic aptitudes of the Russian people cannot be

denied ; later years have proved them. Though 1 do not attach the importance ascribed by most Russian, and even many foreign writers, to local folklore and rustic handicrafts, as proofs of a special vocation :n this respect, I am willing to accept them as presumptive evidence. Yet a close considera­tion of this popular poetry and decoration, which many would fain have us take to be original, leads us to note that their chief characteristic ir a complete absence of all originality and a perpetual imitation ; they are poor, if not absolutely lacking, in subjects drawn from life or from surrounding nature. We see a handkerchief embroidered by a peasant woman from the neighbourhood of Tver. A delicate design, indeed, but the design has come from Persia. We see a wooden goblet of graceful form, but we read India in the bottom of it ; and Monsieur Stassov, in spite of all his opponents (Messager de FEurofie, 1868), seems to me to have triumphantly proved the exotic descent of most of the bylines. Yet art has many degrees, and even imitation is an upward step. At the present day the signs of an absolutely spontaneous inspiration are dis­coverable in Sylvester’s native country'; but do any of them date from the sixteenth century or its predecessors ?

The national architecture, from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, presents two distinct types. Both proceed directly from Byzantium, but in one, that of the south, the Byzan­tine influence rules continuously and almost exclusively, while in the other, all over the north, from Novgorod to Vladimir and Souzdal, a Germanic or Lombardian current wars against it. And everywhere a confused medley of features, borrowed from every comer of the European and Asiatic horizon—from India and Persia chiefly, until the fifteenth century, from the Italian Renaissance, after it—are introduced into the details of these buildings, the general form and plan and construction of which are governed by these two component factors.

As to the nature and mode of propagation of these factors, the existence of which is uncontested, and their relative im­portance, opinions are much divided. The hypothesis of a direct importation of Oriental and Central Asiatic types has met with passionate opposition. Whether from the national or the religious point of view, the theory of an artistic initiation of Slav or Servo-Bulgarian origin has appeared far more pala­table. Some German writers- ■ Schnaase, among others_; in his ‘ History of the Arts ’ (iii., p. 351)—have supported the theory of the Eastern connection, and regarded it as a sign of inferiority and almost of disgrace. One French writer, ViolIet-le-Duc, has asserted it, and claimed it as a glory. The time, no doubt, is drawing near when it will be possible to discuss the problem without any regard to sentiment, but 1 fear it will continue

insoluble. Russia has been, in a most special sense, one of those laboratories in which currents of art, flowing from the most opposite points, have met and mingled, to produce an intermediate form between those of the Western and the Eastern worlds.

Every civilization, indeed, has been the fruit of some such fusion, and circumstance has served the artistic development of this particular country better than its intellectual progress. The isolation, in this matter, has been less complete. The first church-builders, and those most generally employed from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, were Greeks. But at a later period, heartily as the Westerners were, hated or scorned, their skill was often used, and even in 1150 Andrew, grandson of Monomachus, sent for Lombard architects to build the Church of the Assumption at Vladimir, while his son George, who had married a Georgian Princess, employed Armenian workmen at Souzdal. The intervention of Persian workers else­where, at the same epoch, seems proved by the style of certain decorations, and from the fifteenth century onwards the appear­ance of Italian art, with Pietro Solario, the Milanese, Aristote Fioraventi, the Florentine, Mario, Alevisio, and many more, has become a matter of history.

How these elements combined, and in what proportions, is a question which cannot now, and probably never will be, pre­cisely answered. In architecture Byzantium, though main­taining her supremacy, was forced to yield somewhat to the advancing wave, Mongol or Scandinavian, Romanesque or Turanian. And Byzantine art, itself composite, owing tribute to the Farthest East, to Persia, Asia Minor, and even Rome, rather led its Russian imitators back to the sources of its own inspiration. The most ancient of the religious edifices in Southern Russia possess a slimness of outline and elegance of proportion which differentiates them from the purely Byzan­tine form, or even the architectural type adopted at the same epoch in France and Italy and Germany. They seem to have been inspired by some other model, or partly, perhaps, by some original idea. Who can tell ? When St. Louis sent an envoy to the Court of the Khan, he found a Russian architect there, as well as a French goldsmith !

During the thirteenth century the influence of Indo-Tartar art makes itself clearly felt. Curves which seem to have been borrowed from Thibetan monuments, rounded columns crowned with bulging capitals, appear upon the scene. The primitive plan of the churches, as regards its chief outlines, is not changed, but to the central dome, which has existed from the earliest times, others are added, raised up like towers, and crowned with bulbous roofs covered with metal, curiously

worked, and often painted or gilt, which recall the Temple of Ellora. Within, the great curves of the Byzantine vaults are broken up into sharp angles. Presently corbelled pyra­mids are added to the cupolas. These, quite foreign to Byzan­tine taste, are exceedingly frequent in Hmdu architecture. The military buildings of the period follow the same lines. The towers of the Kremlin, built in a square, their ramparts crowned with narrow merlons, are a deviation from the more ancient models.

But was it Asia that triumphed in all these changes ? Is it to Asiatic influences that, as Viollet-le-Duc believes, the door of the fourteenth-century church at Rostov, owes its niches, with their centres formed by the arcs of a circle, and a sharp rectilinear top, and its wall-space so rich in decoration that the groundwork cannot be seen ? Does not the Romanesque style delight in the multiplication of such ecdesiological details, as Father Martynax has proved ? Was not Byzantium the connecting-link between Russia and Asia, just as the Slav countries of the south-west were the connecting-link between Europe and the Russian provinces that lay nearest her ? Hard by some instance of Russian foliage decoration, connected by Viollet-le-Duc with a Hindu design, Darcel has succeeded in detecting a Byzantine ornament that holds a place between the two types. But the transmission of ideas and forms may have followed other paths and other byways. A curious example of this is to be noticed in the case of a literary work. ‘ Bova, the King’s Son ’ (Korolevitch Bov a), a very popular Russian tale, is certainly of Hindu origin. It belongs to the cycle of Somadeva, the Kathd-sarit-sdgara, or ‘ Ocean of Tales.’ And yet Bova is not one of Somadeva’s heroes; he is the knight Beuves d’Antone, a hero of the Carlovingian period. India has thus travelled across Western Europe to reach Russia, and the Western inspiration has accidentally found its way into this other department of the national existence, isolated though it has been, and jealously guarded against external influences.

Some mention must also be made of other forms of art, though they were but slightly apparent in Russia at this time. At Souzdal, and more especially at Novgorod, iconography, influenced by one of the many Greco-Oriental schools existing in the twelfth century at Byzantium, in Italy, and in the Slav countries of the south-west, Servia and Bulgaria, reached a considerable development between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. The specimens of the work of the latter town—that done at Souzdal has entirely disappeared— probably give us the exact measure of the originality attain­able by the artists of the period. Observers have noticed, and

very rightly, the existence of certain types quite absent from the Byzantine iconography, such as pictures of the Inter­cession of the Blessed Virgin (Pokrov), of St. Nicholas, called the Warrior, of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, St. Boris and St. Gleb ; also a special interpretation of certain mysteries or religion* subjects, and the softened expression of some other types. And this, most assuredly, is something. In form, too, these pictures differ from their Eastern models, but in the sense in which a bad copy differs from the original. Some Russian critics have endeavoured to discover, in their much simpler drawing, a tendency to a closer approach to Nature. But it strikes me as being only a lack of knowledge. There is no reason why nature should be interpreted clumsily, after the manner of schoolboys who scribble on their copybooks. The same process of simplification, even to the giving up of the gold backgrounds, probably necessitated by the poverty of the monasteries, rules manuscrij i decoration down to the end of the thirteenth century. But in the fourteenth a much more visible change takes place, and carries the Russian school, :t this particular, far from the Byzantine tradition and its hieratic forms. We see a sudden introduction of the in­finite forms of human and animal life, together with a pro­fusion of designs recalling the scrolls and interlacing patterns carved on the wood of ancient Scandinavian churches, or, yet farther back, on the belt-plates and chiselled clasps of the Merovingian epoch, and sometimes traceable to Iranian types, by no means foreign to the Romanesque and Byzantine styles of early ages. This is like a return to the original sources, for such fantastic representations of men, animals, birds, and insects were known in Herodotus’ time, among the peoples then dwelling on Russian soil. But even as regards the Iranian inspiration, it would seem as though this renais­sance had come through the West, for the manuscript litera­ture of Novgorod, in which it was more specially exemplified, and which almost entirely escaped the Tartar influence, underwent a very strong current of European influences, which travelled by way of Riga and the Hanseatic towns.

In the fifteenth century these abnormal forms of fancy made way for combinations of single lines, the. symmetrical inter­lacements of which terminated in long cusped foliage. Then another current, to which no Oriental or Asiatic origin can be assigned, swept over the national art ; and finally, in the fifteenth century, there was a backward eddy. Under the pressure, probably, of religious feeling, of the spirit of ortho­doxy, rdarmed by the struggle between the Papacy and the Reformation, the Byzantine tradition got the upper hand again, linked this time with a certain, infusion of German and Protes-

tant taste, to be recognised in the long, deeply-serrated leaf— that of a sort of wild fig-tree—which spreads or curls in its cold black tints in the midst of the warm Oriental colouring.

All this is thoroughly and incontestably Russian, but is it an artistic expression adequate to the genius of the nation ? Is it, in other words, capable of stirring the admiration and the imitative faculties of other nations, as did the Greek and even the French and Italian art of certain periods ? Did it even constitute a private fund susceptible of any independent development ? If the Russian borrowers, when they turned to foreign models, had added anything to them beyond failures in executive skill—more or less successful alterations, and combinations the results of which were unsuccessful as a rule ; if they had introduced anything of their own—the fauna and flora of their own country, any reflection of their own sky ; if, amidst their perpetual assimilation of exotic types, they had known how to enter into direct communion with Nature, that first condition and starting-point of any original art, we might have answered. Yes ! But all they did was to copy, to fit in, to disfigure. Look at the carved balcony of an isba. There you will see, so coarsely reproduced as to be almost, though not wholly, unrecognisable, faces of lions and panthers, and representations of fig-trees and palm-trees, invariably. We have to come down to the most recent exemplifications of an art that is st'll feeling its way, the timid effort of some ultra-modem draughtsman, before we discover, under the pencil or brush, the outline of a fir-tree, the white fur of any Northern creature.

Under what conditions, after what plan, by whose hands, these thirteenth and fourteenth century churches, the style of which is now thought worthy of praise, were built, we cannot tell. As to the buildings, secular and religious, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which attract the eye for the same reason—the Church of the Assumption at Moscow, the door­way of St. Nicholas at Mojaisk, the famous ‘ palace of the facets ’ (Granovitaia palcta)—we have an historical certainty: Italian artists have left their mark upon them. Until quite lately the disconcerting and bewildering Church of the Blessed St. Basil (Vassili Blajennoi), built between 1553 and 1559, which Karamzine calls ‘ a masterpiece of Gothic architecture,’ Father Martynov ‘ an evocation of the Erectheion of the Athenian Acropolis,’ Theophile Gauthier ‘a huge crouching dragon,’ Kugler ‘ an enormous heap of mushrooms,’ and Custine ‘a jam-*‘Ot,’ has also been taken to be of Italian workmanship. This mistake has now been recognised. The architects’ accounts have been unearthed, and have revealed two Russian names, Burma and Postnikov. We must render

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the Russia of the sixteenth century the honour which is her due, and rid the philosophy of art of one of its most baffling riddles. And we must acknowledge, too, that, contrary to long-received assertion, this strange edifice was not an isolated phenomenon of its period, the ‘ only proof that was ever drawn.’ It is connected with a whole system of architecture, the origin of which is probably to be discerned in the wooden buildings so common in this country, and the type of which may be noticed at various places within its boundaries, as at Novo­moskovsk, in the present Government of Ekatierinoslav, and at Diakovo, quite close to Moscow. The lack of other material, or, at all events, the difficulty of getting stone, which para­lyzed the development both of architecture and of the statuary’s art, necessitated this mode of structure, some impressions of which may have been drawn from India, and the essential characteristic of which is a grouping and confused mingling of a number of incongruous blocks of buildings. The Novo­moskovsk church consists of three buildings close together, forming nine distinct compartments. The architects of the Vasiili Blajennoi succeeded in producing twice as many, in a mighty jumble of styles, Byzantine, Persian, Hindu, Italian— a wild dance of cupolas and pyramids and campanile. . . .

It would be rash, perhaps, to judge this building according to notions of art which, though hallowed by the approval of centuries, can hardly be asserted to be an eternal and uni­versal criterion. Gothic architecture stirred quite as bitter a criticism, at one moment, as that our present aesthetic taste might be disposed to apply to the masterpiece of Barma and Postnikov. From the artistic point of view, it may fairly be noted, the type thus originated has never been developed. The architects’ eyes were not torn out, indeed, when their work was finished, as the story goes, to prevent their producing another like it. This is a mere reproduction of the legend concerning the maker of the famous Strasburg clock in this same century. But no fresh start, or hardly any, was made, and the legend, like many another, has its meaning. The inspiration of the two Russian artists, thus left to its own devices, evolved nothing but this one architectural fancy ; none of their successors cared to renew so strange and barren an at­tempt , and the solitary proof once dra wn, the plate was cast aside.

It would be a grief to me to grieve my Russian friends, but they are beginning to ask too much. Towards the middle of last century’, so their most authoritative exponents, such as Tchadaiev and Herzen, averred, they possessed nothing of their own, neither a national art nor any national literature or science. Now they claim everything at once, and even to have had it all since the twelfth century ! Messrs. Tolstoi

and Kondakov, two learned historians of art, felt, while they were travelling through the province of Vladimir, as though they were in one of the Lombard provinces of Italy ! This is a pious illusion. In Russia nature and history alike have set their faces against any rapid progress in this path. They have denied the artist his rough materials, and assigned him, as the chief well-spring of his inspiration, Byzantium, with her dried-up or stagnant waters. The Russian genius is rooted in patience, and this the apologists of the national art seem to forget. At the period now under consideration Russian art is beginning to drink at other springs; the living stream will soon flow fast, no doubt, but the rise of the river is not yet, and we are at the very beginning of things.

In the bosom of the Orthodox Church, too, within which, until a recent epoch, every’ form of intellectual activity has been circumscribed, the national art has felt the action of the twofold current, ascetic and sensualist. A dark medley of monkish cells, blossoming out into a profligate luxuriance of form—that is the Church of the Blessed Basil, and the true image of the Russian spirit of the sixteenth century.

Yet it was in this ecclesiastical and specially monastic sphere that feelings and ideas destined to cast a leaven of revival into the stagnation of a people on which age was laying a cold hand, even in the heyday of its youth, first sprang to life.

V.—The Renovating Movement.

The Russia of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had a reform of its own. Isolated though the country was, and closed against any action from foreign sources, it could not remain absolutely unaffected; and, besides, it was itself, though in a different way and in a much more limited degree, passing through certain revolutionary phases, and consequently under­going a certain process of upheaval. A renovating movement, either spontaneously developed in the national mind or in­duced by some foreign influence, began to show itself as early as in the fourteenth century, chiefly in the province of Novgorod, the cradle and the last refuge of the traditions of freedom. The original date of this movement may be assigned to the year 1376. At that period three heretics, founders of the sect of the strigolniki, or cloth-shearers (one of the leaders thus put to death belonged to this trade), were cast from the summit of the bridge in that republican city. This sect repudiated all idea of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, as being based on simony. The Church, whose supremacy extended at Novgorod to the sphere of economic, interests, soon put down the revolt; but even in the second half of the fifteenth century the strigolniki

attracted attention, and their doctrine then found fresh food in the shape of additions to the ecclesiastical literature—fresh writings, still of Byzantine origin, but conceived in a more independent spirit, which indicated various defects in the religious life, declaimed against an excess of ascetic practices, which was animalizing faith and piety at the expense of their spiritual qualities, and denounced the corruption of the mon­astic rule. Meanwhile the teachings of certain Byzantine heresiarchs, Pauliciens and Bogomiles, drawn from those of the Gnostics, the Manichseans and the Messalians, began to creep into the country.

On this .groundwork a mass of local heresies sprang up, and these were soon generalized under the name of ‘ judaizing heresies ’ (jidovstvouinuchtchyie), because certain of their ex­ternal features were borrowed from some anti-Talmudic Jews or Caraites, who took refuge at Novgorod towards the year 1471. Some of these heresiarchs went so far as to adopt the Jewish Easter, The Jewish calendar, and the rite of circum­cision. But the general tendency of all these sects was towards rationalism, a common denial of the Trinity, of our Lord’s Divinity, of the future life, and of all the external trappings of Christianity. Their appearance certainly did the Orthodox Church a great service. It forced her, in the first place, to a certain exegetical labour, imposed by the necessity for making a fight against her adversaries, and also to some amount of self-examination and an endeavour at internal reform. Thus one religious movement stirred another. The last took two different directions. The correction of the sacred books, on which Maximus the Greek was employed, indicates a desire to parry certain doctrinal criticisms. But monastic life deserved a yet severer censure. I have already endeavoured to set forth this twofold aspect of the religious life, which is set down in letters of fire and branded with a hot iron in Ivan the Terrible’s famous writings. Here is a passage from his celebrated letter to the Monastery of St. Cyril, written in 1575 :

‘ Bred up in abstinence from your very childhood, you kill yourselves with privations : loving God, you llee from men ; dwelling in solitude and silence, you put away all earthly enjoyments ; you mortify your flesh with a cruel hair-shirt, you bind your loins with a harsh belt that wrings all your limbs, and thus you have weakened your very backbones ; you have sent all succulent dishes far from your table, so that your dried-up skin clings to your poor bones ; you have cast off every earthly thought ; the lack of nourishment has dried up the marrow in your bones ; your protruding ribs have strangled your stomachs ; all your nights have been spent in prayer, and you have wetted your beards with your tears.’

And alongside this ironical piece of oratory we find the reverse of the medal, in one of the proposals laid by the Sovereign before the conciliable of 1551.

‘ Monks and nuns take the habit and the veil, not to save their souls, but to spend idle, pleasant lives, wandering hither and thither, and perpetually moving from one village to another in search of amusement. ... In all the monasteries monks and abbots drink to excess. ... At Moscow and in all the other towns they may be seen sharing their dwellings and their wealth with worldly men and women. . . . Archimandrites and abbots forsake the common board and hold revel in their own cells with their invited guests. . . . Women—even loose women—have free access to them; monks and hermits go about the country shamelessly, taking young boys with them. . . .’

The evil was not confined to the ‘ black ’ clergy. In that very conciliable of the year 1551, mention was made of priests who only celebrated Mass every six or seven years, came to church drunk, quarrelled amongst themselves, and said the prayers all wrong. Lasicius (De Russorem . . . Religione, 1582, p. 210) mentions popeswhohad been seen lying dead drunk in the public squares, and Herberstein (Commentarii. Startchevski, i. 21) saw priests publicly flogged on this account. Instead of being houses of prayer, the sacred edifices, thus profaned by their own priests, became places of meeting, clubs, markets. Men entered them, even when Mass was going on, without baring their heads, talked and laughed at the top of their voices, discussed and settled their business affairs, and often broke iri upon the chanting with coarse words. Though an analogy may be traced between these features and those pointed out by Rabelais, Calvin, and Luther in the religious habits of the West, their testimony cannot dctract from the example set and the work performed at that same period, by St. Francois de Paul and the Benedictines of St. Maur. In Russia, up till the early years of the sixteenth century, at all events, no such counterpoise existed. But at that moment the necessity for amendment forced itself on the best minds within the bosom of the monastic communities themselves. As to ways and means, opinions differed. Ivan Sanine, the son of a Lithuanian deserter—in religion Joseph, called Volotski—who founded the monastery of Volok-Lamskoii (now Volokolamsk) in 1479, thought he had found them in a return to the strict applica­tion of the old rule. By education he belonged to the old type of Russian Knijniki, with their utter lack of the critical instinct, and their absolute respect for everything that has been. But this could not suffice for everybody. From the depths of those hermitages, to the appearance and multi-

plication of which in the northern deserts I have already referred, another wind began to blow. Nil Sorski, bom in 1433, of an ancient boi'ar family, the Maikov, having first spent several years at the monastery of Mount Athos, then lived near Bielooziero and the monastery of St. Cyril, and finally founded a hermitage, the name of which he took for himself, on the banks of the little Sorka River, suddenly came forward as the representative of a new religious world. His travels and his reading, fuller and better chosen than that of his fellows, had, to a certain point, turned the knijnik in him into a theologian. He had learnt to admit and assert that ‘ all written things were not holy things.’ He ventured to reject the authority of the document, in the sense in which it was Accepted by most of his contemporaries—that is to say, apart from the origin and value of the testimony it bore. Finally, he had looked for something more than texts in the sacred writings : he had sought inspiration. On these lines, and independently of his views concerning the religious life, novel, in Russia, and occasionally very deep, he was des­tined to conceive a new ideal of monastic existence, to con­sist, not in the exact observance of external discipline, but in an internal transformation of the soul. Hence his choice of the isolated life, already adopted by a certain number of monks in that country, but destined, under his influence, to attain a much greater development.

Nil Sorski had soon gathered several hundreds of followers round him, and to these the generic title of ‘ monks from beyond the Volga ’ (Zavolojskiie startsy) was given. Their example and teaching were to play an important part in the religious life of the sixteenth century. They had no rule, so to speak ; they enjoyed an almost complete independence ; they were free to choose their own material conditions and means of existence ; one principle only ruled these—poverty. Here was where the split came with Joseph Volotski and his school, and the clamour of the quarrel thus begun filled the first years of the reign of the Terrible, and lasted.on after he himself was dead.

The problem of monastic proprietorship divided the two camp:-:. Nil Sorski’s solution of it will be easily guessed, and it brought the niestiajatieli and the lioubnstiajatieli, the ad­versaries and partisans of the property in question (stiajatid, an acquirer ; lioubit, to love), face to face. Nil, though con­demned by the conciliable of 1503, was allowed to go back to his desert. But the question continued to fill the literature of the day, and the hermit’s ideas were adopted and brilliantly set forth by another monk, the least qualified of all his com­rades, seemingly, for such a task. Even under his klobouk, Vassiane Kossoi, otherwise Prince Vassili Ivanovitch Patri-

kiev-Kossoi, who traced his descent from Guedymin, a near kinsman of the reigning house, continued a man of the world. A statesman and diplomatist, it was only after a most brilliant career, and even then by force majeure, and in consequence of a sudden loss of favour, that he assumed the monkish garb in 1499. Old ties bound him to a circle in which freedom of thought prevailed, almost to the point of heresy, and his forced stay at Bielooziero brought him into contact with Nil Sorski. Summoned to Moscow for the con- ciliable of 1503, he boldly espoused the cause of the niest- jatieli, placing at its service a skill and energy which the hermit of Volok lacked, and a literary talent which, though he was no more than a popularizer of other men’s ideas, gave him a high rank among the few writers Russia then possessed. After Sorski’s death, Vassiane found a fighting comrade in the person of Maximus the Greek, whose labours as a corrector had led him to seek out other elements of moral corrup­tion, and who, in the heat of his discussions with local and foreign heretics, had gone so far as to echo the Hussite view as to Church property. Joseph Volotski had followed Nil to the grave in 1515, but his partizans, the Iosiflianic, as they were called, still held firm, and at the conciliable of 1523 Maximus, in his turn, received a sentence, the imposition of which was rendered easier by some translating blunders due to the weakness of his scientific methods and his igno­rance of the Russian language. Then it was that he met Vassiane Patrikiev, himself exiled and under sentence, at the monastery of Volok (1531), and the rest of his life was dragged out in prison cloisters. ‘ We kiss your bonds, but we can do nothing for you,’ wrote the Metropolitan Macarius, a more wily diplomatist than even Vassaine himself, whose skill enabled him to play a dubious part between the two camps.

But the struggle continued and its borders widened. Among the men sentenced by the conciliable of 1531 there was a prior of the Troi'tsa called Artemi, who, like all professors of the doctrine.of the Iosiflianie, objected to the putting to death of heretics, and in this resembled the ‘ monks from beyond the Volga,’ who held the same view. ‘ We have no right to judge these unhappy beings,’ wrote one of these hermits ; ‘ all we can do is to pray for them.’ A development of liberal thought, surprising at such a period, occurred in this circle, and Artemi and his disciples simultaneously camt into contact with the anti-Catholic movement, which reached them through Poland, where Protestantism was then in full pro­gress, while other opponents of the official Church, soon to be smitten by her thunderbolts, though accepting certain features of the teaching of the hermit of Volok, followed a line of thought that ran parallel with the rationalist movement of the day.

Thus the Russian reforms spread out in several directions, the Zavolojskiie st artsy and the Iosiflianie only differing as to the means to be employed for the reconstruction of the religious edifice, while the sectarians of Artemi’s type pursued an altogether revolutionary and destructive work. A political element also intervened in the quarrel. Volotski was con­servative even in his conception of the proper relations be­tween Church and State—the State to serve the interests of the Church, and the Church, in return, to yield the State full obedience. According to this organization, the monastery, the material existence of which was based on a privileged land tenure, took on the character of a State institution, the centre and nursery of an ecclesiastical aristocracy, and the triumphant assertion of this doctrine certainly contributed to the establishment of autocratic power at Moscow. The views of the Zavolojskiie startsy on this subject were very different. Nil Sorski put the question aside altogether. It possessed no interest for him, and, from his essentially Christian point of view, had no existence at all. The moral principles he extolled were compatible with every form of political life. But Vassiane Patrikiev was affected in a different way. He could not forget his own origin and parentage, and his patrician soul recoiled from submission to any unlimited and uncon­trolled political power. Thus he spent all his personal autho­rity and all the prestige of his party to strengthen an opposi­tion with which Moscow had to wrestle till its professors were crushed under the iron hand of Ivan the Terrible.

All the elements I have indicated had their share in this struggle, and for that reason I have dwelt somewhat fully on their precise nature. The noble seed, the existence of which, in a dim comer of the national history, is revealed to us through the dark and painful fate of some scarce known heroes, was trodden into the soil and drowned in blood by the victory of the official Church and the absolute power. That seed lies in the earth yet, and even now is scarcely rising above the ground. The harvest is still a long way off. But grains of wheat have slumbered in Egyptian tombs for centuries with­out mouldering away, and it is good to know, it is a consoling thought, that in Russia, too, beneath the dust of centuries, the past has sown such fruitful atoms, which yet bide their time.

I have still to elucidate the conditions under which the great drama to which I have iust referred was played out—a drama which will constitute the greater part of the subject of this work—by an evocation of a part of the national life on which the preceding pages have frequently touched, but which must now be more completely sketched.

CHAPTER IV HABITS AND CUSTOMS

I.— THEIR ASPECT, PHYSICAL AND MORAL. II.-------------- THE WOMEN. III.

THE FAMILY. IV. SOCIETY.

I.—Their Aspect, Physical and Moral.

The thirteenth-century invaders did not prevent all civilization in Russia ; in fact, they imposed their own civilization on the country, and, to judge by the consequences, this side of their conquest was far-reaching. Look at the Muscovite of the sixteenth century. To begin with, he is dressed from head to foot after the fashions of Samarkand. Bachmak, iazam, armii/k, zipoune, tcliebygi, kaftane, outchkour, chlyk, bachlyk, kolpak, klobouk, taflia, temlak—all these are the Tartar names he applies to the various items of his attire. If he falls out with his comrades, and begins to use rough language, the word dcmrak invariably occurs in his vocabulary ; if he comes to blows, the konlak straightway appears. When he metes out justice, he binds the culprit with kandaly (chains), and appeals to the kate (executioner) to give the condemned man the knout. If he is an official he gathers the taxes into a kazna (treasury), protected by a karaoul (guard-house), or organizes relays which he calls iamy on roads served by iarncktehiki. When he gets out of his posting-sleigh, he is seen going into a kabak (tavern), which has taken the place of the old Russian kortchma. And all these words belong to the same Asiatic dictionary. The meaning of all this, though it affects external matters only, is surely very significant. A more serious thing is that a certain infusion of Mongol blood seems to have accompanied this prompt and docile assimilation. What was its extent ? It is difficult to decide. Russian documents dealing with the subject are non-existent, and the observations of foreign travellers contradict each other. * The real Muscovite natives,’ wrote Vigenerius (‘ Description of the Kingdom of Poland and the Neighbouring Countries,’ 1573), ‘ are short, as a rule, with good constitutions, strong and hardy, with very white skins, green eyes, long beards, short legs, and well-proportioned bellies.’ Except for this last feature, noted by the majority of witnesses, this portrait is rather like that of the famous red­headed tavern wench. Peer Persson, or Petreus (Travels, in Rerun: Rossicorum Scriptores Exterii, 1851, vol. i.), had the good luck, when he was in the same country, to see nothing but men who stood six feet high, and women whose Hack eyes, slight figures, dainty bosoms, delicate hands, and taper fingers

filled him with admiration. These same eyes, as black as jet, were also noticed by Jenkinson. But the item of complexion continues to be discussed, Petreus declaring it to be naturally fair, and only spoilt by the abuse of paint and cosmetics, which the fair Muscovites used with singular want of taste, not only on their faces and necks, but on their eyes and teeth, while Fletcher ascribes their addiction to these artifices to a desire to conceal natural defects of colouring.

As an excuse for one and all of these observers, it should be added that they could not see clearly, because the persons they sought to behold hardly showed themselves at all, the women being hidden in their own special quarters, and even the men— of the aristocratic class, at all events—concealed beneath the mass of garments they wore. The list of these, as given by Fletcher, is amazing. To begin with the men. There was first of all the tafia, a little cap which covered the head, itself completely shaved. No man let his hair grow, except as a sign of mourning or disgrace. The taflia, in the case of great nobles, was made of cloth of gold, and embroidered with pearls and precious stones. Over this came a great tiara-shaped cap, in the Persian style, trimmed with black fox, the most valuable of all furs. The collarless shirt left the neck bare, but this was adorned with a richly- worked necklace, some three or four fingers deep. This shirt, made of fine material and loaded with embroideries, was worn in summer as the indoor garment. In winter it was hidden by a light silk overgarment, buttoned down the front, and reaching to the knee, and over this came the kaftane, a long narrow gown, sometimes made of cloth of gold, and reaching the instep ; a girdle, knotted very low, below the waist, with a dagger and a spoon thrust into it; the odnoriadka, a silken garment, still longer and wider, edged with fur, and embroidered all down the front; and then, for outdoor use, the okhahcne. . . .

I will spare my readers the other variations of the costume, the feriaz and the kontouche, all completed by the high morocco- leather boots, worn instead of hose, and also embroidered with pearls and gems.

The feminine wardrobe, as may well be imagined, was no less complicated ; the features common to both were opulence and the superposition of many garments. The hair was con­fined by silken nets, red or black, covered in summer with a fine cambric or lawn kerchief embroidered with pearls, and fastened under the chin. This w^ras replaced in winter by a cloth of gold cap, edged with some valuable fur, and likewise sprinkled with peails and precious stones. The first loose gown—the opachnia —was generally scarlet in colour, and its long sleeves reached the ground. Over it came an incredible series of garments,

some of them wide and some of them narrow, some of silk and some of doth of gold, some fur-lined, others sewn with gems, and whole coffers full of necklaces and bracelets and ornaments of every kind. The noble Muscovite lady, in her white or blue or yellow leather buskins, also pearl-embroidered, could scarcely stand under her heaped-up glories. She was like a shrine.

This was the wardrobe of the aristocrats. That of the common folk was simpler, as may be well imagined. A shirt and a pair of long boots—two chemises, one over the other, for decency’s sake, in the woman’s case— in summer-time; in the winter a coarse blue or black cloth gown, reaching nearly to the feet, and a sheepskin pelisse, were its invariable and chief constituents. For the woman, a metal cross and earrings of some kind were also indispensable. Under the ascetic influence, religion and modesty played a foremost part in the constitution of the female toilet. Even the excessive use of cosmetics seems to have had its origin in this quarter, these being em­ployed to hide charms which had better be concealed. But if God was served by this device, the devil lost nothing by it, and some modes of dressing the hair, and the choice of certain stones, like the emerald and the ruby, considered to heighten the brilliance and expression of the wearer’s face, were certainly not dictated solely by the prece pts of the Domostroi.

Did the dresses and customs bearing these Tartar names really come out of Tartary ? It is a curious thing that Fletcher should never have suspected this origin. According to him, the Russians of his day were dressed d la Grecqne. The garb of the Muscovite Sovereigns, identical with that worn by all European monarchs at a much more ancient epoch, certainly came from Byzantium rather than from Samarkand. And the Byzantine origin of the cosmetics so dear to the coquettes of the country is not less certain. They were a legacy from Olga, the wife of Igor. This Princess was attended, when she travelled to Constantinople in 955, by a numerous female suite, and the ladies did not waste the time they spent on the shores of the Bosphorus. In the Europe of the Middle Ages, Constantinople held the place now occupied by Paris, as the metropolis of luxury. The Russian women of the sixteenth century, when they covered their teeth with a black varnish, and even suc­ceeded, by some now unknown process, in dyeing the whites of their eyes black, would seem to have drawn their inspiration from some primitive system of tattooing rather than from the delicate processes of the Greco-Roman belles. But we must take this to be a consequence of that clumsy deformation undergone by every form of art in a country where feminine vanity strove to realize the ideal of beauty set forth in the

popular song, ‘ A face as white as the white snow, and eyes as red as poppies.’

From the shores of the Bosphorus, Olga’s ladies brought back, if not the kila itself, one form of that head-dress, at all events— that adopted by the ancient Muscovite Sovereigns, with the viazy, long strings of pearls falling down to the shoulders on each side. This head-dress occurs among the ancient Greek colonists on the Black Sea, and in a tenth-century evangelistary preserved in the Gotha Library, Theophania, Empress of Ger­many, and her son Otho III., are represented with costumes strongly resembling those of the boi'ars and boiarines of the sixteenth century.

In this case, then, names and things do not exactly corre­spond, and a peculiarity of all conquests is the creation of appearances frequently rendered illusory by an appropriative action as ephemeral as it is shallow. As regards the Russian women of the period now under consideration, it is at Byzan­tium that we must look for the secret of their ways and their outward appearance. Byzantine asceticism ruled them and wrapped them round. Though, during the woman’s growing years, it allowed a certain development of her body and blos­soming of her physical charms, it commanded, once she was married, that these charms should be hidden from all eyes save her husband’s. The wife’s hai" must be concealed, her form must disappear under her load of wide and floating garments, worn one above the other. She must not wear a belt, save with her sorotchka, an indoor dress in which she would never show herself before strangers. But, by an inversion common in the case of ideas of this sort, the belt must always be worn with the sorotchka, and any neglect of this duty would cause a scandal.

In habits thus constituted, secular convenience was often mixed up with religious conventions. The full garments corre­sponded with the prevailing habit of body. The idleness and lack of exercise common to both sexes in the upper classes made the men stout and full-bellied and the women fat, at a very early age ; and the peculiarity thus associated with an ideal life of luxury ended by becoming an element of beauty— one still valued in the case of the St. Petersburg coachmen and amongst middle-class women in Russia.

Let not my readers scorn, on this account, the female charms which tempted the Russian contemporaries of Ivan the Terrible ! The Muscovite lady of the sixteenth century, in spite of her excessive embonpoint and her thick and ungraceful accoutrements, was assigned a place of honour in Jost Amman’s

* Gyna:ceum ; or, Theatrum Mulierum ’ (1586). ‘ Qualem vix simile',n Gallia culta dabit / . . .’ The taste for dress, the

worship and care of personal beauty, were, indeed, one of the features under which the aesthetic feeling of a still barbarous people, and its aspirations towards the superior forms of civil­ized life, were then revealed. For it must not be forgotten that the very men who wore these gorgeous garments lived in hovels, and I will not deny that, having used the spoon they carried in their belts for their soup, they eat the rest of their meals with their fingers ! Very coarse they still were, in life and morals, under their splendid toggery. But here we note the usual march of civilization, proceeding from the individual, thus cultivated and ennobled in the simplest and narrowest sense, to idealiza­tions of a more and more general and complex kind.

Let us pass on to their moral condition. As to this, all testi­mony is agreed, and it is not complimentary. Anything else would have been surprising. A high standard of morality concurrent with a low state of culture is a fiction which history constantly contradicts. It is well, nevertheless, to recollect that the testimony, in this case, is of foreign origin, and that a certain amount of ill-nature must be allowed for. The features on which it lays special stress are pride, roguery, in­credulity, and bad faith. The Muscovites, in their simplicity, thought themselves superior to all other men. They were liberal with promises which they never dreamt of performing. .No mutual confidence at all existed among them. The father doubted his son, the son believed nothing his mother said, and nobody would lend a halfpenny without security. These are the terms of the witness borne by two Germans, Buchau and Ulfeld, by Persson, a Swede, and Michalon, a Lithuanian. The worst of it is that the Englishmen, Fletcher and Jenkinson, echo these sentiments. ‘ It may be most truthfully said . . . that from the highest to the lowest, except in some rare cases, very diffi­cult to discover, no Russian believes anything that is said to him, or says anything that is worthy oi belief.’ Now, these last witnesses, belonging to a race which at that period enjoyed a privileged position in the country, may be taken to be less dubious than their fellows. And they outdo them, adding another feature to the list, one to which I have already had occasion to refer—cruclty. Fletcher, it is true, excuses this by the following explanation : ‘ Harshly and cruelly used by the magistrates and the upper classes, the nation has grown harsh and cruel to its equals, and especially to its inferiors.’

This is the history of barbarism everywhere, and it was aggravated, in this particular country, by a climate which is not calculated to make men tender. The national historians have vainly striven to lay the blame in this particular, too, on the Mongol invasion, which, so they assert, corrupted the van­quished people’s habits, and taught it cunning and violence.

But two centuries before the Tartars came, the ancient Russia of Kiev was a scene of blood and rapine, plunged in that state of warfare which was to last till the very threshold of the modem epoch was reached, and which was in itself a deteriorating agent. Ferocity is the very essence of war. It has its own laws, which contravene every code and every gospel, and it excludes all honesty. In war, cunning is a merit, and violence a virtue. In this land, where anarchy reigned for centuries, it was not the Tartars who replaced the phenomenon known in Western Europe as ‘ chivalry ’ by another, which, though certainly not its equivalent, was, historically speaking, co­incident with it—‘ brigandage ’—a brigandage enshrined in legend, sung by the national bards, personified by the popular heroes. In one of the bylines, which brings Ivan IV. upon the scene, we find a robber tale which is a specimen of the ideas elaborated under the influence of these peculiar historical precedents. A young man, haled before the justice-seat, is subjected to the pravieje. The Sovereign passes by, and inquires into the matter. It concerns a theft of treasure by the culprit. The young man gives his explanation. The treasure had been in the hands of a robber band. The bold fellow had fallen upon it, laid hands on the booty, and then gone from tavern to tavern, sharing his plunder with all the vagabonds in the country. The Sovereign does not hesitate : the hero of the adventure deserves not punishment, but reward, for his bravery and open-handedness. The judges are commanded to make him large amends, and all the people rejoice with him.

The attitude of mind here exemplified is not the specific characteristic of any Asiatic or European race, but the acci­dental result of a certainly abnormal evolution, during a transition period of development.

During the sixteenth century, under the coating, very super­ficial, as we have already seen it to be, of the Mongol alluvion, the strongest visible mark on Muscovite habits is that left by the nearest, the Byzantine, East. But this influence, just at that moment, was giving rise to fierce reaction. Under the excessive weight and pressure of the ascetic yoke, Nature, physical and moral, was revolting and rebelling, breaking her bonds, casting them off, and rushing, under the reflex action of unbridled instincts, into wild flights in a quite opposite direction—extravagant debauchery, monstrous vices, the oblivion of all modesty even amongst the women, once they contrived to break down the barriers of the terem. These phe­nomena naturally stand out against the ordinary background of social and domestic life. They strike the attention of observers, and thus elicit severe judgments, which should be

carefully weighed. These more particularly affect and con­demn the Russian woman. As foreign witnesses saw her, she is a monster. Into this closer inquiry must be made.

II.—The Russian Woman.

The position imposed on man’s partner by Muscovite customs and legislation was certainly not affected by racial influences. The terem, as all men know nowadays, was not of Eastern origin. In it we recognise, under a Tartar name, the Greco-Roman gynceceum, dressed up Byzantine fashion. Nor can the general tendencies of the Slav race be blamed ; they rather leant towards giving women a privileged position. Most of the Slav laws, unlike those of Rome, Germany, or Scandinavia, reject the idea that woman is an inferior being, placed under the permanent guardianship of her male relations, or assimilated to things of which they have the arbitrary disposal. In Russia, according to the code of Jaroslav, the indemnity due for murder (the glovchtchizna, price of the head) was higher when the murdered person was a woman, and even according to Ivan IV.’s code, both sexes were equal before the law. It was not till 1557 that it occurred to the Terrible to attack this principle by deciding that any clause whereby a wife willed the management of her property away to her husband was invalid. ‘ What the husband orders, the wife writes ’—so runs the preamble of the new law. But this is a mere acknowledgment of a fact, and a precaution taken in the wife’s interest, rather than a decree of forfeiture.

Whether or not it should be attributed, as the learned his­torian of Slav law, Maciejowski, holds, to her participation in the duties of the priesthood in ancient Slav communities, or to some other anti more authentic cause (for the equality in priestly matters itself looks like a result), Eve’s comparative triumph, even on Russian soil, is not open to any doubt. But in Russia Byzantium set on this primordial fact the seal of her own very different conceptions, largely borrowed from pagan teachings. The Constantinopohtan compilers had carefully noted the aphorism ascribed to Solon—‘ The wise man thanks the gods daily for having made him a Greek and not a barbarian, a man and not a beast, a male and not a female.’ They had further noted that Aristotle gave the citizen full power over children, slaves, and women, and they industriously amalgamated these precepts with their Christian notions as to damnation and the origin of sin.

‘ What is a woman ?’ we read in an ancient religious instruc­tion imported into Russia from the East. ¹ A net to tempt men ! with her clear face and her high-set eyes, she works

spells ! . . . What is a woman? A viper’s nest!’ The Eve of the Byzantine world is a being ‘ twelve times impure,’ and always dangerous. On certain days no man must sit at table with her, and the meat she has killed is poison. Wherefore, in the country parts of Russia, in the sixteenth century, house­keepers might have been seen running through the village to find a man to wring the neck of the chicken they wanted to boil. The younger and fairer the woman was, the more she was pernicious and accursed. And only old women were allowed to prepare the sacred wafers.

To lessen the mischief and diminish the peril, the woman must be shut up. ^! She sits behind twenty-seven locks—she sits locked in with twenty-seven keys, so that the wind may not blow on her, so that the sun may not bum her, so that bold comrades may not see her. . . .’ In the case of women of high rank, the precautions thus enumerated in the popular song are literally applied. The bo'iarina’s apartments, at the back of the house, with a special entrance of their own, constitute a prison of which the bo'iarine keeps the key. No other man, not even a near relation, can enter. The win­dows all look on to an inner court, protected from indiscreet curiosity by a tall fence. This is the gaol-yard, where the prisoners take, their exercise. Generally there is a chapel or oratory, where the woman is allowed to perform her devotions, only going to church oil great occasions, and surrounded then by the various precautions which attend all her rare excursions out of doors. The carriage which transports her, when this happens, is a sort of cellular vehicle, with bladder-skins instead of glass in its windows, so that the occupant can see out without being seen, and it is attended by a whole escort of serving-men, halt-spies, half-guards. Most of these will spend the whole of their lives without ever beholding their closely- watched mistress, and even their master’s own friends may not be more highly favoured. As a matter of principle, the wife does not appear before her husband’s guests. But an exception is made on the occasion of banquets given to persons to whom the entertainer desires to do special honour. In the course of such repasts, a ceremony is performed which would seem to show some glimmer of the chivalrous ideas of the West. At a signal given by her lord, the bo'iarina descends the staircase of the gyncBceum, dressed in her most gorgeous attire, and bearing in her hand a golden cup. Having touched this with her lips, she offers it to every guest, and then, standing upright at the place of honour, permits each to greet her with a respectful kiss.

All this was possible, evidently, in the aristocratic class; but outside it, such cloistered retirement seemed less indis­pensable, and the danger slighter. The woman of humble

birth was a beast of burden, who might very well be left to the free exercise of her household duties, to carry the linen to the public washing-place, and labour in the fields. Even in the middle class, the terem admitted of some modifications. When the great festivals drew near, the women of the lesser nobility, and those of the merchant and poorer classes, crowded round the seesaws and roundabouts set up in the streets, the chief entertainment of the female public of that period. The great ladies had them in the inner courts of their houses. When the ladies got off their seesaws, they went to dance in some meadow. The dancing of that period seems to have been a simple and somewhat monotonous business. The dancers kept stamping their feet on the same spot of ground, twirling round and round, moving their shoulders, swaying their hips, nodding their heads about, raising and lowering their eyebrows, waving handkerchiefs—all to the accompaniment of their own singing and of the shnll music of a skomurokh. But Peerson noticed a less innocent aspect of these gambols, a dubious habit of standing back to back, and rubbing the more fleshy parts of their bodies against their partners’, not to mention extempore songs on most improper subjects.

Here, again, we have to note the inevitable consequence of a too severe religious law. Danc^;ng, however decent, was for­bidden by the Church, with games and pastimes of every kind. This was shutting the door in the devil’s face, so that he might climb in by the window. The public baths gave rise to much more serious disorders. In them the sexes were nominally separated, but men and women came out of their respective hot rooms, stripped, streaming with sweat, and their blood heated by smart rubbing, met at the entrance, fell without any embarrassment into eager conversation, and cast them­selves pell-mell into the river, or rolled in the snow, amidst shouts and jests and jokes the nature of which will be easily divined.

This was the filthy outlet of the ascetic system. Only one woman almost entirely escaped this system—the widowed mother of sons. From the domestic and social, even from the political, point of view, she attained complete independence, and enjoyed rights equal to a man’s. But if the widow had no son. she dropped into the class of orphans and infirm persons, of whom the Church had the care and trouble, for society would

[have none of them. Thus the exception was a confirmation of the rule. Unless, again, the Eve on whom the ascetic ideal had laid its curse lifted herself, whether mother or maid, above the malediction, and, rising, by some prodigy of virtue, to the level of that ideal, became a saint according to its canons. But such an elevation seems to have been particularly

laborious, for the ‘ Tcheti Minei ’ of Macarius only chronicle the lives of two female saints in all. Russian hagiographers, indeed, appear to have professed a certain scorn for these scarce beings, even when recognised and adopted by the Church. St. Olga and St. Euphrosyne of Polotsk, who lived, one in the tenth and the other in the twelfth century, found no bio­graphers till the fifteenth—and both of them were Princesses !

One other opening there was for women who could not reach such heights as these—that world of supernatural forces to which the popular imagination ascribed so mighty a power over human life. Woman, banned out of society, scorned as a wife and mother, was dreaded as a sorceress and courted as a soothsayer. She could be queen of the magic kingdom of superstition. And in the raskol, where superstition played so great a part, the power of woman was to recover all its privi­leges and retake first rank. In ordinary life, at all events, was the wife and mother permitted to taste the joys of domestic existence ?

III.—Tiie Family.

Here an initial fact presents itself. In the upper class, the education of the children w'as generally taken out of the mother’s hands. In this quarter, therefore, we rind nothing at all. Maternal love and filial love both lay under the interdict of the Church. The only thing left was marriage. But marriage, in a young girl’s case, did not mean that she had found a young man for whom she cared, or was even likely to care. Except in the case of second marriages, the matching of couples concerned the parents only, and they, as a rule, never thought of consulting the young people’s inclinations ; all the more, as the persons married were very frequently mere children. Twelve years old for a girl, fourteen for a boy, were considered quite marriageable ages. And before they went to the altar, even up to the very threshold of the nuptial chamber, the young couple might be, and, strictly speaking, ought to be, strangers. The bride, especially, must not be seen by her bridegroom until the supreme moment. To avoid surprises of a too painful nature, some lady relation of the man’s assumed the delicate duties of the smotritielnitsa. or looker (smotrit, to look). She was brought into a room decorated for the purpose, and caught a glimpse of the betrothed behind a curtain which was drawn aside for a moment. Substitutions, facilitated by such prearranged presentations, were not un­common. The husband thus deceived had a right to make a complaint, demand an inquiry, and demand the revocation of the contract. As a rule, he preferred to solve the difficulty by

treating the woman so ill that he drove her to take the veil. In exceptional cases, and if his suit was greatly desired, the young man was allowed to accomplish the ceremony of the smoir in person ; but if he drew back afterwards, it was an affront which carried heavy penalties with it.

After the smotr came the sqovor. or espousals, on which occa­sion long speeches were made on each side, the contract was drawn up, and the dowry (always, until the sixteenth century, furnished by the bridegroom) sometimes immediately paid over, in fulfilment of the proverb, ‘ The money on the table, the young girl behind the table.’ But the betrothed bride was never present. It was not till after the signatures had been exchanged that one of her female relatives brought the bridegroom a few trifling gifts from her.

The marriage itself was attended by very complicated rites, symbolizing the entrance into a new life, and very closely reproducing those customary on the accession of a Prince. They were presided over by two personages—one called tyssiatski, a name corresponding with important functions under the appanage system and the vietchie—a sort of chili- arch, appointed to command the crowd of groomsmen and bridesmaids ; the other, the iassielttik (equerry), whose duty was to protect the ceremony and all who took part in it from evil spells of every kind ; for such occasions were supposed to be particularly auspicious for evil spirits and sorcerers.

The evening before the wedding the guests gathered in the bridegroom’s house, where he received their congratulations, gave them a banquet, and sent his bride, who was still invisible, more or less splendid presents—a casket with rings and cos­metics and dainties, and a symbolic whip. At the same moment the matchmaker was busying herself about preparing the nuptial couch. She began by walking all round the house with a rowan-branch in her hand, to drive away spells. The bridal chamber was generally arranged in a loft, so that, being as far as possible above the ground, it might evoke fewer thoughts of the tomb. It was hung with carpets and marten furs, an essential sign of wealth and comfort; in the four comers four pewter vessels filled with hydromel were set, and the necessary adjuncts of the sleeping-chamber were brought in procession, the pictures of Christ and the Virgin carried first. The bed was generally made on wooden benches set side by side. On these, sheaves of wheat were first laid, the quantity, which always had a meaning, differing according to the rank of the newly-married couple. The wheat was covered with carpets, on which eiderdown coverlets were laid, and close to the bed open barrels full of wheat, rye, barley, and oats were placed.

The next morning there was a second banquet in the same

house, for which the koroval (wedding-cake) was baked, and this time the bride occupied her own place at the head of the table beside the bridegroom. In front of her were three cloths, laid one on the top of the other, and on them a salt-cellar, a small loaf of white bread (kalaich), and a cheese. The bridegroom went to fetch his bride with a great following, Aum'ai'-bearers and taper-bearers—two of them, sometimes, to each taper, some of which weighed as much as ninety-six pounds. A groomsman followed with the ossypalo, a great dish of hops, (typical of joy and plenty), marten furs, gold-embroidered hand­kerchiefs, and coins, to be distributed among the company. A sirrrlar procession formed up behind the bride, who was in­visible, shrouded in a thick veil. Two bridesmaids carried two dishes, on which might be seen the bride’s head-dress, a goblet filled with a mixture of wine and honey, the useof which will shortly be detailed, and handkerchiefs, also intended for the guests.

The two processions took their way to the young couple’s residence, and the banquet was opened by long prayers recited by the pope. According to custom, the guests hardly touched the first course, until the matchmaker, rising, requested the bride’s parents’ leave to dress her hair. Tapers were lighted, and a strip of silk with a great cross embroidered on each side was stretched between the couple. The matchmaker took off the bride’s veil, dipped a comb into the symbolic goblet, and passed it through her hair before covering it with the net and the kika. At this moment, while the bridesmaids fanned the couple with marten-skins, the habit, in the middle classes, was that the betrothed persons should bring their cheeks close to the silk that was being held between them. A mirror was held in front of them, and thus for the first time they could see each other’s features. At that moment, too, one of the wedding-guests approached them, wearing a touloupe with the fur outside, and wished them as many children as there were hairs in the fur.

Then came the distribution of the kerchiefs and other objects on the ossypalo, the exchange of rings before the pope, and the handing to the bridegroom by the bride’s father of the emblem of his paternal authority. My readers will have guessed it was a whip ! ‘ I hope I shall never need it,’ quoth the bride­groom gallantly. But he stuck it in his belt. Here there was a break in the feasting, and everybody went to church. Or. the way there was singing and dancing, in spite of the pope’s presence, and, under his angry eyes, the skomorokhy delighted the party with their tricks. After the benediction the br’de sometimes prostrated herself and touched her husband’s boot with her forehead, in sign of submission, while he, with a pro-

tecting gesture, sheltered his chosen partner with a comer of his garment. Sometimes, too, the pope held out a cup, at which the couple wetted their lips three times. Then it was cast upon the ground, and each tried to set his or her foot upon it. If the woman proved the most active of the two, it was taken as an omen that she would have the upper hand in the household. And as they left the church there were more symbolic ceremonies and make-believe endeavours to separate the couple, who clung together. Then everybody went back to the wedding-feast. The bride was expected to, weep freely, and her companions egged her on, singing sad songs to her. Neither she nor the bridegroom were allowed to touch any of the dishes till, a swan having been served to all the other guests, a roast fowl was set before the newly-married pair.

This was the signal for their retirement, and here, even more clearly than in the details already related, the spirit of local mysticism, in its most coarsely sensual and naively cynical form, was manifested. The symbolic fowl led the way to the nuptial chamber, escorted by the taper-bearers, the korovai- bearers, and all the rest of the company. The tapers were thrust into the barrels of com, the married pair were conducted into the room with much further ceremony, and the guests went back to the feast, while the matchmaker and her assis­tants helped the young people to undress. When this process began, the wife, in token of humihty, had to pull off her hus­band’s boots. In one of them a coin was hidden, and if she pulled this boot off first, it was looked on as a lucky omen. Meanwhile the husband enacted his part by drawing the symbolic whip out of his belt and applying it with the dis­cretion the occasion demanded ! The couple were left alone at last, still guarded by an iassielnik, who went on a protective round outside the house, on foot or horseback, and the feasting continued merrily for an hour. At the end of that time a girl was sent to ask for news of the married pair. If the husband answered through the closed door that he was well, it meant that ‘ good had been accomplished between them.’ and forth­with the guests went back to the loft to carry food to the husband and wife. The fowl constituted the chief portion of this ritual feast, but other dishes were habitually added to it. There was an exchange of toasts and compliments, then the newly-married folk were put to bed again, and the guests, departing, sat down once more to make merry'.

The next morning the ceremonies followed their course. First came the indispensable bath, after which the wife pre­sented her husband’s mother with the proofs of her virginity, in the shape of the shift worn on the wedding night, which

was carefully preserved. When the Tsar married, it was not till this stage of the business that the Court beheld the new Sovereign, a boiiarine of high rank lifting the corner of her veil on the point of an arrow. On this day it was the bride’s parents who entertained the wedding guests. But on certain occasions they were exposed to a terrible humiliation. The husband’s father might offer them a cup with a hole bored in it, stopped by the pressure of his finger. The finger removed, the contents of the goblet, wine or brandy, escaped, and the audience knew the young wife ‘ had not been what she should have been. . . .’

All through these festivities, except to pronounce certain sacramental words, the bride never spoke. Her silence, apart from these, was considered a proof of her being well brought up. Her companions, on the other hand, enjoyed a quite unusual freedom, of which they took liberal advantage, a joyous slackening of the bonds, sometimes degenerating into a sort of madness, which carried the most chaste and modest of creatures into sudden shamelessness and the wildest excess. And after all that, the heavy doors of the ter cm closed once more on the short snatch of gaiety, and on the fate of the newly-married wife.

The probable nature of that fate may be easily imagined. The Domostroi has no doubt exaggerated the austerity of domestic life, but it must have been very like a cloistered existence, all the same. Several times a day the denizens of every house of any size gathered in the krestovdia komnata, a room intended as a place of prayer, and covered with ikons from its ceiling to its lloor. All the events of life, small or great, involved the invocation of the sacred pictures, with which relics and other similarly precious objects—such as tapers that had been lighted at the celestial lire of Jerusalem, or fragments of a stone on which our Lord had set His foot—were venerated. Even outside the krestovdia a woman’s rosary was never out of her grasp, and in the hands of the recluses of the terem these instruments of supplication, which must needs be of artistic workmanship and blessed at some special centre of devotion, such as the Troi'tsa or the monasteries of Solovki or Bielooziero, were a faithful image of the monotonous and empty lives that slipped through their fingers with their Paters and their Aves.

Everybody, whether of high or humble rank, rose early : with the sun in summer-time, several hours before it in the winter. Even in the sixteenth century, time was still reckoned on the Oriental system, twelve hours in the day and twelve in the night, the equinox being taken to be the normal reckoning, and the first hour of the day corresponding with

the seventh, according to our present calculations. The services of the Church were regulated on this system of timing, and all other occupations were based on these. These, in the aristocratic class, beyond that of passing from one orison to another till dinner-time came, were very few After dinner a siesta was absolutely indispensable. The very tradesmen shut up their shops, and nobody worked but the barbers, who removed overluxuriant tresses on one of the Moscow spaces, known as the ‘ Square of Lice.’ There was a good reason for this period of repose. People ate a great deal'; they loaded their stomachs with a huge quantity of food, often of a most indigestible nature, and Dimitri the impostor betrayed his true origin by neglecting this national habit.

For the wife of a rich boiar, the whole of life consisted in praying, eating, and sleeping. Other women had their house­hold duties, but their life was one of toil, of convict labour. The boiarina, bom to idleness and stupefied by it, would not even take the trouble to embroider some church orna­ment, except to lighten her own unbearable ennui. And boredom was not the most dangerous guest in a conjugal existence constituted after the fashion we have noted. How many ill-assorted unions did it create ! How great the risk of consequent conflict ! Did not the law provide a special penalty for the wife who poisoned her husband ? And what a hideous penalty ! She was to be buried alive, her head above ground, so that her torture might be long. It sometimes iasted many days. Some culprits escaped this fate by taking the veil, but they were forced to live in separate cells and wear chains.

But in most cases the woman, ill-treated, outraged, and not unfrequently forsaken, avenged herself on these unions, in which love was so seldom her portion, through love. Closely watched as she was, she genentlly succeeded in ‘ putting her husband under the bench,’ as the common expression went. Even the repulsion with which the ‘ non-Christians,’ as all foreigners were called, inspired her, did not prevent her com­mitting adultery with them, if we are to believe the travellers of that time; and the chapter of the Domostroi which forbids the admission of gossips of doubtful reputation into the terem certainly points to the not uncommon infraction of an over- stringent law. Some of these women, who acted as go- betweens, were always to be found about the places frequented by the poorer class—wash-houses, markets, fountains—and they were also to be seen in the most respectable houses, where they generally performed a double duty, and so insured the master’s favour. There was no necessity for his concealing his mistresses, for custom permitted him to take them even

in his own house, and by force, without incurring any serious reproach.

Amongst the lower orders, laxity of morals as to this matter was extreme, and the neglect of all reserve and decency almost general. Women would issue stark naked from the public bath-houses, and brush against the passers-by in the open street. In the following century, Olearius recounts a scene he himself witnessed at Novgorod. A great crowd had gathered for some religious ceremony. A woman came out of a tavern where she had got drunk, and, dazed by the open air, fell down in an indecent posture. A drunken peasant saw her, threw himself like a wild beast on the naked form, while the crowd, men, women, and children, gathered, shouting with laughter, round the horrid sight. . . .

Even when the wife became a mother her miserable fate was hardly bettered. Maternity, for her, was reduced to the material cares and duties of the child’s earliest years, and the essential element—affection—was always to be lacking. Respect for parents was, indeed, believed to insure a long and happy life. It was said of a man who spoke evil of the authors of his being, ‘ The ravens will tear him with their beaks, the eagles will devour him. . . .’ ‘A father’s curse dries up,’ runs another proverb; ‘ a mother’s curse roots up.’ But the family law, while it ascribed a much greater authority to the father, ‘ Look on thy father as on God, and on thy mother as on thyself,’ seems to have had its roots in fear. The father thus commended, not to the love, but to the re­spect of his children, was the august bearer (groznyi) of the whip. It was a law of slavery still, devoid of all moral strength, the fitting counterpart of the political system which it com­pleted, which it partly inspired, and which it made acceptable. And here again, as quoted by Karamzine (‘ History of Russia,’ ix. 156), is the testimony of a Russian moralist who has much to say and conceals nothing as to those family relations, the sad truths concerning which no historian of the epoch can overlook or hide. They have lain like a curse on ten cen­turies of the past history of a people which thereby, more than by any other cause, has been prevented from entering into earlier and fuller dealings and community of thought with other civilized nations. ¹ Better it is to have an un­sheathed dagger at one’s side than an unmarried son in one’s house. . . . Better it is to have a goat in the house than a girl who has grown up ; the goat runs about the meadow and will bring home milk, the girl runs about the village ’— here there is an untranslatable play on words—‘ she will bring home her father’s shame.’

Under the domestic roof, which so often sheltered a very

bell, the one event crowned with an aureole of sincere and august morality was death. In that hour the religious law, which claimed more than any life could render, obtained full and utter satisfaction. To die surrounded by one’s family, and in full possession of one’s faculties, was accounted a heavenly benediction. So great was the power of faith that the moment did not terrify. It w^ras prepared for long before it came, the last will duly made, and as many good actions as possible introduced into it—alms, the freeing of slaves, the remission of debts, or merely their discharge. The keeping of engagements was accounted a merit, and the whole process was graced with ar. expressive name, ‘ to build one’s soul (stro’it douchou). It often happened that the dying man desired to put on a monkish habit, and in the Tsar’s case this was generally done. If a man who had put on the skhima recovered his health he was obliged to enter a monastery. But even on the brink of eternity, and in spite of the part played by Christian beliefs, pagan traditions still claimed their rights, and the scenic effect produced was instinct with materialism of the grossest sort. There was a funeral banquet, as a prelude to which a preparation of flour or of kacha—per­haps the koutia already known to us—was laid on a window­sill, and there were lamentations in which the profane or profaning spirit ruled : ‘ Oh, my darling,’ the widow would begin, ‘ why hast thou forsaken me ? . . . Was I not pleasant to thee ? . . . Did I not know how to dress and adorn myself to please thy taste ? . . .’ And the rest would cry : ‘ Why didst thou die ? . . . Hadst thou not thy fill of meat and drink ? . . . Was not thy wife fair ? . . .’

The family was not so much a moral entity as an association of interests. And it was capable of extension in the form of certain communistic groups, of which the principle, on an equally low level of culture, may be found in Iceland, in Servia, and even in America—elementary communities of from ten to fifty persons, living under the same roof, eating at the same table, and recognising the authority of a leader, instead of any bond of relationship. The Servian zadronga, is the most perfect type of this description. These communities, which were mentioned by Nestor and in the Pravda (code) of Jaroslav, continued to exist in Russia down to the seventeenth century, both in the north-west provinces, towards Pskov, and those in the south-west lying near Lithuania. This method of association, while, as its apologists have pointed out, it sup­pressed the bitterness of economic rivalries, contributed yet more to the paralysis of the spirit of individual enterprise, and certainly did not render family or sexual relations purer or tenderer.

That family life, properly so called, as practised amongst the Muscovites of the sixteenth century, did not admit of the progressive development of certain domestic virtues can­not be affirmed, and this the unfavourable testimony of all contemporary observers notwithstanding. Their observation was limited to the most apparent phenomena, and virtue is a plant which usually flourishes in the shade. One charac­teristic trait in this respect is the solidarity of feeling so power­ful in the numerous class of serving-men and daily guests who surrounded the heads of families of the period. These men, whether slaves or freemen, really constituted a sort of court (dvornia), surrounded by which the boiar loved to play the king, aping the ceremonial and the conferring of places prac­tised in the Grand Ducal household, save that in his bedroom he was apt to replace the spalnik by a postielnitsa. Badly fed, as a rule, for the turnkey (klioutchnik) did not fail to levy an unconscionable tithe on the food destined for the servants’ support ; ill-clothed, too, for, as in the Grand Duke’s palace, fine liveries and rich clothes were only worn on great occasions, the members of the dvornia frequently sought compensation out of doors. They wandered about the streets, fraternized with vagabonds and beggars, asked charity like them, and helped them, when darkness fell, to strip the passers-by- Re­ward and punishment alike were bestowed on their master’s whim, and their idea of justice w^ras one in which morality had no part. ‘ The master,’ they said, ■ will find a fault if he wants to strike.’ But they were ready to die for him. When a quarrel arose between two boiars their servants always inter­vened, and made this intervention a point of honour identical with that observable in the relations between the sloojilyie lioodi and the Sovereign. The boiar, habitually robbed and even betrayed by his servants, just as he often ill-used them, both in their persons and in their dearest interests, felt no scruple as to his own master, whom he deceived and whose property he stole, whenever and however he could, and whom he was quite capable, too, of betraying on occasion, though he would serve him, on some other, with an unchange­able devotion. Ivan the Terrible was to spend his whole life in denouncing and chastising his servants’ disloyalty, and yet he always found men to carry out all his undertakings : men with a moral system of their own, in which the sense of right and wrong had no place, and conscience played no part, but in which a single directing instinct asserted itself in prodigies of complete and absolute self-sacrifice—that one principle of ‘ service.’ This imperative absolute, the basis of the social and political organization of the country, triumphantly forced on the docile mind of a robust and patient race, has been the

secret of its triumphs and its glories. The whole of Russia’s greatness reposes on this foundation.

We have crossed the threshold of the family dwelling ; let us now follow the bolar on his walks abroad.

IV.—Society.

We know already that he never goes out except in a carriage or on horseback. The horse’s trappings are as splendid as his master’s clothes. The rider and his mount are all of a piece. The saddle is covered with morocco leather or velvet, em­broidered with gold; the housings are of the same precious material, the frontlet silver-mounted, and chains and necklets and bells jingle down to the creature’s very hoofs. A perfect peal, in fact, giving warning, even from the distance, of the great man’s coming, and bidding passers-by get themselves out of the way. The carriage, generally, was a sledge, for even in summer-time wheeled vehicles were despised, being considered much less dignified. This sledge, long and very narrow, usually held only one person. But two servants, as a rule, crouched on it at their master’s feet, hidden, like him, in winter-time, by a mass of furs. The horse, another peal of bells, adorned according to the season of the year with feathers or fox and marten tails, was bestridden by the coachman. Thus our boiar fared forth a-visiting, but as he neared the house he pro­posed to honour with his presence, a question of etiquette arose. Where should he dismount or get out of his sledge ? This, if the house to which the visit was paid belonged to a person of the highest rank, must be done at the courtyard cate. At the Kremlin, a few dignitaries had the entree to the court­yard, but they would have been knouted if they had dared to cross it altogether. Amongst equals, the visitor could drive or ride to the steps of the house. Here he was received, according to circumstances and to the rules of a most scrupu­lous ceremonial, by the master of the house or some attendant. Once within doors, he began by saluting the holy pictures, crossing himself before them, and then touching the ground with his right hand. Then he proceeded to salute his host, exchanging civilities ruled by the equality or differences of the respective ranks, and ranging from handshakings to genu­flections. Everything, down to the tiniest detail, was care­fully regulated. The opening remarks, too, followed certain stereotyped formulas, very ceremonious and hypocritically humble. * I strike my forehead like a slave in the presence of my benefactor ! . . . Pardon the poverty of my intelli­gence ! . . .’ Speaking to a Churchman, it was absolutely necessary to declare one’s self ‘ a great and impious sinner,’ and

to address him as ‘Orthodox doctor’ and ‘Guardian of the great light.’ After these and similar grimaces, refreshments were accepted—these were offered at every hour of the day— and when the guest departed, he began, as when he arrived, by paying his duty to the. holy pictures.

Meetings in public places involved less etiquette and con­straint, but they were not of common occurrence. The bathing estaWishments were not much frequented by people of con­dition, though the habit of taking baths daily, or several times in the week at all events, was shared by every class. But the humblest of gentlemen had his own bania. The moment a Muscovite felt out of sorts he drank a glass of brandy seasoned with pepper or garlic, ate a slice of onion, and took a douche. This was the usual course of treatment for every complaint ; none but a few great lords bestowed any confidence—and in their case it was limited—on doctors, who were not numerous in those days, and all of them of foreign origin. The first, who came into the country with Sophia Paleologus, wife of Ivan III., had been sentenced to death because he failed to cure one of his patients. This precedent had not produced an encouraging effect. Yet under Ivan IV. a medical body was to be formed, in which a quartette of Englishmen, Standish, Elmes, Roberts, and Frensham the apothecary⁷, were to compete with Elysius Bomelius the German. But not the whole of them together could have induced any native-born Russian to swallow a pill or accept any similar remedy.

Apart from the bath-houses, social life found its expression in banquets, which occurred pretty frequently and took two forms : they were either private or collective—arranged, in this latter case, by associations, communities, and called brattchiny {brat, brother). Friends and relations feasted among themselves on the great festivals, anc¹ important family gatherings, marriages, christenings, and funerals. Court ban­quets were given on such occasions as a coronation, the installation of a new Metropolitan, or the reception of a foreign Ambassador. The question of the places to be assigned to the guests at these feasts was hugely important, and often gave rise to quarrels, and even to bloody scuffles, although it was the correct tiling for a guest to make difficulties about taking his rightful seat at the high table. Two persons generally ate out of the same dish, helping themselves with their fingers, and putting the bones on their plates, which were not intended to serve any other purpose, and were not changed during the meal. The amphitryon distributed the bread and salt, and sent delicate morsels to his guests. The number of the courses passes all imagination, and the duration of these repasts, together with the peculiar taste of most of the dishes and the

smell of garlic, onions, and rotten fish that soon filled the air, the excess to which the guests carried their libations, and the disgusting conduct in which most of them indulged, made them unendurable to foreigners. It w^ras nut an uncommon thing even for ladies, w^Tho took their meals apart from the men, to be carried home unconscious, and when their hostess sent to inquire for them the next day, the correct answer, their tribute to the hospitable entertainment they had received, was, ‘ I was so merry yesterday that I do not know how I got home !’

Amongst devout folk, religious observances were strangely mingled with all this carousing. The clergy were invited and set in the place of honour ; they paid their score in prayers and ceremonies of various kinds, blessed the food and drink, and burned incense in every room in the house. Sometimes, in imitation of the practice in the monasteries, a monstrance containing ‘ the host of the Blessed Virgin ’ was placed upon the table. The meal was stopped now and then, and psalms were sung. Beggars were fed in the antechamber, and some were even made to sit down among the other guests. The seclusion of the ter cm was broken, and the two sexes met. Players on instmments and jugglers fanned the general merri­ment, and filthy songs rang on the air.

Amongst the peasants, tl e feast took the name of ‘ private beer,’ because it presupposed the permission, only occasionally granted, to brew strong drinks, beer, fermented liquors, or hydromel/all of which were monopolies. This authorization could be had for three days, or even for a week, at the great festivals, and when the period closed, the fiscal authorities sealed up the various drinks until the next feast-day came.

The brattchiny were also called ssypnyie (from ssypat, to pour together). In ancient days the shares were probably paid in wheat, poured on to the same heap. These collective banquets, which were presided over by an elected staroste, enjoyed a judicial autonomy, of which some remnants existed down to the seventeenth century. The quarrels between persons present at them were not amenable to the ordinary tribunals. The proverb, ‘ We will brew no beer with that man,’ indicates the nature of these feasts, symbolic of an alliance, an action taken in common. At them peasants and nobles met in perfect equality. But disorderly scenes, scuffles, even murders, were of more frequent occurrence here than at private gatherings. Wherefore pious folk generally avoided them. The drinking was excessive. Vladimir had already written, ¹ Roussi vessele piti: nie mojet bez tavo byti ’ (‘ The joy of Russia is to drink : she could not do without it ’). Joy, tenderness, sympathy, a whole gamut of feeling, found its expression in the bowl. A man got dead drunk to

express his friendship for his guest or for a cheery comrade. And he ate, too, till he was ready to burst—pikes’ heads dressed with garlic, fish soups with saffron in them, hares’ kidneys stewed in milk and ginger, strongly flavoured cookery all of it, highly spiced, that burnt the mouth and necessitated copious libations. The wines most commonly consumed came from Hungary and the Rhine, and are not always easy to recognise under their corrupted names. For Patersernen we must read Peter Simon's wein, a Rhenish vintage imported by Peter Simon, a Dutch merchant. There were French wines, red and white burgundies—amongst which the Romanee vintage no doubt figured under that name of Romaneia now- applied in Russian taverns to com-brandy and alcohol dis­tilled from fruits, malmsey, alicant, and other Spanish wines. French wines were more especially used by the Church. Brandy was also imported in large quantities, and so were German and French white wine vinegars. The usual drink of the common people was kvass : but Tetaldi the Italian mentions another preparation, frequently used, called tolokno, into the composi­tion of which dry oatmeal entered. But Russian authorities only speak of this as a food.

As to the extent of the habits of intemperance thus revealed, witnesses disagree as much as on every other matter. Accord­ing to Jenkinson, the English traveller, Russia would have been a drunken country whether Ivan IV. had been sober or not, whereas a memorandum drawn up at Lubeck in 1567, on the occasion of a projected embassy from Germany to Ivan's Court, points quite in the opposite direction. The Ambassadors are charged to keep perfectly sober, because drunkenness is considered the greatest of vices in Muscovy. And the author of this memorandum is a merchant who made a considerable stay in Moscow (Forsten, ⁴ The Baltic Question,’ i. 475). Michalon the Lithuanian, certainly an impartial witness, speaks in the same sense, adding, it must be confessed, a state­ment, thoroughly untrue, that there were no taverns in the country. Towards the close of Ivan IV.’s reign, accord­ing to Tetaldi, the sale of spirituous liquors was only allowed in one subu^rb of Moscow, which is also mentioned by Herber- stein, Guagnino, and Olearius, though each, according to his own fashion, maims the word, the etymology of which they derive from nalivat, to pour. The real word was Nalivki, and the spot, which is within the boundaries of the present city, is marked by a Church of the Transfiguration, still called na Nalivkakh (at the Nalivki). The trade in strong drinks seems, in fact, to have been centralized, at a certain moment, in this outlying comer of the ancient capital. At the same time, however, the other towns and villages of the country

were completely free in this respect, thanks to the innumerable taverns, the existence of which the fiscal authority favoured in its own interests. In this matter, as in so many others, secular interests were at variance with the principles of a vexatious system of morals, and the result was a series of com­promises which have led observers astray.

The Church, as may be imagined, warred against the kahaks ; but from a general point of view, if the Church’s own witness is to be believed, her commands and anathemas did very little good. The conciliable of the year 1551 has left us a picture of contemporary morals which reveals a condition, in the popular classes, at all events, of extreme profligacy. In the course of certain nocturnal gatherings, which combined the commemoration of a Christian festival with the worship of a heathen tradition—the feast of St. John and the festival of Iarilo, the Slav Priapus—drunkenness favoured every other form of debauchery. Men and women, girls and boys, spent the night in some out of the way spot, dancing, singing, in­dulging in every kind of excess; and, so we read in the report of this illustrious assembly, ‘ when dawn came, they ran shout­ing like mad folk down to the river, where they all bathed together, and when the bell rang for matins they went back to their houses, and there fell down, like dead people, of sheer exhaustion.’ The stress laid by the members of this council, and by all Church writers of that time, on the sin of sodomy, is equally significant.

But the Church, as we know, exacted much—too much. She confounded and condemned every⁷ form of sociability with a quite excessive severity. Secular art, like pleasure, fell under her interdict. She waged war, too, against the skomorokhy. According to a popular legend, which had a religious basis, the devil took on the form of these wandering jugglers and musicians, so that he might lead honest folk to their perdition. Without this special action on the devil’s part, the skomorokhy frequently played the part of burglars—nay, even of highway robbers. Considered outlaws, and treated as such, they moved about, to insure their own safety, in bands numbering from thirty to sixty persons, and sometimes they grew dangerous. They were artists in their way, and the forerunners of the entertainers who form an integral part of every civilized life. They supplied the comic note, and the national theatre is the outcome of their coarse and burlesque performances. They had rivals, too, pursued, like them, by the thunders of the Church—other comedians, these, bear­leaders.

The bear held an important position in the Muscovite life of this epoch. He, too, was an artist after a fashion ; and not

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only had he been taught to perform every kind of trick, but lie figured as the chief character, and under divers aspects, in a comic repertory dear to the common herd. Sometimes he was a judge, who took bribes and delivered grotesque sentences ; sometimes he was a husband, fooled first of all, and then thrashed. He was the Punch, the Snagarelle, of the country. Now and then, indeed, he was promoted to play some tragic part. Physical exercises and effort of every k'nd, races on foot or on horseback, archery competitions, tournaments, at which the riders picked up rings on their lance-points, and fights, whether with fists or cudgels, were all much enjoyed. But the most favourite sport of all was a match between the bear and hounds, or other animals, or, above all, between the bear and a man. The man, armed with a spear, strove to strike his terrible adversary in the breast just when the creature stood up on its hind legs. If he missed his aim, he ran the risk of being tom to pieces, and this often occurred. The bear’s antagonists were generally selected from amongst the Sovereign’s dog-boys ; but on the lists of the most famous champions we find such aristocratic names as that of Prince Goundorov, who, in 1628, was rewarded with a piece of blue damask for having killed a bear in single combat and of Feodor Sytine, the son of a bo'iar, tom to pieces, in the course of a less successful struggle, in 1632.

Affairs of honour were also decided with fists or cudgels. It was not considered necessary to unsheath the sword on such accounts, and the fact suffices to show how rustic and savage this half-complete society still was, how far removed from the elegant forms of life already existing in the West. It was a far cry, indeed, to those French and Italian palaces where the guests already talked, after they had laughed and danced ; where the man who could tell a story pleasantly, or ‘ say the word,’ was welcomed ; where things of beauty were admired, at all events, if comfort was not generally sought; where love was full of poetry, and there was wit even in hatred ; where, if a quarrel arose, men slew each other—after they had taken their leave—nobly, as they had delighted to live. To the models of beauty and grace there blossoming in the flush of a new art summer, the spirit of Russia opposed a very different type, personified by another order of vagabonds, one which enjoyed the favour of the populace and the indulgence of the clergy — the iourodivyie or blajennyie, coarse seers and magi­cians, who turned the people’s credulity to account, and skilfully concealed their real trade under professions of extreme austerity and appearances of miraculous power. They stalked naked in the bitterest cold, they let their neglected tresses float 011 the breeze, they pretended to need neither food nor

clothing, but they went into any shop and took what they wanted without paying for it. To be robbed by them was an earnest of prosperity, a certainty of blessing. They were accounted saints. They had the privilege of telling the truth, even to the Sovereign himself, and we shall see the Terrible, when brought to close quarters with one of them, yield to his bold words. The Church tolerated them, and even admitted them to paradise, and at the splendid funeral of the blajennyi Basil, to whom the masterpiece of Barma and Postnikov on the Kremlin Square is dedicated, the holy man’s coffin rested on Ivan’s own shoulder.

I have said enough to enable the reader to measure the abyss which parted Europe from this corner of the European world, at the moment when Russia was about to enter into contact with the civilizations lying nearest her, and thus to render the story of this evolution, which I am now about to com­mence, intelligible.

THE YOUTH OF IVAN

CHAPTER I THE FIRST RUSSIAN TSAR

I.—THE BIRTH OF THE TERRIBLE. II. THE GOVERNMENT OF THE

BOIARS. III.—MARRIAGE AND CORONATION. IV.—SYLVESTER AND ADACHEV. V.—THE FIRST ASSEMBLY : RUSSIAN PAR­LIAMENTARIAN^!.

I.—The Birth of the Terrible.

On Ivan the Terrible’s birthday, August 2.5 (September 4), 1530, the whole country was filled with the noise of thunder, and with awful flashes of lightning. Even when the child began to stir in his mother’s womb, the Muscovite armies fighting befcre Kazan had felt a flush of eagerness and valour such as they had never known before. More genuine than the prodigies of which popular legend has thus pre­served the memory were the shocks which at that moment were staggering all Europe. Luther and Calvin, Wycliff and Huss, had made their entry on the world’s stage, ami from one end of Western Christendom to the other, on battlefields where brother fought against brother, and on public squares that bristled with scaffolds, in churches tom with distress and courts shaken by revolution, Catholics and Protestants, soldiers and priests, Princes and varlets, were striving to turn the great shout of liberty that had rung from the battlements of the Wartburg into a war-cry, an instrument of massacre and oppression. Shaken to her foundations, the •Church, from her begging friars to her Pope, was arming to fight for her privileges; but within the walls of Rome, shattered by the assault of the German troops, the Holy Empire and France were disputing the empire of the world.

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In the North, the religious reform was serving as a stepping- stone for the new dynasty that was climbing to the Norwegian and Swedish thrones, and Muscovy, wrapped in centuries of isolation, had no part in these events—was not aware of them, or scarcely felt their distant consequences. Yet Time was labouring to reknot the bonds Time had himself untied. Western Europe was beginning, in some quarters at all events, to take an interest in the mysterious neighbour by whom she herself was scorned and disowned. As early as the fifteenth century, when the leaven which was to destroy her intern?! unity and harmony was already working within her, she had watched the rising of yet another peril above her horizon. Answering the tempest against the Papacy that roared within her boundaries, she had heard the mighty clamour of Islam, making ready to assault the Christian world. Stirred by the twofold threat, Rome and Vienna, Genoa and Venice, had looked about them for some new support, and had discovered Russia. Ever since that day, Italian diplomats and Levantine agents had been labouring to bridge the gulf. By his marriage wrth the daughter of the Paleologus, Ivan IV.’s grandfather had entered the family of the European Princes, under the auspices of the Holy See. In 1473, the Venetian Senate reminded the Muscovite monarch of his claim to the Byzan­tine inheritance. In 1480 and 1490, the direct heir, Andrew Paleologus, tried to strike a bargain as to his rights, at Moscow, lie failed, and began to treat with Charles VIII. of France. But Rome was still supposed to hold the key of this treasure, and Rome, so men fancied, would dispose of it to secure a Russian army to fight the Turks. In 1484, Sixtus IV. found it necessary to reassure Casimir, King of Poland, who imagined his own rights, as an elder member of the Slav family, threatened.

Ivan III., who cared more for realities than for imaginary titles, sent one scornful refusal after another. Yet the matter of the Russian provinces, claimed alike by Muscovy and Poland, was dependent on the hypothesis of a great Slav empire, strengthened by the investiture of Rome. The new diplo­matic combinations which arose in this sphere of rival in­fluences and dominations themselves endued the Pan-Russian idea with body and strength.

Though the Grand Duke dismissed Andrew Paleologus to seek other buyers, he gave a far better reception to the Emperor’s envoy, Von Turn. He avowed himself ready to make an alliance with Maximilian, with the eventual object of opposing Islam, but to settle historic accounts with his Polish neighbour, in the first place. Without waiting for any Papal bulls, he allowed his subjects to call him by the name, of

Tsar, which corresponded, in the imagination of the orthodox, with the Imperial dignity and the claim to the inheritance of Byzantium. And to this, in 1483, he added, by his own autho­rity, the title of Sovereign of all the Russias, which amounted to an assertion of his rights over Kiev and Vilna.

This autonomous solution of the great Oriental problem had been long since prepared. The south-western Slavs had been the first to perceive it. In the fourteenth century Douchan, a Servian, and Alexander, a Bulgarian, had both suggested it, when each dreamt a conquest of Constantinople, ami began by proclaiming himself Emperor. A reference to the building of a new tsargrad (imperial city) at Tymov appears in the manuscripts of that date. But, as Monsieur Milioukov has justly observed, before the Russia of the sixteenth century could appropriate this programme of national greatness, she had to await an impulse that was to come from Europe, just as the Russia of the seventeenth century was to feel a similar external impetus before she could conceive and accept the reform of Peter the Great.

When Ivan III. died, in 1505, he left five sons, and divided his inheritance among them. But to Vassili, the eldest, he gave not one-third, according to precedent, but two-thirds—seventy- six towns and provinces, including the capital. Vassili had married, as his lirst wife, the daughter of a boi'ar, Salome- lourievna Sabourov. He had no children, and mourned the fact. ‘ The birds are happy !’ he would say when he looked into a nest. The spells to which the barren wife had recourse produced no effect. A council of bo'iars, summoned in 1525. proposed another expedient, coinciding, no doubt, with the husband’s secret desires. ‘ A barren fig-tree must be cast out of the field !’ One councillor alone, the bearer of a name soon to win histre in the camp of the aristocratic opposi­tion, Simon Kourbski, d?red raise his voice in defence of the sacred bond about to be broken, and his protest was sup­ported by the members of the clergy who represented the reform party, Vassiane Patriki6v and Maximus the Greek. They were overruled. Salome was thrown into a cloister, and Vassili led Helen Glinski, the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee, to the altar. He was desperately in love with her, and the barrenness (if his repudiated wife was probably a mere pretext. Since the Muscovite Sovereigns had given up taking their wives from foreign Courts, a habit had come in of opening a sort of beauty competition among the native ladies, from whom the master made his choice. Hundred? were brought together from every comer of the country. Now, on this occasion nothing of the kind seems to have been attempted.

A beautiful woman, who, thanks to her origin, had enjoyed

a comparatively superior education, Helen Glinski possessed charms which Vassili could not have found in any Muscovite. Her father, Vassili Lvovitch, had died when she was very young, and she had grown up under the guardianship of her uncle Michael, a former comrade-in-arms of Albert of Saxony and the Emperor Maximilian, a wandering knight, whose adventures had led him to Italy, where he had even become a Catholic. Thus did Western Europe find her way back into the Kremlin. According to Herberstein, Vassili went so far as to shave off his beard to please his new partner, and this in itself was almost a revolution.

This second marriage, called adulterous by the ¹ monks from beyond the Volga,’ did not promise, however, to be more blessed by HeaVen than the first. There was'talk already of a son born to Salome in her convent. But at last the prayers of a more, indulgent monk. Pc.phnucius Borovski—afterwards declared a worker of miracles and canonized, as a reward for this one—were granted. Helen brought the longed-for heir into the world. Three years later, on October 15, 1533, she bore a second son, George, and immediately afterwards she was left a widow. Ivan III. had altered the succession, according to which the throne, in former times, had passed to the dead Sovereign’s brothers. The regency, at all events, should have been theirs. That Ivan left any other order seems uncertain. But Helen, the scion of a race of adventurers, energetic and ambitious, had a strong party behind her, and knew how to use it so as to grasp power, and keep it.

She made a twofold blunder by refusing to share it with her uncle, a gifted man, and giving the lion’s share to her lover, Prnce Telepniev-Obolenski, a. mere muddler. Trouble soon began. Helen, having thrust her own uncle and one of Vassili’s brothers, George, into prison, found herself in diffi­culties with another brother-in-law, Andrew, who had received Staritsa as his appanage, and avowed himself discontented with his share. She reached the brink of civil war, and only escaped it by laying an ambush into which the Prince fell. He departed, in his turn, into one of those Muscovite dungeons which so seldom yielded up their prey. Hunger and the weight of the chains with which he w^ras loaded hastened his end, and his adherents, to the number of about thirty, gar­nished gibbets set at stated intervals along the road from Moscow to Novgorod. Novgorod had seemed inclined to send the vanquished man armed help.

Thus for several years Helen struggled on, forced, as well, to hold her own against enemies beyond the border, Tartars and Poles, w⁷ho joined hands to take advantage of the weakness of her Government. In 1538, her foes at home had recourse to

poison, it is thought, and Ivan was orphaned. Then the power fell into the hands of the boiars, and oligarchy was soon expressed in anarchy.

II.—The Government of the Boiars.

Left to himself, Obolenski at once lost his footing in the tempest. Rivals whom the Regent had been able to hold in check now rushed upon an easy revenge. Above the ruins of a decimated party the Chou'iski raised their heads. By their origin they stood very near the throne, and their pre­tensions aimed at something more than a mere temporary supremacy. They belonged, like Vassili and Ivan, to the line of Alexander Nevski, the elder branch of a family of which the reigning house was only a younger one, and the height to which their dreams of ambition soared may be conceived. Within a week they had got rid of the favourite, who disap­peared into an oubliette, in which Ivan lost his natural guardian and even his foster-mother, Obolenski’s sister, Agrafena, who shared her brother’s fate. But Vassili Vassilevitch Chouiski and his cousin Andrew, who came out of prison at this juncture, found themselves face to face with another apparition. The opening of the dungeons had brought a whole army of competi­tors into the lists, ami among them Prince Ivan Bielski, who had no intention of giving way to any other person. He ad­vanced the claims of his own ancestor, Guedymin, as against those of the descendants of Rurik. His father, Feodor, had married a Princess of Riazan, niece of Ivan III. His brother Simon, molested by Helen, had fled, and found in Poland, in the Crimea, and even at Constantinople, something better than a refuge—an alliance that enabled him to claim his heredi­tary possessions, Bielsk and Riazan, annexed to the Muscovite Empire.

Thus, in the struggle which, from 1538 to 1543, filled Moscow With violence and carnage, and from which Ivan’s own person and the integrity of his inheritance found no protection save in the antagonism of the rival families and their eagerness to de­stroy each other, the whole existence of the work accomplished by the younger branch of the Rurikovitchy was threatened. But the child had to pass through cruel trials. In their triumph, the Chouiski lost all moderation, sacked the Tsar’s treasury, and made themselves absolute masters. Ivan Chouiski, who had become head of the family on the death of Vassili Vassile­vitch, forgot all respect. ‘ In my presence,’ wrote Ivan IV. at a later date ‘ he stretched out his booted feet on my father’s bed.’ And he remembered, too, that the victor of the hour, who had been covered by a shabby pelisse, ended by eating

off gold plate. ‘ He certainly did not inherit that from his father. If he had, he would have begun by getting himself a better coat. And meanwhile I was suffering privations, lacking everything, even to food and clothing.’ The young Sovereign suffered in his affections too. First his foster­mother had been taken from him, then, in 1543, he was de­prived of his earliest friend, Feodor Siemienovitch Vorontsov. This unhappy man, whom the Chouiski hunted into a room in the Kremlin, beat, and threatened with death, owed his bare life to the intervention of the Metropolitan ; but even this could not prevent him from bung exiled to Kostroma.. The Metropolitan throne itself, indeed, had to suffer attack. When­ever a coup d'eiat placed one family or the other in power, the holder of the see changed too. In 1539, the Bielski put Jehosaphat in the place of Daniel. In 1542, when the Chouiski got the upper hand and sent Ivan Bielski to Bielooziero. the Metropolitan shared his disgrace. The provinces received no better treatment. Under the Chouiski’s rule especially, bar­barity and confusion were rife. Except at Novgorod, in which town they had supporters and favoured friends, their repre­sentatives, as the chroniclers tell us, behaved ‘ like wild beasts.’ Everybody who could tGok to his heels, and the towns stood empty. The Italian architect Friasini, who had been summoned to Russia, and permanently established there by Vassili, escaped and got across the frontier just when he was being sent to Siebieje to direct the construction of the fortifications there. He told the Bishop of Derpt the bc'iars were making everybodv’s life impossible. The Bielski were more humane, and likewise more intelligent. It was during their short tenure of power that the first charters— forerunners of the autonomous communal system—were granted. But none of these men had any idea of government save by an abuse of power.

While subjecting their country to a most intolerable tyranny, they were teaching its future master the most odious of lessons. Thanks to them, violence in every form took hold of the boy’s feelings and imagination, and inspired him, body and soul. Violent he was to be, like them, growing up as he did in an atmosphere of perpetual battle, ready to give back blow for blow, desperately nervous, cruel, irritable. His earliest pleasures, shared with the companions chosen for him, were hideous, like everything about him. Seeing men tortured under his eyes, he tortured beasts till he should be able to do likewise. His great amusement was to throw dogs down from the top of one of the castle terraces and enjoy their anguish. He was given his way, he was even encouraged in it. The men’s turn was soon to come.

It was a rash undertaking for the Chouiski and the Bielski, who brought the boy up in this fashion, to claim any lengthy control over an autocrat who would soon have a beard on his chin, and was already old enough to realize his own position. He beheld the very men who offended and ill-used him in private, who quarrelled over his patrimony, and used it, one after the other for, their own convenience, go back to their real rank when there was any official function—Court festivity or recep­tion of a foreign Ambassador—bend lowly before his throne, become crawling slaves. He was soon to turn this lesson to account. In September, 1543, he had allowed himself to be parted from Vorontsov. In the December of that year, having previously put the docility of his dog-boys to the test, he had Andrew Chouiski carried off by them. The rogues obeyed, and even went beyond their orders, for they strangled the boi'ar, whom they had been told to hale to prison. Ivan held it well done, and everybody understood that Russia’s master, at all events, if not her government, was changed.

The boi'ars he had spared went on governing in their own way, but they did not venture to cross their Sovereign, who, before Louis XIV., had, after his own fashion, spoken the words, Uetat, c’est moi! He began to go about the streets now, thrashing the men he met, violating the women, and always applauded by those about him. Feodor Vorontsov, whom he had recalled ’mm exile, was one of these ; but the master’s favour was already veering towards more docile comrades, whose names and parentage shielded them less from his caprice.

Ivan preferred his dog-boys to members of the aristocracy, whom he was apt to suspect and dread as being fresh Chouiski. In May, 1546, while he was hunting near Kolomna, he found himself face to face with a troop of armed men who barred his way. They w^rere the Novgorod musketeers, coming to com­plain of their governor. Ivan, who understood nothing about their business, ordered them to be put aside. There was a scuffle, m the course of which several shots were exchanged. The young Prince was not hurt, but he was very much frightened. His physical courage was always to fail him. In addition to — a very probable hereditary predisposition, the terrors of his ~childhood had made him nervous in the. extreme, his body —shivered and his soul was troubled at the slightest alarm. He took to his heels, imagined a plot, and ordered an inquiry. A candidate for his favour, Vassili Zakharov, at that moment a plain diak, had no difficulty in obtaining a hearing for his accusation of Vorontsov and his family, already under sus­picion and in semi-disgrace. The pupil at once went far beyond his teachers. The Terrible came upon the scene.

There was work for the executioner and his scaffold. He was not to enjoy many idle hours in future. Feodor Vorontsov and one of his cousins lost their heads. Other presumed accomplices took their way into exile.

Zakharov may not have been the sole author of this catas­trophe. In the Sovereign’s intimate surroundings a man had already appeared, whose character and career a whole school of history has delighted to idealize, associating therewith a brilliant period in the new reign, which, thanks to his in­fluence, according to its view, was freed from bloody excess, and stuffed with noble effort and glorious exploits. Alexis Adachev, a man of humble origin, who had been in the Sovereign’s household since the year 1543, was borne on the Court registers as one of the officers of the bedchamber, ‘ makers of the bed.’ I shall endeavour, later, to define this man’s character and the part he played.

Towards the end of this same year, 1546, Ivan was to affirm his emancipation 'n yet more decisive fashion. On December 17 the news ran through Moscow that the Grand Duke had resolved to marry, and to marry a daughter of the soil.

III.—Marriage and Coronation.

This resolution was probably not so sudden as it has gener­ally been taken to have been. As early as 1543 an embassy had been sent into Poland ; Feodor Ivanovitch Soukine and Istoma Stoianov, the envoys, were desired to let it be under­stood that the Prnce was old enough to look about for a wife (Bantich-Kami^nski, Correspondance Diplomatique, Lec­tures de la Societe d’Histoire, i860, p. 72). Other attempts of the same nature would appear to have been made, and it was only after many failures that Ivan’s pride bowed to the necessity of an alliance that would not revive the tradition of Jaroslav. He was resolved, at all events, to make up for his discomfiture to some extent. The day after that on which his decision had been announced, a Te Deum was sung in the Cathedral of the Assumption, and after it, Ivan, calling his boiars together, announced that he intended to be crowned likewise, and this, not like his predecessors, as Grand Duke, but under the title of Tsar, to which they had hitherto made no formal claim.

Tsar, Emperor—the two titles were synonymous in the language of the country, though the first, indeed, had lost caste owing to the discredit brought on it, amidst the dismember­ment of the Mongol power, by the crowd of Tartar princelets— some of them tributaries to Moscow, or mere heads of provinces in her pay—who had assumed it. Yet the lords of ancient

Byzantium had bome it, too, and it was the Empire of the East that Ivan dreamt of raising up once more in the new capital of the Orthodox world. Church literature had long been labouring towards this resurrection. In all books written in the Slav tongue the word tsar was used indifferently to denote the Kings of Judsea, the rulers of Assyria, Egypt, and Babylon, the Emperors of Constantinople and of Rome. At the same time, by perpetual insinuation, by cunningly-suggested freaks of fancy, the illusion of an historical descent connecting the rulers of Moscow with these predecessors filled the readers’ imaginations, and slowly permeated the national mind. Was not Muscovy the ‘ Sixth Empire ’ mentioned in the Apoca­lypse ? And had not tlie house of Rurik, before the days of Sophia Paleologus, won a right to the inheritance of the Porphyrogenetes, to that of Constantine the Great, and even to that of the Roman Caesars themselves ? We have seen that for centuries the idea of a ‘ third Rome ’ had been floating like a dream in the Slavonic world, and perpetually seeking some more definite form. After the fall of the Slav Empires in Bulgaria and Servia, after the conquest of the Balkan Pen­insula by the Turks, this dream was naturally driven north­ward. Cyprian the Bulgarian, sent in 1382 from Constanti­nople to Moscow to fill the Metropolitan see, brought with him the phraseology elaborated by Ephimus at Tyrnov, and found it was received by willing ears. Immediately after the fall of Constantinople, all those who had escaped the ship­wreck of Southern Slavdom turned their final hopes in this direction. Pakhomii the Servian, in his turn, revealed a solemn recognition of the 'mperial title of the Moscow Sovereigns by the Emperor John Paleologus. Other writers set to work to bring the investiture into harmony with the sacred texts. They had already succeeded in applying these prophecies to Alexander of Bulgaria. It required less effort to transfer them from one Slav Prince to another. According to the Greek tradition, Ishmael was to be vanquished by a ‘ fair ’ people, and the word for ‘ fair ’ in Russian is roussyii. One of the best-known of the legends of Byzantine origin current among the Slav peoples—one which travelled west­ward in the German poem of Apollonius of Tyre, and the old French romances dealing with Oberon and Huon of Bordeaux, relates that the imperial Insignia of the Porphyrogenetes came from Babylon, whither the Eastern Emperor Leo had sent to fetch them. Other legends referred to the acquisition of these insignia by Vladimir Monomachus, or St. Vladimir. In the Stepiennaia Kniga Macarius learnedly explains that Vladimir, when he was dying, confided this sacred treasure to his sixth son, George, so that he and his descendants might

keep watch and ward over it till a Prince capable of making use of it should arise in Russia. As early as in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, on the other hand, Slav genealogists had contrived to trace the descent of the Bul­garian Assanids from an illustrious Roman house, and in the fourteenth they likewise discovered a relationship between the Servian Nemanitch and the Emperor Constantine—nay, even with Augustus himself. Thus, when Macarius intro­duced a Prouss, brother of Augustus, whose descendant Rurik was supposed to be, into his life of St. Olga, a Russian Princess, he was only following former precedents.

The ti*le now claimed by the son of Vassili was all this: a whole world of myths and svmbols, of glorious memories and ambitious dreams., made flesh in living and tangible reality.

The coronation took place on January 16, 1547, and nothing which might heighten its glories was forgotten. In presence of a mighty concourse, amidst the joyous pealing of bells and all the mustered pomp of Church and Throne, Bishops, priests, and monks prayed God to grant the new Tsar the light of justice and of truth, while all around him his bolars scattered handfuls of gold pieces, emblems of the prosperity which was his promised lot. Yet the heir of the Greek and Roman Emperors did not venture to make known his pre­tensions to the foreign Sovereigns. He knew both his father and his grandfather had met with a rebuff. Vassili had succeeded, in 1514, in slipping the title of Caesar into a treaty with the Emperor Maximilian. But Vienna, disowning her own plenipotentiary, Snitzpanner, had refused to sign until the text was altered. Poland, too, was irreconcilable as to this matter. Some of the small German States and the Patriarch of Constantinople were the only powers that show ed any disposition to oblige, now they themselves offered the sole hope of dignity left to the professors of the Orthodox faith. And even in this quarter Ivan thought it well to delay his application till the morrow of his greatest victories in the year 1561, and offered with it, then, a liberal donation. He met with very moderate success. The Patriarch Jehosaphat did indeed acknowledge the son of Vassili as Tsar, and as the descendant of Princess Anne, the Emperor Basil’s sister. He even went so far as to offer, superfluously, to renew the coronation ceremony by the intervention of a Metropolitan despatched for that purpose. But out of the thirty-seven signatures which adorned the charter sent from Constan­tinople to Moscow, five-and-thirty were later to be recog­nised as forgeries (Pierling, ‘ Russia and the Holy See,’ i. 319 ; Milioukov, ‘ Essays on the History of Russian Culture,’ iii 71, founded on Regel, Analecta Byzantino Rossisq., 1891).

Even the Orthodox Church held aloof,though the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch vied with each other in their zealous acceptance of the accomplished fact, and the Patriarch of Jerusalem went still farther, and proclaimed the new Tsar ‘ the head of Christendom.’ The great body of the Eastern clergy refused to follow this lead, and the Tsarate was fain to enter this community, wherein it claimed the highest place of all, by a low-browed door, and to stumble on the threshold. But the Muscovite people knew naught of these details. In the poetry of the bylines, wherein facts and dates were hope­lessly confused, the national pride and the popular fancy worked in unison, casting a veil of fascinating fiction over humble beginnings and early discomfitures. In these the bea rer of the Imperial insignia, passing from Babylon to Constanti­nople, where he found the Empire laid m ruins and the Ortho­dox faith endangered, travelledfrom the shoresof the Bosphorus to the banks of the Volga, never halting till he reached the camp before Kazan, and there fell in with the true Defender of the Church, the conqueror of Islam. On the panels of the symbolic throne still shown in the Cathedral of the Assumption, the native artists spent their skill on representations of other and similar myths, and, within the limits of his huge dominions at all events, Ivan felt himself girdled by a radiance of power and glory such as no ancestor of his had ever known.

His marriage was to bring him a happiness such, as few of them, we may be sure, had tasted,, either. The bride had been chosen, this time, according to the accepted rule. All the, marriageable girls in the Empire belonging to the class of the ‘ men who serve ’ had been ordered to repair to Moscow. A huge building containing many rooms, each with twelve beds in it, had been prepared for their reception. On the occa­sion of Vassili’s first marriage, 500 beauties, according to Francesco da Collo, or 1,500, according to Herberstein, had thus been brought together. These figures probably apply to two successive choices out of the general mass of competitors, and a preliminary selection had no doubt been made in the various provinces. At Byzantium, where the same practice was in vogue, the provincial governors received detailed ^:nstructions for the purpose, with directions as to the height and other qualifications required. When the seraglio had received all its inmates, the Sovereign, accompanied by one man, chosen among his oldest courtiers, took his way there. He walked through all the rooms, and presented each fair lady with a kerchief embroidered with gold and gems, which he threw upon her bosom. His choice once made, gifts were bestowed on the companions of the bride, and they were sent back to their own homes.

After this fashion, in the year 1547, the Tsar’s choice fell on Anastasia, the fatherless daughter of Iourievitch Zakharine- Kochkine, of an ancient boiar family, which, amidst the ruin of the princely families, had contrived, thanks to an avoidance of those perilous rivalries from which the young Sovereign had suffered so bitterly, to retain its place close to the throne. It is not impossible, indeed, that even on this occasion the customary competition was a mere matter of form. The Zakharine-Kochkine were favourites of Fortune. Like the Cheremetiev, the Kolytchev, and the Kobyline, they were said to be the descendants of a certain Andrew Kobyla, a Prussian fugitive, so the chroniclers assert. But the national vanity, at a later date, turned ‘ Prussia’ into ‘Novgorod’— there was a quarter of that city the denizens of which were commonly called Prussians. Kobyla’s Slav origin cannot be contested. His very name proves it. Kobyla stands for ‘ mare ’ both in Russian and Polish, and it is a well-known fact that the present capital of the Germanic nation stands on Slav soil.

We have no details concerning Ivan’s marriage, but those given ir: the preceding chapter of this work are applicable to the occasion. The young Tsar was as much in love with his wife as his father had been before him, and long years after­wards he was to call up, with bitter regret, the joys, all too soon cut down, ot a union in which he seems to have found every satisfaction and pleasure known to body, heart, and mind. But liis honeymoon was soon and c ruelly disturbed. He was married on February 3, 1547. Less than three months after that date, a whole quarter of his capital was de stroyed by fire. Ivan was tom from the sweet peace in which he had seemed to revel, and which those about him had re­joicingly accepted as the guerdon of a happier future. The fair and gracious Anastasia was already looked on as the good angel destined to dispel the Sovereign’s fits of fury, and insure his subjects’ peace. But this was but a dream, and it may well be, in a country which is the home of legend, that an influence the visible effects of which are not attributable to any per­manent cause was somewhat magnified. Ivan’s irritable nature, which had slumbered for a time, woke suddenly to life. When the inhabitants of Pskov came, in their turn, on June 30, 1547, to make a complaint against their governor, the Tsar gave them a worse reception than that he had bestowed on their fellows of Novgorod. Returning to the cruel pastime of his boyish days, he poured lighted brandy all over them, and then, having had them stripped, would have proceeded, no doubt, to put them to death, had not a luckv diversion turned his mind from this particular form of entertainment.

The scene had taken place in the village of Ostrovka, close to the capital, and just at this crisis a messenger arrived bearing bad news : the great bell of the Kremlin had fallen down. It was a gloomy portent, the presage, according to the spirit of those days, of other and more terrible catastrophes. And this time, indeed, the omen was to come true, amidst events destined to bring fresh characters on the scene, and change the face of the lately-opened reign. Ivan forgot all about his victims. Calling for a horse, he galloped to the scene of the accident.

IV.—Sylvester and Adachev.

Once again, on June 21, fire devoured Moscow, and this time its ravages exceeded anything ever seen within the memory of man. The Kremlin itself suffered. The cupola of the Cathedral of the Assumption, the Tsar’s palace and the Metropolitan’s, the treasury, the arsenal, two monasteries, and several churches, with all the wealth within them, were consumed by the flames. The Metropolitan Macarius was nearly suffocated, tumbled down in his flight, and hurt him­self severely. Seventeen hundred victims, men, women, and children, were burnt alive. Every shop in the mercantile quarter was destroyed. Ivan was left without a roof over his head. He took refuge in the village of Vorobievo, on that ‘ mountain of the sparrows ’ whence Napoleon was to catch his first glimpse of the city which was to be the tomb of his glory, and there the Tsar held a council. His confessor, Feodor Barmine, talked about witchcraft, to which, according to him, the disaster was due. In this connection, indeed, there was a legend. The sorcerers were supposed to take human hearts, tom out of corpses, to dip them in a pail of water, and then kindle the fire by watering the streets with the contents of the pail. A few boiars backed the accusation, and the search for the culprits began. Swayed by a treacherous suggestion, the crowd gathered on a Sunday, some few days later, before the blackened ruins of the cathedral, mentioned names. Helen’s regency had left some bitter grudges behind it. Undying hate pursued her mother and her brothers. Witnesses were found who had seen them drench the streets and walls with the maleficent liquid. The Tsar’s uncle, Prince Michael Vassilevitch Glinski, was living with his mother on a distant property near Rjevo, but his brother George was close at hand. He sought refuge in the very church the firing of which was laid at his door. The mob pursued him inside it, dragged his corpse to the spot where condemned criminals were executed, hunted his servants. Three days later the murderers pre-

sen ted themselves at Vorobievo, clamouring for fresh victims. Andrew Choui'ski’s relations and adherents, who had been •exiled after his execution, and subsequently recalled and restored to the Sovereign’s household and favour, urged him on to bloody reprisals.

But Ivan was soon to reveal himself. It was a tragic and decisive hour. If the son of Vassili had yielded to this criminal pressure he would have entered on a course which would have made his only mark on history a mark of blood. To yield was not in his nature. A merciless judge he was—too merci­less very often—but he was always to hold full mastery over his own judicial acts. Whatever he thought of the accusa­tion—and at his age, especially, and superstitious as he was, like all his contemporaries, he may very well have thought it plausible—accusers who were bold enough to encroach on his own rights by dictating or even forestalling his decisions stmck him, no doubt, as being more guilty than any incendiary, genuine or supposed. He rose up, showed himself as he was, established his reputation. Behind the tyrant the Russians knew already, they perceived the Sovereign they were about to know. Michael Glinski, who had fled towards the Lithu­anian frontier, had been caught by one of the Chouiski, Peter by name. Ivan had set him free, and he would not have the mother touched. The executioner had work to do, but the heads he took off belonged to the abettors of disturbance, who had hoped to build their own fortunes, or gratify their own resentments, on the ashes of the ruined capital.

Ivan’s earliest biographer, Kourbski, has introduced an episode into his history of these events which must have misled the imagination of many of his successors. Just when Ivan was in full dispute with the half-tipsy murderers, a man, an unknown priest, whose aspect resembled that given, in loc.il iconography, to prophets, appeared in the Tsar’s presence. His finger was uplifted, his expression at once threatening and inspired. With all the authority of a Divine messenger, we are told, and quoting many a Scripture text, he boldly asserted that what was happening was a manifest sign of God's wrath. He is even declared to have supported his claim by revelations and miracles. This last feature would suffice to edify us as to the nature of the story, even if we did not possess other information enabling us to reconstitute the historical truth. Sylvester, the author of the Domostroi, to whom Kourbski has chosen to attribute this curious intervention, could not have been a stranger to Ivan, seeing that for several years he had served the Church of the Assumption, the priest or proto­pope of which was, by virtue of his position, the Sovereign’s •own confessor. He was on friendly terms with Prince Vladimir

9

Andreievitch, one of the Tsar’s uncles, for whom he had already successfully interceded in 1541, and thus his influence, though still circumscribed within the narrow limits imposed by the humble priest’s worldly position and intellectual quality, was evidently of much older standing, and had been exercised in a far more natural manner.

Kourbski, no doubt, remembered Nathan’s coming into the presence of David; but there was nothing prophetic about the language of the Domostroi. A moment was certainly ap­proaching at which, without any question of miraculous intervention, other and quite as humble persons in the Tsar’s household were to rise to foremost rank. Ivan, as he realized the necessity for a change in his methods of government, was to look about for new men to fit new positions. Unconsciously, we may be sure, he was to imitate Louis XI. ‘ Distrusting, and not without good cause, highly-placed men, and honest men, he was fain to discover in the unknown herd some bold fellow or other—one of those, who, without having learnt anything, succeed by their own instinct.’

Like that other terrible monarch, and in closely analogous circumstances, Ivan, too, was ‘ to love none but those he made himself, and who, but for him, would have been nothing at all ’ (Michelet, Histoiri de France, vii. 262). Nothing is more probable than that the catastrophe of 1547 ^may have led up to this moment, and that Sylvester may have risen into prominence amidst the troubles which attended it. But nothing, on the other hand, proves that Ihe influence over his young Sovereign ascribed to him by Kourbski and other his­torians was acquired at that particular juncture.

And, further, was he a man whose gifts would ever have enabled him to enact such a part in connection with a man of Ivan’s calibre. ? The Domostroi does not give us the idea Of a very far-seeing politician, nor a moral teacher of a par­ticularly high order. Apart from this book, the only three epistles from the pen of its author preserved to us are mere twaddle and nonsense. And that addressed to Ivan—its authenticity, indeed, is doubtful—is by no means the least foolish of the three. Its only injunctions as regards morals are connected with the avoidance of the sin of sodomy. But as an inculcator of virtue, Ivan already possessed Macarius. Sylvester, much inferior to this prelate in acquirements, and with an intellectual outlook far below that of the chosen circle gathered around Maximus the Greek, neither embodied nor represented anything striking or seductive. Subsequent to the year 1547 he is said to have performed the duties of a teacher—duties of a kind calculated to produce some impression on his young master’s mind. It

had become necessary to redecorate the rooms of the^Grand Duke’s ruined palace. In every country and at every period, mural paintings have been a faithful expression of the feeling oi the century producing them. In Russia, during the sixteenth century, no difference existed, in this respect, between secular and religious edifices. In every building, the style and subjects of the decoration were almost identical, and chiefly drawn from Scripture or from ecclesiastical tradition. Sylvester seems to have been appointed to overlook the work of the artists at the Kremlin. The paintings then executed were preserved till the end of the seventeenth century, and Monsieur Zabieline (‘ Private Life of the Tsars,’ p. 149) has been able to give us an exact account of them. The only conclusion at all flattering to the pope to be drawn therefrom is his pos­session of certain courtly aptitudes already brought into relief in the Domostroi. Whether as a repentant sinner or—and this more especially—as a triumphant conqueror, as Joshua entering a vanquished city or Solomon pouring forth a flood of beneficent wisdom, Ivan’s is the figure perpetually limned m the huge apotheosis that typified and idealized all the great facts and glories of his reign. And though the young Sovereign may have found some means to edification in these pictures, he must have discovered still more, and more per­suasive, temptations to pride, while the scenes of carnage connected with the triumphs of the Biblical conqueror, the

* cutting off of every living soul ’ represented on the broken walls of these ravaged Jerichoes, were not calculated to soften the inherent ferocity of his instincts.

Sylvester’s apologists have further credited him with a somewhat novel piece of daring, to which the work of the unknown artists he is said to have inspired bears witness. The figure of a woman ‘ with her sleeves dropped as if she was dancing ’ close beside the hieratic presentment of the Christ, gave rise to scand;d and to an ecclesiastical prosecution. But Macarius himself appeared as the champion of art, and de­fended the artist’s right thus to symbolize debauchery amidst the other vices confounded and put to shame by the word of the Divine Master. The introduction of a certain flow of innovation into the plastic art. of Russia unquestionably dates from this epoch, and this was due to a current of foreign influences with which Sylvester certainly had nothing to do. In two ikons simultaneously painted by Pskovian artists for the Church of the Annunciation. Rovinski has recognised an undoubted imitation of Cimabue and Perugino.

But the reforming period of Ivan’s reign only began with the convocation of an assembly of which the date and precise nature cannot, so far, be clearly settled, but which certainly did

9—2

not meet till at least two years after the disaster of 1547. At that moment, too, Alexis Adachev appears upon the scene, and joins hands with Sylvester. Yet during the whole course of this assembly, it is Macarius who plays the leading part. Sylvester hardly appears at all, and i< is only thanks to a false and subsequent interpretation of the information at disposal that a part, which closer observation convinces us neither was capable of playing, has been ascribed to the two comrades. Round Adachev particularly a legend has grown up, so wide and full that in most historians’ eyes the Terrible himself has been almost eclipsed by his own servant. Deceived by the self-interested assertions of a political ally—I refer to Kourbski—and by the Sovereign’s own, they have, as it were, put the henchman in his master’s place ; they have made him think and act instead of his lord, and, taking him in con­junction with Sylvester, they have imagined a bicephalous government, which they suppose to have endowed Russia, for the space of ten years, with every i imaginable kind of prosperity.

I shall endeavour, further on, to set forth the elements of a very different state of, matters, and give men and things their proper values. Kourbski’s testimony, like that of the monarch himself, was borne after the two favourites had fallen. At that moment Kourbski, himself a voluntary exile, was endeavouring to avenge his own disappointed ambition by means of more or less ingenious inventions, and Ivan was always a proficient in that sort of fiction which enabled him to divest himself of his personal responsibility by casting it on his enemies. During the struggle into which the Sovereign’s reforming policy was soon to draw him, and in which he was doomed to strive till the close of his long and stormy career, it would be difficult indeed to discover the party at the head of which the pope and his comrade put themselves, or which they even joined. Parvenus, both of them, they have been taken to represent the new blood brought in by Ivan to oppose the old bo'iar oligarchy. But to this oligarchy Kourbski belonged heart and soul, and he was the friend and accomplice of Sylvester and Adachev. Other contradictions, just as in­explicable, can only be avoided by taking the two partners for what they were—mere dummies. Ivan used them against the bo'iars, but they preferred to use the bo'iars, and even to make common cause with those they used. Then Ivan crushed them, and called other utility actors to his aid. Let us come to facts.

V.—The First Assembly : Russian PARLIAMEN­TARIAN^*!.

In 1547, Ivan had held his own against the mob and the mob-leaders who had egged him on to crime. He had done justice, and several heads had fallen. But after that time, as before it, the boiars held the reins of government, and the tumult of which Moscow had been the scene was as nothing compared with the more permanent disturbances which con­tinued to torture and mangle the whole country. Two or three more years elapsed before Ivan co-old persuade himself that this intolerable system must be suppressed, or that he himself was strong enough to suppress it. It was in 1549 or 1550—this latter date stems the most probable—that he finally made up his mind. At that time, according to the chroniclers, he convoked an assembly of all classes from every province, at Moscow. The sitting and the palaver were held in the open air, on the Red Square in front of the Kremlin. The Tsar spoke first, and brought his accusation against his untrustworthy boiars. He set forth a long list of their mis­deeds, and announced that they were about to come to an end, and to be replaced by ‘ the triumph of virtue—and of love.’ In conclusion, he turned towards the Metropolitan: ¹1 beseech thee, holy master, to be my help and mainstay in this work, which, as I know, obtains thy favour. Thou knowest that when my father died I was but four years old. My other kinsmen took no care of me, and my powerful boiars thought of nothing but abusing their own strength . . . and while they multiplied their rapines and their excesses, I, because of my youth, was deaf and dumb. They ruled as masters. Oh, peculators, depredators, and dishonest judges, how will you answer now for the blood and the tears that have been shed through you ? My hands are clean from that blood ! But you, make you ready for the chastisement you have deserved!’ Then, bowing on every side, the Sovereign begged his audience to forget ‘ for a space ’ the misdeeds from which they might have suffered, because ‘ it was not possible to repair them all.' But thenceforward he himself, as far as might be, would be their judge and their defender.

That very day Adachev was raised to the rank of oknlnitchyi, and appointed to attend to all petitions. Ivan ordered him to look with most particular care into those presented by the humblest of his subjects, and to have no fear of the resentment of the great lords, ‘ the monopolizers of the great posts, and the oppressors of the poor and weak.’

This story requires some explanation. Ivan was always a great lover of scenic effect, and though he may not have

indulged to the very letter in the lyric effusions the chroniclers have put into his mouth, and of which he himself has given us several versions, he may very well have discoursed on the Red Square in similar terms and under similar circumstances, for he was always a great talker. But what was the object of the scenic effect and of his speech ? In the young monarch’s appearance before his assembled subjects the Slavo­philes hail a striking example, an ideal relationship between the ruler and the ruled—a relationship rooted in love, a characteristic trait of the Slav race, the only one capable of conceiving such a basis. Many historians, on the other hand, have taken the whole thing to be an appeal to the popular imagination against the boiar domination. These are all fancies.

We have no sure information as to the composition of the assembly of 1550, but if we judge by those convoked on later occasions, the representation of the popular element in it seems more than doubtful. We have nothing to prove that the representative principle existed in it in any form or to any extent whatever. A passage in the chronicle known as the ‘ Chronicle of Khrouchtchov,’ a manuscript of doubtful origin preserved in the archives of the Moscow Foreign Office, has been interpreted in this sense. This work, like the ‘ Col­lection ’ by Macarius, to which I have already referred, is a ’ book of degrees ’ (Stepiennaia Kniga), a form of compilation very usual at that period. But at the very place in question, Monsieur Platonov (‘ Studies of Russian History,’ 1903, p. 223) has detected an interpolation, probably dating from the second half of the seventeenth century, and which was most likely made under the influence of ideas which had only then come into vogue. It should be taken, therefore, to reflect the con­stitution of assemblies convened at a much later date, and under quite different conditions, by Ivan’s successors. As to the assembly of 1550, Ivan himself has given us a piece of information which tends in quite a contrary direction. Speak­ing at a conciliable called in the following year, and referring to his speech on the Red Square, he gives us a glimpse of the reality hidden by a deceptive mise-cn-scenc and under the flowers of a fallacious rhetoric. At Moscow, people were very easily satisfied with words, or rather some people there had a marvellous faculty for using coin of this sort in pay­ment of certain ^;ntricate scores. No other race ever had so pronounced a taste for face values, fiction, circumlocution ; and this time, again, Ivan took good care not to speak quite clearly. ‘ I have urged,’ he said, ‘ all my boiars, officials, and provinckd governors to reconcile themselves with all the Christians in the Empire.’’ If we compare and condense the

texts we arrive at a plausible conjecture: the assembly of 1550 was no more than a gathering of officials, an incident in the administrative life of that system the features of which I have already sketched, and the nature of which Ivan never dreamt of altering.

He had so little thought, at this ^;uncture, of appealing to his people against his boiars—that is, against his officials—- that, though he abused them roundly, his reproaches were addressed to themselves, and to themselves only. His dis­course on the Red Square was an apostrophe ad homines, combined with a use of the third person. What could he have made out of the people ? And how would he have got hold of it, to begin with—I mean men of that class who would have been capable of understanding anything about problems of this nature ? And still less could he have found men fit to make any better hand of the work the others had done so ill.

But what was he driving at, then ? At this : Without laying his hand on the system of ‘ service ’ nor on the slnojilyie lioodi, who had been abusing it so long and so hideously, Ivan hoped to improve the working of the machine by taking the command of the machinery into his own hands, and confiding it, in part, to creatures chosen by himself. Hence his announce­ment that he would do justice in his own person, and hence his appeal to Adachev’s services. So much for the future. For the past, as ‘ everything could not be repaired,’ it was necessary to pass a wet sponge over the face of an over­crowded slate. Thousands of complaints were waiting their turn, piles of papers were accumulating, in the hope of a settlement which, by the ordinary methods of the slowest and most complicated procedure ever known, was utterly impossible. Wherefore ‘ the triumph of virtue and of love,’ like the ‘ reconciliation of all the Christians in the Empire,’ simply meant, in the phraseology of that period, the substitution of a friendly arrangement for that interminable procedure. A tolerably short interval had been assigned for this purpose, no doubt, for in 1551 Ivan, found himself in a position to announce that the settlement of all the matters in suspense had been carried through.

The convoking of popular assemblies, in the strict meanir.g of that term, did not enter into the plan of the political edifice which Ivan had inherited, and the destruction of which he by no means contemplated, except in so far as to alter its internal arrangements at a future date, and thus adapt it to more modem needs. There was no place here for any Par­liamentary institution, and so little idea was there of its in­troduction that the representatives of the aristocratic oligarchy,

with Kourbski at their head, made not the slightest objection to the principle of periodical meetings, modelled on that of 1550, which they appear to have taken as a purely adminis­trative and judicial expedient, and nothing more. Some of them, such as the author of a political pamphlet" much talked of at that time, and to which I shall make further reference— ‘ The Conversation of the Wonder-workers of Valaam ’—even suggested the permanent institution of this particular form of council.

Yet there was no fresh attempt at convocation until 1566, and then, as before, it was for one special object—to look into the disputes with Poland. The official list of the members of this second assembly has come down to us. It comprises thirty-two members of the upper clergy, tw^ro hundred and fifty- eight boi'ars or sons of boi'ars, officials of various ranks, nine landed proprietors, fifty-three Moscow merchants, and twenty- three belonging to Smolensk, or who had business interests there, called by the generic title of smolianie. There is no trace as yet of any popular element. It is a council of ‘ men who serve,’ with whom some men of special competence are associated, because the national relations with Poland affect trade, and more particularly those engaged in the frontier trade. There is no sign, either, of any return to the tradi­tions of the ancient vietchie nor of any appeal to those of the representative assemblies of the West. It was probably the osviastchennyi sobur, the conciliable or council of the high ecclesiastical dignitaries, summoned regularly, since the most remote times, to discuss affairs affecting the Church and even the State, which suggested the idea, and provided the type of these other meetings, which ultimately received an analogous title, ziemskiie sobory—land concilicibks or councils—in the administrative sense now conferred on that appellation. The correct meaning of the word sobor is conciliable.

The ancient vietchie were very unlike these. Neither the political nor the social organiza tion of the Empire could supply any material for a process similar to that which, amongst other Slav races, and among the Germanic peoples, evolved repre­sentative institutions out of the primitive national assemblies. All the intermediate forms—the ‘diets of nobles,’ magna consilia, Herrentage—were lacking here. The ziemskiie sobor, like the bo'iarskaia douma, was the simple outcome of the habit, common to all Russian Princes, of calling their comrades, whom they afterwards turned into their ‘ servants,’ into council. With the extension of the administrative service, a necessity for representation arose. It was not possible to summon all the sloojilyie loodi to Moscow. And. on the other hand, when the Government thought proper to appeal to the

elective system for the bestowal of certain functions, the persons thus elected found themselves in possession of a sort of representative authority. It became the established custom,; for certain deliberative purposes and the settlement of certain reckonings, to summon to the capital, at arbitrary intervals of time, a selection of officials, some of whom held an electoral mandate, not as members of an assembly, but as performers of their administrative functions. The admission to this assembly depended on a different system. In what did this consist ? Was the choice made by election, and. if so, what form did that election take ? We know nothing of all this. However it may have been, the officials summoned to the assembly only appeared as, and because they were, officials. They did not represent social, they represented administrative, interests. They raised their voices, not as the advocates of certain corporate groups, but as Government organs, called to furnish information to the central administration, and take their orders from it. Here was all that underlay the fictitious appearance of this deliberative assembly, from which the Government occasionally made believe to take ad\ice, but to which, in sober truth, it simply gave its orders.

Of any such thing as political rights pertaining to these phantom representatives, or to those who elected them—in spite of the wily endeavours of the Muscovite policy to culti­vate an illusion, favoured by the uncertain form to which the institution was always restricted—there never was a question. As a matter of fact, once more, there is no trace of any legis­lative work accomplished by any of these assemblies nor even of any spontaneous decision come to by them. The nomad character of the first Russian settlements had pre­vented any development of corporative elements, or the for­mation of any strongly-constituted classes. The task of grouping the scattered forces of society had thus fallen to the central power, which, in performing it, had naturally applied itself more to imposing duties on the associations it called into being than to acknowledging that they possessed rights of their own. As a consequence, the political edifice, both in its general structure and as to its inner details, was entirely founded on the principle of ‘ dues,’ the tiaglo; and even the introduction of the elective system into this architecture did not modify its fundamental features. In the absence of any sufficiently developed social interests, or any adequate consciousness of them, electors and elected saw nothing in this concession beyond another burden to be added to its predecessors. Even if it possessed an elective basis, which is by no means clearly proved, the institution of the ziemskiie sobory—the result of a State need, and not a victory won by the emancipated forces

of freedom ; the outcome of a Government extemporization, and not of the long travail of a nation’s life, a superstructure mechanically adjusted 011 the exterior of a huge archaic build­ing, and not the fruit of any internal development at all—was no more than an incident and an ephemeral phenomenon in the country’s history. Between 1550 and 1653, sixteen of these assemblies were called, and the memories and regrets left by the last are neither very sharp nor over deep. As an arbitrary act on the part of the only real power had called them into life, so did another arbitrary act send them back into the darkness, and neither their existence nor their exit made much mark upon the destinies of the Russian race. If the constitutional inaptitude of this particular branch of the Slav family for the free forms of political existence, acknow­ledged by some historians, be an antiphrasis, and its vocation for perpetual absolutism a blasphemy, it is quite certain that no serious attempt at a Parliamentary system was appropriate to the shadow of the Kremlin in the sixteenth century.

The whole historical importance of the assembly of 1550 lies in the troubles which paved the way to the expedient, and in the other and more efficacious measures of which it was the starting-point. The Tsar had proved that he realized the painful sores from which the body of society was suffering. He had stripped them boldly. He was about to show his anxiety to do more than dress them with the panacea thus supplied. The following year was to inaugurate the era of reform.

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST REFORMS

I.—THE REFORMING CURRENTS. II.—THE NEW CODE. III.—THE REORGANIZATION OF THE ‘ SERVICE.’ IV.— THE RELIGIOUS REFORM.

I.—The Reforming Currents.^-

From the heart of the intelligent class—a very small one, numerically speaking, in the days of Ivan’s rule, but eager, nevertheless, to study certain political and social problems— and out of the focus formed by the men who thought and dis­cussed and wrote, a twofold current of reform passed at this moment, converging, in spite of its exceedingly diverse points of departure, on analogous, if not identical, objects. In both cases the ideas and calculations advanced dealt with the burning question of the day; that of the possession

of the land. My readers are already acquainted with the position assumed, as to this delicate matter, by Nil Sorski and Vassiane Patrikiev. Towards 1550, a pamphlet, couched in a form so strange as occasionally to render the author’s thoughts unintelligible, but full of a striking fervour of expression, gave a fresh impulse to the views of the Niestia- jatieli (non-acquirers). The pamphleteer borrows his charac­ters—the wonder-workers of Valaam, Sergius and Hermann— from the world of fiction. His own personality is wrapped in mystery. Some people have chosen to identify him with Patri­kiev, but the author’s denunciations of the excess of wealth accumulated in the hands of the ‘ black ’ clergy, and the abuses resulting therefrum, are too vehemently irreverent to proceed from a wearer of the klohouk. There is something monkish, indeed, about the curious artlessness of his political ideas ; the permanent assembly he longs to see established is to apply its chief anxiety and care to insuring the strict keeping of fasts ! But would Patrikiev, monk as he was, have ventured to claim, as the sole property of the laity, the place his brother priests had usurped in the Sovereign’s councils ? The lot of the ceno- "bite, according to the author of this pamphlet, is poverty and prayer. Patrikiev’s ambitions tended in quite a different direction.

The problem thus set was widening its borders, threatening other joint interests, inciting other claims. If the excessive expansion of monastic property was an evil, were not the dis­tributions of land, now so numerous, to the ‘ men who serve,’ and the gradual monopoly of the soil by the privileged class, whose conduct Ivan had just branded with dishonour, evils too ? And behold, a second pamphlet, published under the form of an epistle or petition to the Tsar, from Ivan or Ivachka Peresvietov—whether this was the author’s real name or a pseudonym has never been thoroughly settled—formulated an accusation against this rival class of landholders. By their spells and their intrigues they were said to have won the Sovereign’s heart, and imposed their will on him in every par­ticular. Enriched beyond all measure, as much so as the monks, by their expropriation and merciless squeezing of the dispos­sessed husbandmen, they lived in idleness and debauchery. As cowardly as they were greedy, they jeopardized the safety of the Tsar’s armies in time of war, and in time of peace they levied a huge tithe on the taxes extorted from his subjects, and became the responsible agents of all the public woes.

But what then ? The secularization of the monastic pro­perties had been an item in the Muscovite policy for many years. Ivan III. had turned his attention to the matter, and made some slight attempts in that direction. How did Ivacha

Peresvietov propose to solve the other portion of the problem ? By an equally radical measure : by the suppression of the kormlenie, by returning all the lands allotted to the sloojilyie- loodi to the State, and the substitution, for this mode of reward, of a money payment, which would insure obedient officials to the Sovereign, restore the land to its natural uses and legitimate owners, and relieve the mass of the people from the pressure of an unendurable tyranny.

From the literary point of view, the two pamphlets would seem to possess some bond of relationship. The imaginary characters in the first are replaced, in the second, by a Palatine of Wallachia, with whom the author has made a sojourn. The style of both is equally uncouth. But enigmatic as is the form of the work, with its strange circumlocutions, uncertain and obscure as all the phraseology of the period, never, in any country, was a more revolutionary process of reform suggested. The modem Nihilism of Russia can claim ancient parentage 1 In those days, as in ours, the space that parted theory from practice was wide. The question here was nothing less than a thorough reconstruction of the edifice, social and political. But the two programmes of the reformers, though they affected two different classes of land tenures, did not clash, as has been supposed. They were in a very natural agreement, and one supplied what the other lacked. They constituted two ex­pressions of one and the same solution, revolutionary and democratic.

What was the state of Ivan’s mind ? How did he stand as to this twofold current of thought ? That he was disposed, as far as Church property was concerned, to follow in his fore­father’s footsteps, we cannot doubt. On this point, through every vicissitude, from reign to reign, even from dynasty to dynasty, the Muscovite policy was never to be changed. But the grandson, like his grandfather, had to reckon with an opposition which nothing but the long-drawn complicity of time could wear down and overcome. The reorganization of the lay tenure was more difficult still. When Ivacha Peresvietov— I care not whence he came or what the source of his inspiration may have been—spoke such bold words, he must have felt a strong hand behind him. Parts of his pamphlet, indeed, seem no more than an echo of the young Tsar’s speech on the Red Square* When we take him to have been a semi-official writer, we are probably not far from the truth. But unworthy as the ‘ men who served.’ whom he would have dispossessed and reduced to their legitimate portion, may have been, and severely as the Sovereign might be resolved to treat them, they consti­tuted the army and the administration, the very pillars of the temple ! How were they to be replaced ? .Ivan meant to do

it. But while he was finding thousands of Alexis Adachevs, he had to live ; and for that purpose it would be better, instead of modifying the political status of the ‘ men who served ’ to their detriment, to think of insuring them a livelihood. Though no reform had shaken their legal position as yet, the privileges of the sloojilyie. now so bitterly attacked, had been severely damaged already. To the more or less just complaints brought against them they could reply with others, quite as legitimate. If they applied excessive pressure to the peasants who tilled the soil, the peasants themselves, by forsaking the cultivated areas, were raining their masters. The Govern­ment, having begun by welcoming and favouring the agri­cultural exodus, which had so powerfully aided the process of colonization, now perceived this exodus to be a source of immediate peril, far more to be dreaded than the abuse of power, or even the insubordination, rife amongst its kormlen- chtchiki. The executioner could always deal with insubordina­tion. But supposing the materiJ to fill the ranks of the ‘ service ’ were to fail ? Supposing the holders of the pomicstid, already so poorly supported by their scanty allotments, came short of food ? The State would find itself disabled at once.

Further, Ivacha Peresvietov, when he brought all the land­holders, small and great, the owners of stingily-proportioned life allotments, and the holders of huge hereditary domains, under his anathemas and his plans for dispossession, went astray, and missed the only mark then attainable, because he went beyond the facts as they existed at that date. Seeing that the land in Russia was still the only capital at the State’s command, it was perfectly natural that it should be used to remunerate the State’s servants, there being no other form of payment at the State’s disposal. But the servants of the State were of various kinds. The land tenure of the ordinary pomiechtchiki. precarious in its nature and extremely restricted in its proportions, was not an abuse from the social point of view, nor any peril from that of politics. The people who were really privileged and really dangerous were the holders of the ancient appanages, who alone, amidst the gradual ruin of their weaker neighbours, continued to enjoy a certain amount of wealth, and, thanks to the social and economic crisis which was swallowing up the fortunes of their feebler rivals, even increased their possessions ; for they attracted all the available labour by offering hope of better pay, if not by sheer force, and on the freehold lands thus populated and enlarged they kept or created a following, and maintained or strengthened their independence. These, too, were servants of the State, but often only as their pleasure, their leisure, or their con-

venience willed it. They were undisciplined, carping, as un~ accustomed to obey as they were difficult to punish.

To protect the interest of the State in this dual system, and, instead of destroying both these elements, without knowing how to replace them, to set one against the other, weakening the stronger—the only one he had to fear—and strengthening the weaker and inoffensive ; then, that first result attained, to strike hard, and rid himself of the standing menace ; to keep the building intact, to preserve its good pillars, and pull down those that were in the way ; to work out that historic evolution which, with slow but resistless force, was putting the Russia of the autocrat and the pornihtia in the place of the ancient Russia of the appanaged Princes and the vottcJiiny- -this was the plan on which Ivan, on a day yet to come, was to decide ; and it was the only one that harmonized with the traditions and present necessities of his Empire.

This is the story which has hitherto been so ill understood; and the whole story of the opritchnina.

Ivan did not arrive at it suddenly. At the period which we have now reached he had probably allowed himself to drift astray between the two currents of thought, the novelty and boldness of which attracted his own open and enterprising mind. He lent an ear to the niestiajatieli, and probably encouraged Ivacha Peresvietov. He was feeling his way, and was des­tined to begin with experiments, attempts, and compromises. These form the history of 1550-1551, and the events which fill them ; the drawing up of a new Code and the assembling of an ecclesiastical council, which, thanks to that habit we have noticed of introducing lay representatives and discussing secular questions, marked an epoch in the political life of the country".

II.—The New Code.

That collection into one volume of the laws and customs of France which had been the dream of the dying Louis XI. was not realized, as my readers know, until the days of Henri III And was it not a mere codification, then ? In Russia the codifiers of 1550-1551 had to amend the Soudiebnik of 1497, which had already endeavoured, under an exaggerated system of unification, to establish a uniform procedure and a unique judicial organization. This advance on Western legislation was, indeed, less real than apparent. The legislator of 1497 had hardly touched the ideas and judicial conceptions of the Rousska'ia pravda of the eleventh century, except where, as in one or two places, he adapted’t to the point of view of his own period. Save as to procedure and matters of organization, he was content to transcribe the old Customary. His work

had been inspired, above all things, by the centralizing policy he was carrying on. That of his grandson was the outcome of two tendencies which, at first sight, appear inconsistent and contradictory". It marks, in a sense, a backward step—a return to the old local jurisdictions, expressive of the autono­mous movement of the period. But at the same time, and in much more timid fashion, it marks, from the purely judicial point of view, an advance on the path of progress.

The first of these two aspects of the new Code was far the most important. The administration of justice at that time was practically the only administration in existence, and this was the beginning, in the vaguest fashion and under the form of a mere indication, of a general organic reform. No great exactness must ever be expected of the literary productions of that period. Even when they are prolix they tell very little, express what they do tell very ill, leave a great deal more to be understood, and are content with a hasty sketch, the features of which it is by no means easy to catch. But the outline exists, and it has been fairly claimed to have been the deter­minative argument of the Code, and of the assembly to which the Code was submitted.

This reform did not spring spontaneously from Ivan’s brain, nor from the mind of his councillors. In spite of his centraliz­ing views, the legislator of 1497 had accepted the principle of a certain share in the exercise of justice on the part of those amenable to it, through their elected representatives, starosts, hundreders, firud'hommes. This was rendered im­perative by the toughness of certain local traditions. But these assessors’ duty, limited to a right of examination, was merely optional. Starosts, hundreders, and prud’hommes did not exist everywhere, and in some places nobody cared to have them. The new Code announced that the principle was to be generally applied, and made its application obligatory. Elected and sworn assessors were to be established in every bailiwick. And more. During Ivan’s minority, in the midst of the disorder into which the incoherence of the central Govern­ment had cast the provinces, the force of circumstances had evolved other judicial authorities, intended to replace the official magistrates, who had forgotten all their essential duties. Somebody there had to be, to arrest, and try, and punish, the brigands and malefactors of all sorts who swarmed in every place. Thus, in many parts of the country, rural and urban communes had sought and obtained leave, by special charters, to supply this need, by choosing judges of their own. The magistrates of this new' type were generally known as goobnyie starosty. The %ooba was the generic title applied, in some parts of the country, to the ward. The districts of Pskov and Novo-

torjok were divided up into gooby. But these wards were not originally connected with the criminal jurisdiction,in any way. To this acquired fact the Code of 1550 gave an official confirma­tion. By a stroke of the pen, it placed all this department of jurisdiction under the charge of the communes. And this was only a preliminary step. The outbreak of war soon necessitated a general mobilization of the ‘ service men,⁵ and the expediency of appealing to the new magistracy for the discharge of all the administrative duties left unperformed by the sloojUyie, absent on military duty, shortly became apparent. By a series of charters, which grew more and more numerous after the year 1555 > the very financial organization, and the assessment and collection of the taxes were included in the same system.

This was neither more nor less than the adoption of Ivacha Peresvietov’s plan, the cutting off of the korrdenie at the root, by the elimination of the kormlenchtchiki. At one moment, and as early as 1552, Ivan made no secret of his determination to reorganize his administration to the exclusion of these offi­cials, who would thus have lost, if not every title—for they would still have been soldiers—the most essential of their rights to the possession of the land. And a remarkable feature is that the persons affected made no protest, and expressed no complaint. They would willingly have sacrificed their privi­leged possession of the land to obtain a pecuniary compensa­tion, which, even if trifling, would have been more certain than the revenues of their ruined properties. But the reform, which had thus reached a point at which it seemed on the brink of realizing a complete communal autonomy, and, simultane­ously, a profound alteration in the social, economic, and political constitution of the country, suddenly stopped short. As might have been foreseen, the men to carry out the ideas were not to be found. The benefit of the autonomy thus offered to populations quite insufficiently prepared for the duties they were expected to assume, was far beyond their powers of assimilation. The right of jurisdiction involved heavy re­sponsibilities. The great distance between the various dwell­ings, which, though these were placed in the midst of elements naturally inclined to sociability in every form, enforced a necessity of a very opposite nature, was in many cases a quite insuperable obstacle to any organization of communal groups. And, further, the State did not bestow this benefit—which the people did not know how to use, and the responsibility of which it dreaded—as a free gift. It was a privilege, and the tradition in Russia, as elsewhere, was that privileges must be paid for. The charters conferring autonomy were therefore burdened with a ransom ; in other words, the commune had to buy out the judicial rights of the persons who had previously held them.

Many refused to incur this pecuniary sacrifice ; others were too poor to make it. In this respect, the course of the Upper and Lower Oka seems to have divided the country into two distinct regions. On the northern side, the population, thicker and more industrious, showed an inclination to accept the reform. On the southern, the resources of the people, material and moral, were too poor to peimit of their welcoming it. A more general application of the principle might, indeed, have resulted from a development of prosperity, and coincided with the progress of communal existence ; but this progress was soon to be com­promised and stifled by the law of serfdom, while the Govern­ment, impelled by the bureaucratic system maintained in certain provinces, and strongest of all at the central point, was itself to intervene, and warp the working of the new institutions. In fact, from the close of the sixteenth century onwards, the goobnyie starnsty, in the very places where they had been called into active existence, were to find themselves converted into mere officials appointed by Government, and dependent on its offices at Moscow.

Ivan’s abortive attempt, as I have just sketched it, bears a pretty close resemblance to the reform which called the urban communes of France into life, under Phib’ppe-Auguste and St. Louis, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and a yet closer one to that movement in the tenth and eleventh centuries which, through the charters granted to certain associations of serfs belonging to a feudal lord, resulted in the formation of the rural communes. The difference between the general processes of evolution, tending in one case to the complete enfranchise­ment of the classes, and in the other to their more and more complete servitude, differentiates the two phenomena. The Russian peasants, already, when Ivan claimed to use their instincts of independence for his projected scheme of reorgani­zation, more or less deeply plunged into servitude, turned their backs on this ideal. Between the kriepostnoie pravo and self­government no compromise was possible.

Ivan also imitated Edward I. of England by putting the administration of justice and police matters into the hands of the gentry. But while in England, both in theory and in practice, the responsibility and the privilege were bound together, in Russia the two terms were to be practically separated. Whether it was that the peasant class failed to supply candidates for the pseudo-autonomous functions offered, or that the Government did not care to find them in that class, the privilege fell to the ‘ men who served,’ in that the choice of the electors found nobody else on whom it might fall. T‘ us, the peasants’ share ended by being all duty and no rights. And the sloojilyie themselves soon found theirs too heavy.

It lacked one essential charm—independence. For—and here we have the most characteristic feature of the Muscovite experiment, and it was also one, and no doubt, the strongest, of the reasons which induced Ivan to undertake it—this tentative reform, far from being the fruit of a decentralizing tendency, was really the outcome of an anxiety of a quite different nature.

In connection with this matter, the part played by appear­ances and fictions in the political life of Moscow stands out in striking relief. One durable effect, and one of the objects, of this experiment, was the dissolution of the com­paratively independent political organisms still present in the composition of the Muscovite State. The programme of unification, the execution of which Ivan was now pursuing in his turn, was hampered by the hereditary rights of a number of petty provincial potentates, who held certain regal rights within their own dominions. These remnants of the past the young Tsar had in view, and these he expected to wipe out, when he set up a rival organization—an organization of which he, who had created it, root and branch, was to be the regulator and master. In the West, the centralizing move­ment found a weapon to its hand in that emancipation of the classes which broke up the old feudal moulds, and in the particularism of the old local institutions. In Russia, where these classes did not exist—for there the town, the monastery, the village with its lord, the bailiwick with its free peasants, were only so many separate units—the State evolved the idea of creating these elements artificially, by a system of forced service imposed on the communities it undertook to consti­tute. But ukases cannot impart life, and the reform thus devised was stillborn, save in the sense I have just indicated— that of an agent which destroyed the past and paved the way to a system of universal servitude.

The Code of 1551 laid only the lightest of fingers on the great question of the land. Contrary to the reforming tendency, and conformably with the desire of the conservative party, it converted a custom which had fixed and consolidated the tenure of the land into a law—the right to buy back patri­monial properties. In other words, the vendor of such a property, or, failing him, his relatives, were allowed to take back the lands sold at any period, so long as the pr.ee that had been given for them was repaid. The future exercise of this right was limited, indeed, to a period of forty years, and given to collateral relations only, but, notwithstanding this, it constituted a recognition, on the legislator’s part, of a most detestable archaism, opposed to all freedom of exchange and economic progress.

On yet another puint his work is marked by a capitulation in the struggle between the two antagonistic elements and prin­ciples. As I have already remarked (p. 20), the causes con­stituting slavery, as recognised by custom and by the Code of 1497, were restricted by that of 1550. Thus, children bom before their parents became slaves were to be free ; enslaved parents were forbidden to sell their children bom out of slavery ; all contracts of servitude were to be signed in the presence of certain high officials, and that only in the towns of Moscow, Pskov, and Novgorod, etc. But at the same time, and with a quite opposite tendency, the Code gave the peasants power to leave the lands they worked at every season, if they desired to barter their own freedom and sell themselves as serfs; and, further, the new law, by increasing the dues on his dwelling-house, tightened the rope that was already strangling him round the husbandman’s neck.

The personal inclinations of the Sovereign probably did not affect these last provisions in any way. A series of proposals, drawn up for presentation to the assembly in his name, prove his own leanings to have been very different. But the man who was some day to jeer at Batory’s limited power did not venture, as yet, to make use of his own omnipotence. He was too young, and too uncertain of his ideas and convictions.

As regards civil rights, the new Code left the order of succes­sion untouched. It was not till 1562 that an important change w^ras to mark the triumph of'the political programme sketched above : the hereditary domains of Princes, in the absence of male heirs, and the hereditary properties of boiars, failing immediate heirs or testamentary’ dispositions, were to go back to the State. Ten years later, the right of succession was limited to vottchiny in the original deed of concession of which this power had been specially stipulated for, and only direct heirs and collaterals to the second degree were allowed to enjoy even these truncated rights.

The Code of 1550, indeed, like that of 1497, was above all things a rule of procedure, and in this respect it consti­tutes a distinct advance on its predecessor. Measures for insuring greater regularity in the course of justice, severe penalties for careless or dishonest judges, the. putting down of bribery, the regulation of the use of torture and of the judicial combat—nothing calculated to correct vices un­fortunately all too inveterate and obstinate, was overlooked. In another order of things it may be credited with a capital innovation—the establishment of a fixed and graduated rate of fines for offences. But taking it all in all, the conservative party came out victorious, and Ivan was left face to face with the triumphant army of his unruly boiars, who had kept

all their rights and privileges, and were as ready as ever to abuse them.

Yet Ivacha Peresvietov had not spoken in vain. In the course of that same year (1550) Ivan, though he still hesitated, scarce knowing what end he should pursue, or how he should attain it, took one decisive step on the only path open to him, if he was to enter on the inevitable struggle with any hope of victory, and reconcile a reform which had become indispens­able with the maintenance of a political system of the destruc­tion of which he could not dream. On October 10, he published a ukase for the reorganization of the upper class of the ‘ men who served.’

III.—The Reorganization of the ‘Service.’

Notice the expression. It embodies the germ of the entire system of the opritchnina and of the whole internal history of Ivan’s reign.

Orders were issued to. collect a thousand sons of bo'iars, chosen among the best, and give them pomiestia in the Moscow district and those nearest it. This elect body was to form the nobility of the capital, the nucleus of a contingent which was to be available for service of every kind, and for military service more especially. The oldest aristocratic families established in the region were mcluded in the group, and provided, if they did not already possess them, with allot­ments of landed property in the immediate neighbourhood. The whole body of this aristocracy was divided into three classes, or stati, acording to seniority in the service. In this fashion, the legislator without suppressing the miestnitchestvo, determined and' limited the field of his future labours. The service to be paid for each allotment was also carefully defined and fixed : for every hundred acres (about fifty d'essiatines, or as many hectares) the holder was to supply one mounted man, and a second horse if the expedition was to be a long one. A money payment might be substituted for the man and the horse, and the Sovereign, on his part, guaranteed an indemnity for extra men supplied, in addition to the campaigning pay every man received

Hence the theory of ‘ service,’ wldch upset all positions and ruled all questions of rank and precedence, was destined,, even more than in past days, to hold the foremost place in the hierarchy thus constituted. And here is an indication of the result obtained. No Princes appear on the lists of the great personages summoned to the assembly of 1566. In the course of the evolution which had carried the official class into the front rank, they had disappeared, or, officially speaking at

all events, they were as though they did not exist, for their titles still appear in their signatures, .and they thus main­tained and affirmed their rights. But the law ignored them, and they sometimes ended by forgetting their own identity. Even in 1554, we find Michael Ivanovitch, the descendant of the ancient appanaged Princes of Vorotynsk, claiming no more than the title of dvorianine (courtier), higher, now, than any other; and the trend of the Muscovite policy itself always "tended to eliminate the hereditary element in the higher sphere, for in 1566, out of ninety-four dvorianie of the first class, only thirty belonged to the princely families.

This was the work wrought by the ukase of 1550, and a few years later the system was further and largely extended by a service, reorganized in 1571, for the protection of the southern and south-western frontiers, and confided to the landed proprietors of those regions. A fort had been built, during Ivan’s minority, at Temnikov, on the Mokcha, a tribu­tary of the Oka, and a number of posts established along the natural lines of defence rendered it possible to keep a watch on the Tartars’ movements. In 1555 a regular guard of Striettsy and Cossacks was organized, all along the Volga, and one Cossack regiment, the khoperskii polk, still preserves the remnants of a standard presented to it by Ivan IV. He did more than this. By his care, another contingent of boi'ars’ sons in search of an establishment was assigned pomiestia in the territory threatened by invasion. The holders of these lands were thus interested in the defence of the frontier, and bound, in return for the landed properties bestowed upon them, to keep up a permanent guard. A double chain of fortified townlets thus arose, from Alatyr and Temnikov to Poutivl, and from Xijni-Novgorod to Zvenigorod. And after this, the system, which had proved its value, was successively extended to the eastern and western frontiers, and made up one huge whole, ensuring the Empire the tranquillity it had hitherto lacked.

This work alone, so wide in its conception and so vigorously carried out, in spite of the painful struggles through which he was then passing, should suffice to clear Ivan of the too general and most insufficiently justified opprobrium cast on this portion of his reign. The Terrible did not spend it in doing nothing but cutting off men’s heads. It was no fault of his that the assembly of 1551, to which his Code was presented, did not itself inscribe a far more brilliant page in the nation’s history.

IV.—The Religious Reform.

In history this assembly bears the name of Stoglavnyl-sobor, or the ‘ Conciliable of the Hundred Chapters,’ which it owes to an arbitrary division of the report of its deliberations. My readers will remember, in this connection, the ¹ Hundred and One Griefs ’ of the Diet of Worms. It was the fashion of those times. As usual, the conciliable included the Metropolitan, the Archbishops of Novgorod and Rostov, and many Bishops, archimandrites, and priors. The lay element was repre­sented by the great Court dignitaries, and by the whole body of the boiarskaia douma. Ivan did not fail to make speeches of his own. He multiplied his rhetorical efforts, made an act of contrition, and appealed to the counsels and prayers of his whole audience. All this was his usual course of scenic effect. Then the new Code was considered and approved. This was a mere matter of form. The questions affecting the work of legislation had been previously cleared up between the Sovereign and his lay counsellors, the only persons concerned in them. All that Ivan expected from the composite gathering now assembled, and representing the highest moral authority in the country, was a recognition of his reforms, whether accomplished or proclaimed. This was the ordinary pro­cedure, and an invariable feature of every successive avatar of the Parliamentary existence of the country. By the way, however, the Sovereign was pleased to call on the assistance of the conciliable as to certain fresh legal proposals, in connec­tion with which he sought, not its adhesion, but its advice. These were the suppression of the miestnitchestvo in time of war; a revision of the Crown grants of land, with the object of bringing them into proportion with the amount of service rendered ; the means to be employed for fixing the level of taxation by remedying the present fluctuations of the taxable population ; the putting down of taverns ; the bestowal of landed properties on the widows and orphan daughters of boiiars; and the establishment of an official cadastral survey. . . .

We must not expect method any more than we must expect perspicuity, from the legislators of this epoch. Their pro­cedure was one of riddles and of jerks. The assembly made some attempt to fulfil the task imposed upon it. A remedy for the fluctuation of the population was by no means easy to find, and the gathering suggested none. The plan for putting down the taverns, which had been inspired by the religious party, ran counter to the fiscal interest, and did not advance beyond a pious wish. But it was decided that in war-time ‘ places ’ were not to count ; the cadastral survey and the revision of the landed properties were undertake^

and as to the widows and orphan girls, a system of life allot­ments was adopted, the lands to be given up if the holders married or took the veil. All this, however, was but an in­troduction to the feast, and the ‘ Hundred Chapters ’ bear no trace of these labours. In this assembly, in which the Church predominated, the anxieties filling men’s minds were of a quite different order. Ivachka Peresvietov’s programme had been put aside or reduced to a minimum, the scope of which was probably not even understood, but that of the wonder­workers of Valaam remained upon the scene. The reform claimed.by the Niestiajatieli had still to be dealt with.

In this matter Ivan seemed disposed, at first, to give proofs of a more lively originating power. He certainly was in­fluenced by Nil Sorski’s disciples. Artemi, the declared enemy of the Iosifiianie, and soon to be appointed Prior of the Troitsa, was allowed to present the Sovereign with a memorandum which boldly demanded the secularization of the monastic properties. So, at least, we are led to think by a letter from the monk which has come down to our own times. Among the members of the sobor was Kassiane, Bishop of Riazan, supposed author of a vigorous denunciation of the corruption of thought and morals rampant in both orders of the clergy. Isolated though she was, Russia was not entirely untouched by the revolutionary currents which were convulsing the Western world of that period. But the Metro­politan Macarius, a worthy pupil of his alma-mater, the mon­astery¹ of Volok-Lamski, spoke, not less vigorously, against the radical proposals. In a famous epistle, which has been guessed to be a reply to some new law proposed by the young Tsar, he appealed to the example of the Greek Emperors, the Russian Sovereigns, and even the Tartar Khans, who had all shown equal respect for Church property. The Iosoflianie had a huge majority in the sobor. And Ivan gave in again, agreed to present the question in a very moiir.ed form, and contented himself with calling the assembly’s attention to the faulty administration of the monastic properties, and to the monks’ excessive greed.

In theory, the sobor pronounced for the suppression of these abuses, and ended, though not without sharp resistance, by accepting some practical measures to that end—the restitution of freehold lands (votichiny) ceded to the monasteries by boiars without the Sovereign’s consent, and a similar restitu­tion of all lands of every kind illegally acquired by the Church ; the annulling of all gifts to the Church during Ivan’s minority ; the monasteries to be forbidden to acquire the patrimonial estates of the ancient appanaged Princes, and the clergy in general to be forbidden to acquire vottchiny without the

Sovereign’s leave. Although she laid great stress on the value of the service she already paid by furnishing a certain number of military recruits and contributing to the repair of the fortifica­tions of certain towns, the Church was forced to accept fresh burdens. She had to pay her share towards a fund for ransom­ing prisoners, and the concessions she made led on to others. In 1573 a conciliable was absolutely to forbid, by the Tsar’s order, any donations of freehold land to the rich monasteries, already well provided in this respect; and another, held in 1580, was to apply the principle still further, by forbidding all future acquisition of any lands whatsoever by any member of either clergy, whether by gift or purchase.

Thus the growth of the landed property of the Church was checked.

In 1551 Ivan sought to give more complete satisfaction to the ideas of the reformers in another matter. His intentions were made manifest in a series of questions addressed to the assembly, so sharp and searching that they sound like an echo of the English ‘ Black Book ’ of 1534—that accusation drawn up by the agents of Thomas Cromwell against the monks of his day, their dubious morals, their pride, their coarseness—or else of the scandalous tales which enlivened Layton’s correspondence with his master. This somewhat insulting interrogatory, the answers given by the assembly, and the Sovereign’s further remarks, enter into the composition of the ‘ Book of the Hundred Chapters ’ (Stoglav), and constitute the most essential portion of it. The dialogue we are thus enabled to follow is most curious. We observe that the sobor at first tried every means of avoiding the discussion. In the first forty chapters, the Tsar’s indiscreet queries are all brought together. Then follows a general reply, which altogether begs the question, slipping into side issues, and stealing away into the uncertain regions of the qui fro quo. Ivan finds sharp fault with the bad use made of the wealth piled up in the monasteries. The assembly pretends it does not know what he means, and replies by putting forward divers liturgical problems. This part of the book most likely adheres to tne order and procedure first adopted in the debate. After the forty-first chapter these are altered, probably because the Tsar thought a change of method advisable. Questions and answers now follow in regular alternation, though the fathers of the Church still do their best to quibble and avoid any too definite response. A return is made, but with no better success, to some of the points already discussed. When the morals of the clergy are called in question, the sobor, not without a touch of spite, drops into lamentations over the increase of sodomy amongst the laity, and solemnly passes 011 to some such problem of ascetic morality as this : Can a sick nun make her confession

to a member of the secular clergy ? Sometimes the dialogue warms into a quarrel, and descends to personalities. Ivan has made a remark as to the bad painting of the ikons. The sobor replies, ‘ Look at what is going on in the Kremlin !’ This Is a hit at an ikon of doubtful orthodoxy lately sub­stituted for a famous one painted by Roublev, a fifteenth- century artist. Thus, through it all, amidst all the shuffling and straying hither and thither, the general idea of the reform is lost—evaporates, as it were, never attains solidity on any point. Some few amendments as to details : the institution of ecclesiastical starosts and tithing-mcn to overlook the morals of the clergy; a rigorous separation of the sexes within all monasteries ; a stricter observance of the rules of the various communities, were accepted in principle, but in practice they were destined to remain a dead letter. The assembly, thus forced to acknowledge the reality of certain disorders which had brought shame on the National Church and compromised her future, did not fail to recognise their essential cause—the state of ignorance in which both clergy, the regular and the secular, continued to wallow. And it decided on opening a great number of schools for the education of priests. But it did nothing to insure the carrying out of this decision. It imagined, or feigned to imagine, that it could reckon, for this purpose, on the zeal and devotion of the poor popes, who were most of them forced to beg, and did not themselves possess the requisite learning ; and the wealthy Bishops and archi­mandrites refused any personal contributions, and refused, too, in this ease, to admit the necessity of beginning at the beginning —in other words, of raising the intellectual standard of the upper ecclesiastical hierarchy in the first place. Macarius himself was apt to commit the grossest errors in the interpreta­tion and selection of his texts !

Under the influence, as we may suppose, of Maximus the Greek, the sobor turned its attention to the corruptions of the sacred books, and ordered the establishment of a printing-press —the first that ever existed at Moscow—to reprint them accord­ing to the most correct copies to be had. Alas ! as my readers already know, the existence of this printing-press was of the shortest, thanks to a local tumult. All that remained were the interdicts pronounced by the assembly at the same time on certain impious and heretical works. But, alas, again ! these works—the Secreta Secretorum, a repertory of the science of the Middle Ages, here called Aristotel, and ascribed to Aris- toteles, and the astronomical tables of Emmanuel Ben Jacob, known under the title of the Chcstokryl—constituted the whole profane literature of the country. And to save its face, reply to the accusations of immorality, and flatter the ascetic

tendencies of the epoch by giving itself an appearance of ^rigorous austerity, the assembly took good care to renew all the Church’s anathemas against profane amusements.

Quite as empty was the shadow of administrative reform embodied in the autonomous institutions the new Code had proposed to call into life. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction, as exercised by the Bishops’ delegates, whether boi'ars, clerks, or tithing-men, gave lively cause for complaint. The suppression of these magistrates did not seem feasible ; they had existed under the great Metropolitans Peter and Alexis ! The popes were given leave to have themselves represented, for judicial purposes, by elected starosts and hundreders, but the assembly forgot to define the part these representatives were to play !

And yet, in spite of its weaknesses and failures, the labours of the assembly of 1551 do not seem to me to deserve the scorn which has fallen upon them in their own day, seeing that the very anathema with which it was smitten at a later date, by the conciliable of 1667, attests the scope and comparative bold­ness of its endeavour. Is not the fact, i;i a society so de­praved and generally devoid of knowledge—a society in which no ideal existed, and given over to the rule of the coarsest instincts—that a handful of men attained so much, and asked a great deal more, a sufficient title to our indulgence and even to our respect ? Attempts have been made to minimize and even to deny Ivan’s share in the result obtained. Silvester or Adachev, Maximus the Greek or Macarius, we are told, did it all, even to inspiring or formulating the famous set of questions on which the deliberations of the assembly were based. Most assuredly, the young Tsar neither acted nor thought alone. Even during the progress of the debate, the earlier decisions of the conciliable were sent to the Troiitsa, where Jehosaphat, the former Metropolitan, Alexis, a former Bishop of Rostov, and a few other ecclesiastics, had to pronounce upon them. It was in consequence, indeed, of this consultation, as it would appear, that the question of the monastic properties, first put aside, and then brought back under discussion, was solved in the sense I have just indicated. But Jehosaphat and his comrades, all of them former ecclesiastical dignitaries in disgrace, and avowed partisans of Nil Sorski’s, could only have been called into consultation in this way by virtue of some act of high authority, which certainly did not proceed from the council itself. Silvester is mentioned as having been one of the monks who brought back Jehosaphat’s views from the Troiitsa. He would not have applied for them on his own account, and we may even doubt whether he would have had any desire to serve the cause of the ascetics ‘ beyond the Volga ’ in this fashion. The coarse asceticism of the Domostroi was also invoked by the

Iosifiia me. It was the standard of the official Church. Among the materials which served for the composition of the Stoglav some people have included the epistle addressed to Ivan by the pope of the Church of the Annunciation. I have already said that the authorship of this epistle is doubtful, and only one of the subjects of which it treats was touched by the conciliable— the question of wearing beards, which Silvester connects with that struggle against the sin of sodomy, which seems to have been the great anxiety of the author of the Domostroi. And his point of view is the one generally taken up by the moralists of this school, their idea being that ‘ beardless men, by making themselves look more like women, were more liable to stir sinful desire in others.’

Young as Ivan was, his intelligence and education bnth raised him to a higher level than this. The set of questions the conciliable had to consider was not only presented to it in the Sovereign’s name, but partly written by his own hand; and a comparison with other and later writings by the same author reveals his personal mark as strongly apparent ir it-—not his thought only, but his forms of speech, his way of putting things, cutting like a knife, vigorous and biting, rugged and blunt. Nothing here recalls Silvester, with his inferior composition and poverty of thought. Even on questions of liturgy, as to which Macarius may well have directed him, Ivan was always to give proof of very wide information.

Further, no study of the ‘ Book of the Hundred Chapters ’ was attempted till at a comparatively recent period, and the text available was incomplete, and gave rise to a great deal of uncertainty. The Stoglav, which fell under interdict in the year 1667 escaped the curiosity of historians for two whole centuries. Macarius may probably be considered as the author of the relative failure of the work of 1551, and the chief organ­izer of the assembly’s opposition to the reforming tendencies of Nil Sorski and Jehosaphat, and the personal inclinations of the Sovereign. The Metropolitan did advocate a reform, but one which would have operated in a different direction. He turned his back on all progress, and saw no salvation save in a return to the past and its traditions, which had been scorned and violated, and to the old arbitrary ideal of the primitive Christians. This ideal consisted in a piety based on a scrupu­lous performance of rite ; a Church with a mighty hierarchy entrenched in the very heart of the aristocracy, and rolling up more wealth, ‘ which came to her from God,’ from year to year ; an understanding with the State, on the basis of mutual support ; the merciless putting down of heresy ; and no schools at all. As for Jehosaphat’s opinions, they would certainly never have been either received or sought for but for the inter­

vention of the only omnipotent will able to hurl such a defiance at the majority. Their insertion in the Stoglav has given rise to some natural confusion, producing an impression that the assembly had adopted them, and even gone the length of adopt­ing the views of the Niestiajatieli. As a matter of fact, the sobor only made a partial capitulation, and the honour of this cannot be denied to Ivan.

His victory, modest as it was, was still further diminished by the later efforts of the vanquished party. In some localities the decisions of the assembly long continued a dead letter. Everywhere the official Church endeavoured to hamper their application, and when the clergy were once more called together in 1554, to judge the heresies of Matthew Rachkine and his followers, they revenged themselves by dragging several of the most prominent of the reformers into the trial. Soon, too, certain of the ecclesiastical conservatives, wounded or threat­ened in their dearest interests, were to meet with other mal­contents. Ivan’s pursuance of his plan of reform was to rally every element of opposition against him : religious and political interests were to join hands, and with them all he was to enter on a fearful struggle, from which he did indeed emerge vic­torious, but leaving a terrifying name, and a memory that makes men shiver, even now, to his descendants.

The religious reform had failed. The political reform, more resolutely imposed, was to bring a reign of terror with it.

But Ivan had to solve other problems first. In his case, as in that of his predecessors, the territorial expansion of the huge and growing Empire called him to the frontier. The legislator was to be transformed into the conqueror.

CHAPTER III

THE EXPANSION EASTWARDS—THE TAKING OF

KAZAN

V—THE REMNANTS OF THE MONGOL EMPIRE. II.------- IVAN’S ARMY.

III. THE CAPTURE OF KAZAN. IV.—THE CONSEQUENCES.

V. THE CAPTURE OF ASTRAKAN. VI.—THE COSSACKS. VII.—-

THE CRIMEA AND LIVONIA.

I.—The Remnants of the Mongol Empire.

When Ivan ascended the throne, the Tartar conquest was nothing but an ugly memory. The Empire of Gengiz and Timour had crumbled in the conquerors’ hands. On the east and south, the remnants of the Golden Horde, which had set up almost independent khanates or tsarates at Kazan and Astra-

kan, and on the Crimean steppes, still lay along the frontiers of Muscovy. The Mongol tide, as it drew back to the high Asiatic plateaus, had left little pools on which waves were still rough and eddies threatening, but their onset was steadily weakening. Not an inch of Russian soil was now covered by the flood, which in these countries, as I have said, had never reached the proportions of an ocean. Russian conquest and Russian colonists had taken the offensive, were marching in the track of the old invaders, and penetrating further every year, almost ever\’ day, into the huge Finn-Tartar continent. Slowly but surely the Sovereigns of Moscow were widening their borders, and adding more and more vast spheres of influence to their possessions. Vassals once, they hadnow made themselves the suzerains of the nearest Khans, and Safa Ghirei, Khan of Kazan, paid them tribute.

In the Crimea, however, a new centre of Tartar domination had been established. This power, thanks to a political and military organization, modelled, on much stronger lines, after the old ones, had succeeded in recovering the fealty of the neighbouring khanates, and breaking the t inds which bound them in vassalage to Moscow. This began by being an annoy­ance, but it soon became a danger. In 1539, Khan Saip-Ghirel, who had succeeded in getting a footing at Kazan, and had even garrisoned the place, attracted or welcomed Simon Bielski, then a fugitive, to his Court, and sent a message to Moscow which sounded like an echo of the imperious summons of the old days : ‘ I am going to march, and I do not march in secret. ... I shall take thy lands, and if thou followest me, thou wilt not reach mine !’ And an undertaking not to lay a linger on Kazan did not suffice the insolent aggressor ; he demanded a promise of annual tribute—a return to the shame of the past. From 1539 to 1552, then, there was a struggle, the anguish of which tinctured the boyhood and youth of Ivan, and the details of wiiich my readers will thank me for sparing them. At Kazan the partisans of Safa, and, later, of his son Outemich, a minor, strove with the Muscovite party, which, helped by the most famous warrior of that country, Boulat, succeeded in replacing Saip’s protege by one of Ivan's, Schah- Ali, or Schig-Afei. But Saip, drugging Bielski in his train, and strengthening his forces with a Turkish contingent, and with muskets and heavy ordnance sent him by the Porte, ended by threatening Moscow itself. At that moment the question as to whether the young Tsar was to stay in his capital and bear his share in defending it, or not, was seriously discussed, and it was only thanks to the interference of the Metropolitan J ehosaphat that manly counsels prevailed. On such occasions Ivan’s ancestors, even when they had reached a lighting age,

had always insured the safety of their own persons. But Moscow, as Jehosaphat pointed out, had now become something more than a mere capital city. It was a metropolis, a holy town, wherein the whole of Russia had deposited all that she held most sacred—her faith and her relics, her hopes and her pride.

So Ivan held his ground, and his very presence made Sai'p retire. Behind the Tsar, the crowned boy who would nut flee, the Khan’s fancy beheld an army strong enough to beat his Tartars, no longer what they had been in Baty’s time, plun­derers rather than soldiers, now, lovers of easy victories. As Ivan grew older, he did better still. Twice over, in 1548 and 1549, lie exposed his own person, and led expeditions—unsuc­cessful ones indeed—up to the very walls of Kazan. He started too late each time, and the winter overtook him. His regiments melted in the snow, and the Volga swallowed up his artillery. In their desperate quarrels about precedence, the ‘ men who served ’ forgot all their duties. Twice over the Tsar, weeping tears of fury, was forced to beat a retreat, while the Crimeans and Kazantsy, plucking up their courage, ravaged his fairest provinces.

But the second expedition did bring some result; a town was founded on the enemy’s territory, and quite near Kazan, at the confluence of the Sviaga and the Volga. This town was Sviajsk, and the neighbouring mountaineers, Tchouvaclies and Mordvians, soon found it a centre of attraction, while the Kazan Tartars recognised it as an establishment with which they would have to reckon. The Khanate was dismembered, in fact. The Kazan Tartars, forsaken by the Crimeans, who quitted the town to the number of 300 fighting men, leaving their women and children behind them, but sacking everything before they went, displeased with Outemich, whom they betrayed to the Russians, and just as ill-pleased, soon afterwards, with Schah-Ali, ended by asking the Tsar to choose them a ruler, and Ivan fancied himself on the brink of a blood­less triumph. The selected governor, Prince Simon Ivano- vitch Mikoulinski, had almost reached the gates of the city in February, 1552, when the intrigues of Schah-Ali, who had quietly retired to Sviajsk, and the intervention, no doubt, of some of Salp’s emissaries, operated a sudden change. The gates remained closely shut. An appeal to arms ensued. Couriers hurried into the Crimea to ask for reinforcements, and the adventure threatened to become a disaster.

At Sviajsk, on which place Mikoulinski had to fall back—for he had but few troops with him—he narrowly escaped being surrounded and destroyed. The plague, and mutiny, which came with the sickness, entered his camp. Debauchery was

added to material distress. ‘ The men shaved off their beards,’ so the chronicler tells us, ‘ . . . and debauched their younger comrades.’ The bo'iars, sitting in council at Moscow, devised none but the most frivolous expedients ; they had the sacred relics carried in procession from the Cathedral of the Annuncia­tion to the Cathedral of the Assumption ; they sent water con­secrated by these same relics to Sviajsk, together with an edifying instruction drawn up by the new Metropolitan, Macarius. Ivan and his closest counsellors felt something else must be done. The prestige of Moscow, the whole future of the Muscovite policy in the countries affected, were at stake. A blow must be dealt, this time, that would win the day, or else all hope of conquest must be relinquished, and the ancient yoke, maybe, assumed once more. Salp, once grown bolder, would not yield again. The experience of past years proved the necessity for haste. On June 16, 1552, having made over a sort of regency to the Tsarina Anastasia, ordered the libera­tion of a great number of prisoners, and performed various other pious acts, in the hope of bringing down the heavenly benedic­tion on his undertaking, Ivan set out with all the available forces remaining to him. Of the importance, composition, and quality of these forces, I shall now endeavour to give some approximate idea.

II.—Ivan’s Army;

In this country, where the feudal system was unknown, the military organization of the period was, nevertheless, essentially feudal in all its features. In France, naught of such an organi­zation remained, save the ban et Varriere-ban—a small matter, some 2,000 or 3,000 men, little or nothing in presence of the regular and permanent forces, the real army of modem times. In Russia, Ivan was only beginning to form this new type of contingent, by giving it a nucleus in the shape of the corps called the Strieltsy, a name which appears for the first time in the course of the decisive campaign of 1552 against Kazan. The Strieltsy were arquebus-men (strielat, to lire), recruited from the free class, on a life engagement. Most of them were married men, and they ultimately formed a separate body in which the profession of arms was hereditary. They were armed and equipped in the European fashion, and each received a rouble to build himself a house, another rouble oi yearly pay, uniform, powder, and some measures of flour and kacha. These arrangements having proved insufficient, the Government ended by giving land, and allowing the Strieltsy to pursue divers trades, subject to the performance of their military duties. This led to their being confused with

the ‘ men who served.’ At the close of Ivan’s reign they numbered 12,000 men, 7,500 of whom garrisoned Moscow, and formed, with the town Cossacks, the first body of infantry the Russian Tsars ever possessed. A permanent corps of artillerymen, divided into gunners (pouchkari), fort artillery­men (zatinchtchiki), grenadiers (granattchiki), and artificers, and a special corps of arquebus-men (pistchalniki), was organ­ized at the same time.

All this did not constitute an army. The bulk of the force consisted of the ‘ men who served,’ and of what was called the rat, the germ of another regular force. In war-time two things were done. All or part of the ‘ men who served ’ were called out,on the one hand,and on the other, levies were ordered, such and such a town or diocese being obliged to furnish so many foot soldiers or mounted men, recruited outside the military class. This constituted the rat or possokha ; and for one campaign alone—that undertaken to recover Polotsk from the Poles—Ivan was to collect 80,000 of these possochniki. They were not disciplined troops, as may well be imagined, nor calculated to cut any very brilliant figure on a battle­field. As a rule, therefore, they were employed in digging earthworks or preparing war material. The Muscovite Government, indeed, permitted its taxpayers to pay a money indemnity of two roubles instead of each man due, and even preferred this plan. It was simply a form of taxation.

Mobilized by circulars sent by the War Office, or Razriad, to the provincial voievodes, and specifying the number of men to be called out, the points on which they were to be concen­trated, and the nature of their armament, the f men who served,’ boiars, boiars’ sons, and courtiers (dvorianie), were divided, from Ivan IV.’s time onward, into five regiments— the great regiment, the vanguard, the right hand, the left hand, and the rearguard. When the Tsar was present, a sixth regiment, called ‘ the Sovereign’s regiment,’ was added. The first regiment consisted of three, and the others of two divisions, subdivided into ‘ hundreds ’ (sotnias). Each regi­ment was commanded by a voievode, each division by a lieu­tenant who ranked as a voievode, and each sotnia by a dvor- ianine of the first class. In the Tsar’s absence, the whole body was under the orders of a Court voievode, the magistcr militarum of the Romans, the generalissimo of the present day, who was surrounded by a numerous staff, which included sborchtchiki, whose business was to bring the troops together; okladtchiki, who had to divide them ; possylnyie, lioodi, or aides-de-camp ; stanovchtchiki, or engineers; foreign artisans, employed in siege works, provosts, medical men, and priests.

How many men did all this come to ? We have no data

for the year 1552, but in 1556 the full numbers of the van­guard regiment did not bring it up to 1,500 horsemen. In 1578, in the campaign against Lithuania, the army, though increased by the presence of a Tartar contingent, only num­bered 39,681 fighting men in all, made up as follows :

Russian and Circassian Princes .. .. .. 212

Moscow boi'ars and boi'ars’ sons .. .. .. 9,200

‘ Men who served ’ from Novgorod and Iouriev.. 1,109

Tartars and Mordvians .. .. .. .. 6,461

Court Strieltsy .. .. .. .. .. 2,000

Strieltsy and Cossacks from the provinces .. 13,119

Possokha from the northern provinces .. .. 7,560

39,681

Part of the available forces had probably been left to guard the frontier, while every boiar, on the other hand, took at least two ratniki, or fatigue men, with liim, and some brought fifty or more.

One traveller of this period, Clement Adams, mentions 90,000 as the total number of men available for the Tsar’s service, but adds that he only called out a third of these on his campaigns, being obliged to leave the other two-thirds to guard the fortified places. There is a striking agreement between this calculation and that furnished by the rosters for the year 1578.

Apart from the Strieltsy of the special corps and the possokha, all these troops were mounted. Their armament was of the most varied description. In Ivan’s time, the curved Turkish sword and the bow were the favourite arms with most Russians. Only a few substituted pistols or long muskets. An axe hang­ing at the warrior’s saddle-bow, a dagger, and now and then a lance, made up the campaigning equipment. Cuirasses were very little patronized. A few great lords wore them, and of very splendid make, out of vanity, and covered their heads with ‘ sallets ’ or ‘ morions.’ There were no spurs—the whip supplied their place. The horseman held his bridle and his bow in his left hand, and clasped his sword and whip with his right. When he shot he dropped the sword and whip, both of which were fastened to a strap. The moment the enemy came within range every arrow flew at once, and, how­ever much or little the adversary’s onslaught were checked, the whole body of troops beat a retreat without awaiting the shock of battle. Thus it came about that this cavalry never learnt to stand in the open country against the Polish squad­rons, which had been taught to charge right home. Its chief merits were its endurance and its extreme mobility. On

their unshod horses, most of them undersized, and all clumsily- accoutred, these Russian soldiers covered huge distances, and unflinchingly endured the greatest fatigues and the most extreme privations. Clement Adams and Chancellor show them camping out in the snow, lighting a tiny fire, content with such poor nourishment as a handful of flour mixed with boiling water, and lying down to sleep with no covering but their cloaks, and without even a stone for a pillow. The second of these two English travellers wonders how many of the warriors of his own country, prouder than most men of their valour, would have been able to hold out, even for a month, against these troops, and comes to the conclusion that if these men realized their own strength nobody in the world would be able to stand against them.

But endurance is not everything in war. Ivan’s undrilled and undisciplined soldiers (lid not possess the very elements of their art. The only tactics they knew consisted in sur­prising the enemy, overwhelming him with a force two or three times larger than his own, and deafening him with their yells and the discordant clangour of their trumpets and cymbals. Brave :n their own way—as brave as they were temperate—they were seldom known to sue for mercy, even if they were worn out and on the brink of giving way. But they broke up very easily. They were useless in the service of any skilled strategy, and they were just as useless for siege operations, such as those which awaited Ivan under the walls of Kazan. In cases of defence their superiority was evident. Once shut up and cut off from all chance of taking to their heels in flight, they were extraordinarily tenacious, bore cold and hunger without a murmur, died iijt their thou­sands on the earthworks and wooden defences they perpetually repaired, and never gave in till the very last extremity. Hence the constant use in the Muscovite armies of portable defences, shields made of planks, with holes bored for the muske.t- barrels—these were called khoulal gorody (‘ towns on the march ’)—and hence, also, the precocious development of a very powerful artillery service.

The first cannon the country had ever possessed were of foreign make, but even in Ivan III.’s time, foreign workmen were casting them in Russia. A gun produced by this home factory, and bearing the date of the year 1485, is still pre­served in the St. Petersburg arsenal. Under Ivan IV., the war material thus collected included all the European improve­ments in ballistics—serpentines (here called zmci), falconets (sokolniki), and mortars of various calibres, amongst which were classed the haufnizy (from the German word haufnitz). the haubitzen of a more modern type, and the volkomietki

(from volk, wolf, and mietat, to launch). No Christian Prince of the period, according to Fletcher, possessed such a quantity of ordnance, and in 1557, Jenkinson speaks with wonder of the Russian gunners’ drill, in which he saw them vie with each other, laying their guns with extraordinary swiftness and skill.

The chronicles speak of 150 pieces of ordnance as having been brought under the walls of Kazan in 1552. This figure is probably as much of an exaggeration as that of 150,000 men given as the total effective of the troops which accom­panied the guns. But certain it is that the Tsar entered on this campaign with a very considerable force. And yet he must have made a great effort of will to start at all. Apart from that dislike of the risks of war, which he shared with all the Rurikovitchy, other motives must have held him back. His wife was expecting the birth of her first child, and the appeal of the Kazantsy to their Crimean brethren had not been in vain—the bands of the new Khan. Devlet-Ghirei, had already made their appearance before Toula. But the young Tsax would not be turned from 1 is resolve. Toula held out, on August 13 he was at Sviajsk, where the effect produced by his presence was more salutary than that of the holy water and admonitions despatched from Moscow, and on the 23rd he was encamped before Kazan.

III.—The Capture of Kazan.

The ramparts of the town were only built of wood and earth, but from the very outset the garrison, which the chroniclers reckon at 30,000 men, seemed determined on a most obstinate resistance. Judging, and rightly, that it could expect no pardon, it also realized, no doubt, that this meeting was des­tined to decide a struggle, now centuries old, between two races, two powers, and two religions. Until now, apart from the foundation of a few outposts, such as the new establish­ment at Sviajsk, Moscow had done no more than exercise reprisals. In Kazan she was to take possession of one of the bulwarks of ancient Islam. Supported by a chief sent from the Crimea, Tsar Indiger-Mohammed, and strengthened by the picked warriors who had come with him, the Tartars revived the memory of their ancient valour, victoriously re­pulsed the first assaults, and drove Ivan to fear the merciless winter would again overtake him.

In September a tearful storm overthrew quantities of tents in the Russian camp and destroyed a number of storehouses on the Volga, and from the top of their ramparts, in which his artillery failed to make any breach, the besieged began to jeer at the White Tsar. Making obscene gestures, so the

chroniclers tell us, turning their backs and lilting up their garments, they cast defiance at him : ‘ Look, my Lord Tsar, this is how thou wilt take Kazan. . . .’ And with strange yells and contortions, which passed for sorcerers’ spells, they terrified their adversaries’ superstitious minds.

• Ivan did not flinch. To fight the spoils, which had called down torrents of rain, he sent to Moscow for a miraculous cross, which brought back the fine weather, and against the fortifications, which the Tartars so industriously repaired, he appealed to the skill of his foreign engineers, who constructed works of approach which doubled the effect of the Russian fin¹ and hastened the end of the business. In the popular poetry this siege, which really lasted a few weeks, attains the proportions of the Siege of Troy. Ivan is described as having spent eight, or even thirty, years at it. By the end of September, in reality, the artillery had battered a sufficient breach, and a general assault was arranged. This was delivered on October 2,1552. The result, a complete victory for the besiegers, was a foregone conclusion. But 011 this occasion Ivan, who had hitherto proved his tenacity and courage, did not dis­tinguish himself. Ilis followers had already grown accustomed to see him take active command. By making them fear, he had taught them to obey him. They looked for him at the head of the columns that moved out to the attack. He was not there. The leader had disappeared ; all that was left was the Rurikovitch, who fled beiore danger, shrank from the bloody struggle, and lingered in prayer before the altars. At dawn, while Prince Michael Vorotynski was blowing up the last works, a solemn office had been said n the chapel erected in the middle of the Muscovite camp, and the legend tells us that the mining operations corresponded with the solemn course of the Orthodox liturgy. The Slav version of the ponem inimicos tuns scabellum pedum, tuurum, chanted by the deacons, was followed by the first explosion, and a yet louder one greeted the Gospel verse, ‘There shall be but one fold and one Shepherd.’ But deacons and sappers alike had done their work ; the thing, now, was to mount the breach. Appeals to the God of the Christian and the God of Mahomet were already mingling in the air with the hail of arrows and bullets. A breathless boiar ran in : ‘ Sire, it is time to start!’ he cried; ‘ your men are at close quarters with the Tartars, and your regiment is waiting for you !’ Gravely Ivan replied, in the words of a Scripture text, of which the men of his period and his intel­lectual calibre carried an inexhaustible supply in their memories. This one conveniently indicated the value of long prayers, and the Tsar did not budge an inch. Then came a second and more pressing summons. The Tartars were recovering their

lost ground, and the Sovereign’s presence at the head of his troops was absolutely indispensable. . . . Ivan heaved a deep sigh, shed copious tears, and once more set himself, aloud, this time, to invoke the Divine help.

The whole spirit of his race was expressed in the young Prince’s behaviour, and some allowance, too, must be made for his personal temperament and the particularly nervous nature we know him to have possessed.

Was he a coward ? No ! The man who was soon to face the fury of others, impose his indomitable will by fire and sword, and maintain it, in spite of the hatred, the weak-heartedness, and the defeated conspiracies of his closest comrades, for twenty years, the coming champion of the Opritchnina, could not be a coward. He was the heir of the Russian Princes who had made Russia great, not by prodigies of valour performed on battlefields, but by the dim paths of intrigue, bargain-making, and economy, by miracles of patience, cunning, humiliation, stoically borne ; and he was the pupil of the ancient Eastern teachers of his country, who had imparted to him their own Asiatic habits of indifference, scorn of physical effort, and haughty calm. The act of fighting, of dealing blows and running the risk of receiving them, did not enter into their conception of a Sovereign’s duty. The master had slaves for all that work. His part was to give his orders, send his men out to die, and say prayers himself.

But the boiars about Ivan did not take this view. One of them, very likely, offered his Sovereign some violence, for at last the Tsar, having exhausted every shift, kissed the miracu­lous picture of St. Sergius, drank a little holy water, swallowed a morsel of the host, received his chaplain’s blessing, harangued the clergy, praying for their pardon, and claiming th^ir blessing too, now he was going ¹ forth to suffer for the true faith,’ mounted his horse, and galloped off to join his regiment. But even then, Kourbski tells us (and it did not occur to the Terrible himself to contradict this eye-witness’s assertion), though the battle was nearly over, and there was no reason to fear any fresh onslaught on the part of the besieged forces, some difficulty was experienced in getting the horse and his rider to the front—the boiars had to lay their own hands on the bridle.

The Muscovite standards were already floating over the ramparts, and the leading columns of the assault had entered the town. The carnage began. Six thousand Tartars vainly tried to reach the open country by fording the river Kazanka. Ivan never thought of putting a stop to the bloodshed. Even in the West, a town taken by assault was a town condemned to death. The women and children alone were spared, and they

were carried into captivity. After all was done, the Tsar ordered a Te Deuni to be sung, and with his own hands planted a great cross on the very spot over which the standard of the last Khan of Kazan had waved during the fight. A church was to be built there, and within two days it was ready and consecrated. By the end of the week two governors, Prince Vassili Siemienovitch Serebrianyl and Prince Alexander Boris- sovitch Gorbatvi, were installed in the conquered city, and the victor was hurrying back to Moscow, and to Anastasia.

On his way home, at Vladimir, joyful news awaited him. The Tsarina had borne a son, who received the name of Dmitri. At Tai'ninskoie, one of the oldest villages in the vicinity of Moscow, whither Ivan was one day to retire, during the trials which were to follow on this triumph, his brother George and his chief boiars came to offer him their lirst congratulations. At Moscow the Metropolitan, attended by all his clergy, met him, and compared him to Dmitri Donsko'i, to Alexander Nevski, and to Constantine the Great; then, casting himself at the Sovereign’s feet, he thanked him for having won this triumph for the country and the Church.

A great triumph it was, indeed,—greater, both in its imme­diate and its more distant consequences, than Henry II.’s acquisition, that same year, and at the other end of Europe, of the Three Bishoprics.

IV.—The Consequences.

In 1555. Gourii', first Archbishop of Kazan and Sviajsk, went forth to take up his new post, with a whole following of priests, and his departure was the counterpart of that migration of the Greek clergy which, in Vladimir’s time, had brought the true faith from Byzantium to Korsoun. After officiating at the consecration of a Church of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin, built within the Kremlin, in memory of the new conquest, Gourii took ship, the chants and prayers con­tinuing even on board, and all along the course of the Moskva and the Volga a huge concourse of enthusiasts greeted the representative of the true faith. Russia was beginning an apostolate of her own. The blow delivered on the walls of Kazan had struck the whole of Islam, and the budding pres­tige of the Crimean Khans had been irreparably shaken. There w^Tas to be no more of that talk of ‘ beating his forehead ’ in their presence, which had previously appeared in Ivan’s corre­spondence with his redoubtable neighbours, even though he claimed to be on equal terms with the Emperor of Germany and the Sultan of the Turks ! From the material point of view alone, Kazan was a most precious prize. This remnant

of the Mongol power, set on the middle course of the Volga, and barring the way eastward, had been an obstacle in the way of Russian development, if not an actual menace to Moscow. At Kazan the first collision between Islam and Christianity had occurred, long before this time, when the Mahometan Bulgars, the earliest inhabitants of the place, had fought with the first Princes of the new Russia of the north­east. To Asia, Kazan had been a commercial and industrial centre, to the Mongol Empire, the only solid footing left it in Europe ; for, once reduced to the Khanate of the Crimea, it became a mere nomad camp, floating hither and thither over the southern steppes. Astrakan still remained, but once Kazan had fallen, the breaking of the other dyke that barred the onward course of the Muscovite flood became inevitable, and the conquest and process of colonization thus begun were to rush with resistless force towards the rich lands watered by the western tributaries of the Volga, and the eastern affluents of the Don.

Kazan, in short, was the natural rallying-point of all the numerous savage tribes—Tcheremisses, Mordvians, Tchou- vaches, Votisks, Bachkirs—dwelling in the mountains and on the plains along both sides of the Volga. The mountaineers, already attracted by the shelter of Sviajsk, were creeping into the bosom of Muscovy; the men of the plains were soon to follow them.

But, in his eagerness to return to the joys of home, and taste the glories prepared for him at Moscow, Ivan had been in too great a hurry to leave the country. The boiars, Kourbski tells us, had pressed him to wait till the spring. Yet they themselves, it may be, had furnished him with good reasons for a contrary decision. Though they had had to drag him by his bridle under the walls of Kazan, at the last moment, his ‘ men who served ’ had threatened to forsake him several times before he got there at all, declaring they were worn out, and their strength and resources alike exhausted. A silent struggle was already going on between him and them. He felt he could not hold them, and they saw he was not the man to be long content with a grudging, capricious, and uncertain obedience. The reforms he had accomplished or prepared had evoked a discontent which never lost an opportunity of showing itself, among the higher aristocracy, and Ivan probably felt none too safe in the midst of the warriors who had taken upon themselves to show hun his proper place in battle, and put him into it by force.

None the less, as early as in the month of December, the benefits of the victory seemed likely to slip through the victors’ fingers. At Kazan and in its neighbourhood alarming symp­

toms appeared. Open revolt soon followed. The Cossacks and Sirieltsy of the occupying force lost 1,000 men in a fight with the tribes of the gorna'ia storona (mountainside), and the rebel mountaineers actually founded a new town on the Mecha, some seventy versts from Kazan. In 1554, it became necessary to undertake a regular campaign against these insubordinate hillmen, and five years were to elapse before the peaceable possession of the country’ was insured. But Moscow liad already taken a new and important step in another direction.

V.—The Capture of Astrakan.

In the spring of this same year 1554, 30,000 Muscovites embarked on the Volga, under the orders of Prince George Ivanovitch Pronski, and 011 August 29, while Ivan was keeping his fete-day at Kolomna, a courier brought him the news of the taking of Astrakan. This was not a final conquest; Pronski contented himself with setting up a Tsar of his own choosing in the town, Derbich-Ali by name, who was obliged to pay a yearly tribute, and guarantee the Mus­covites free navigation of the Volga between Kazan and Astrakan. The Muscovite policy was following the game which had worked so well with Schah-Ali at Kazan. The results in this case were similar. Derbich’s task, between the new protectors, the native Tartars, who were very impatient of their authority, the Khan of the Crimea, who claimed to exer­cise his, and the Turks, who seemed inclined to have a finger in the quarrel, was a very difficult one. He soon entered into communication with the Tartar-Nogais, a neighbouring tribe, the headship of which was in dispute between two brothers at war with each other, Ismail and Iousouf, and, supported by one of these competitors, he sought to make himself independent. A fresh expedition became necessary. Derbich having made a pact with Iousouf, who was afterwards killed by his brother, and then, with the dead man’s children, Moscow treated with Ismail, who, as the reward of his assist­ance, claimed certain modest gifts—three hawks, a falcon, a gerfalcon, and a sparrow-hawk, a great deal of lead, a great deal of saffron, a large quantity of colouring matter and paper, and 500,000 nails. . . . Derbich was driven out. His place was taken by Ismail, who in his turn grew unruly, and had to give way to his nephews. Moscow had trouble for many years with all these turbulent vassals ; but her acquisition of the mouths of the Volga was definite and final, and the little principalities round the Caucasus, which brought Russia into their own disputes, begged her to arbitrate between them, or

craved her support, gradually drew her—unconsciously, or almost against her will—further and further eastward, to new fields of action, which, one by one, perpetually widened the frontiers of her all-absorbing hegemony.

The emigrant colonists followed the progress of this policy, step by step, and now and then even outstripped it. From the banks of the Don and the Terek, where they had already taken root, they spread to the Crimea, to the very gates of Azov, in never-ending enlargement of the sphere called the kazatchina—the Fatherland of the whole floating population of the Empire, a Fatherland of indefinite limits and continually changing borders. The power of the system of territorial aggrandizement thus set in motion was tremendous. But it contained an element of danger.

VI.—The Cossacks.

The authority wielded by the metropolis over this element, so variable and turbulent in its nature, was purely nominal, and destined long so to remain. It was not till 1570 that Novossilt- sov, one of Ivan’s lieutenants, was to endue it with a little more coherence on the banks of the Don. and it was the third cen­tenary of this event which the present army of the Don cele­brated some thirty-four years since. But even in 1577, Ivan w'as obliged to send Mourachkine with a whole army corps to put down the brigandage and violence of his unruly subjects, and it was then, as it is believed, that Ermak and his com­rades, the future conquerors of Siberia, to escape just reprisals, took refuge with the Stroganovs, other colonists of a different type, whose huge possessions touched the borders of Asia.

This led the way to a fresh, and still greater conquest; but meanwhile, the behaviour of these Cossacks and their arbitrary enterprises forced Moscow into an inevitable struggle with the last remnants of the Tartar power. Unable to make Ermak and his armed thousands on the Crimean border bend to his will, Ivan was fain to take the initiative in a duel which was not to end till Catherine II. sat on the Russian throne. As early as 1555—a prelude to the expeditions led by Galitzine and Miinnich—he sent out 13,000 men under Cheremetiev. As always happened in such circumstances, the Khan, the swifter and bolder of the two, forestalled his opponent, beat a retreat before the Tsar, but inflicted a serious defeat on his lieutenant. This did not prevent a Cossack detachment, under the diak Rjevski,. from making a reconnaissance as far as Otchakov, and stirring lively emotion and an outbreak of war­like feeling among the Little Russians along the banks of the Dnieper. Then came the turn of a subject of the Polish King’s,

Prince Dmitri \Visni0wie9ki, who occupied and fortified an island in the Dnieper—the Khortitsa—and tried to brave the neighbouring Khan by dint of an alliance with the Tsar. He was driven out in 1557, but took his revenge the next year, under the very walls of Azov; while the commander of the Muscovite forces, Daniel Adachev, reached the estuary of the Dnieper, captured two Turkish vessels, landed in the Crimea, and spread terror through that country.

The moment seemed to have arrived when a mighty effort promised to end it all, and the men about Ivan eagerly pressed him to act. But the young and glorious Sovereign had wheeled round already. His enterprising spirit, its back turned on the east, was travelling westward, whither it w^ras drawn by stronger intellectual affinities and more seductive prospects. Livonian affairs held him tight, and were to absorb him for many a year. It was the story of Peter the Great already.

VII.—The Crimea and Livonia.

The two undertakings were irreconcilable, and how^rever he may have been criticised then or since, the determination at which the Tsar arrived seems fully justified. To go to the Crimea was not the same thing as to go to Kazan or Astrakan. The transport of troops and stores from the banks of the Moskva to those of the Volga was insured by a network of navi­gable rivers, running, partly at all events, through a compara­tively populous country. The other road, once Toula and Pronsk were left behind, was over the desert, through resourceless and shelterless wastes, in which, till the end of the eighteenth cen­tury, the ceaseless efforts of Russia’s best military leaders were to meet with shipwreck. And behind the Crimea, it must be. re­membered, lay the risk of having to face Turkey—the Turkey of the sixteenth century, the Turkey of Solyman the Magnificent.

Further, Ivan was not absolutely free to choose. Since 1554, he had been at war with Sweden on account of this same pro­vince of Livonia, and on its account, too, but for a succession of truces, always on the point of being broken, he would have been at permanent war with Poland. Thus the solution of the one problem was not so urgent as that of the other. Anxious as the Crimean business was, it could wait. But in Livonia neither Poles nor Swedes would wait, for they could not afford to delay an intervention in which Moscow must forestall them if she was not to be cut off for ever from all access to the Baltic. The ancient colony of the Teutonic knights was reaching that condition with which Poland was one day to become, acquainted, and which constitutes, in a sense, a strain on all neighbouring greeds ; the house was on fire, and every­

body was trying to be the first to put it out. Give the whole thing up ? Ivan could not dream of that ! Even at Kazan he had only won his victory thanks to Western help, aided by the European engineers and workmen whom he laboured to gather from Germany, Hungary, and Italy. But if in Italy, and to some extent in Germany, a disposition w'as shown to second his efforts, other European countries, and those his nearest neighbours, kept up a suspicious and hostile attitude, stopping his recruits on the border, forbidding the sale of the most modem war material, and striving to maintain the wall built by centuries of isolation between themselves and their too enterprising neighbour. Livonia was a door—the door which Peter the Great was one day to beat down with mighty strokes. The chance of opening it at once, and that, as it seemed, with­out any excessive effort, offered now.

Might not Ivan have used the shores of the Gulf of Finland between the mouth of the Siestra and that of the Narova, which were already his, to the same end ? This objection has been advanced, but it is not conclusive. The foundation of St. Petersburg had not occurred to the young Tsar. Even if he had possessed the genius of Peter the Great, he would prob­ably havefound it impossible to force the huge and unreason able labour involved in such an undertaking or. his subjects. To make that other effort, the value of which is open to discussion, possible, a century and a half later, the century and a half of labour, which insured the triumph of the absolute power and gave the son of Alexis a weapon the son of Vassili never wielded, was indispensable. Peter the Great himself was not to be content with his marshy port on an inhospitable coast, and it seemed, at this time, as if all Ivan had to do was to put out his hand.

In fact, though his undertaking failed, its failure was solely due to a surprise which nothing led him to foresee. This sur­prise, this miracle, was the ephemeral career of Batory, a real King, in a country which for years had known mock Kings only —a Hungarian cavalier, who broke in the Polish mare, and drove her full gallop to stop the Russian horseman’s w^Tay. Only ten years this wild ride lasted, but they sufficed to work an utter change in the chances and positions of the two parties : to transform the Poland of the Jagellons, which Moscow knew, and which she could defy, into another Poland, of which she had not dreamt and whose strength she could not gauge ; to make the triumph on which the victor of Kazan and Astrakan had so surely reckoned a disaster, and convert the match on which every appearance had encouraged him to stake his fortunes into a most disastrous wager.

He brought the prestige of his recent exploits to it—a glory

the splendour of which one only of his successors was to increase, and a popularity none of them attained. The conquests and reforms of Peter the Great, less understood, have consequently beenless appreciated. Ivan, the conqueror of Islam, the lawgiver who cared for the humblest, and wrought terrible justice on the ‘ great ’ only, forced admiration even from foreigners. No Prince in Christendom, thought Jenkinson in 1557, was so feared by his subjects, and so loved. At the same epoch, Foscarini, the Venetian envoy, eulogizing the justice meted out by this peerless Sovereign through his simple and appropriate laws, and praising his affability, his humanity, the variety of his information, the splendour of his Court, and the strength of his armies, places Batory’s future opponent among the foremost Princes of his time. He enumerates, with evident pleasure, his gens d'armes, equipped in the French fashion, his artillery­men, drilled on the Italian system, and his splendidly taught arquebus-men, and affirms that no other European power possessed so formidable a war machine. In a mirage of victory, his fancy beholds two armies, each numbering 100,000 men, ready to march at a sign from the great Tsar—‘ which seems almost improbable,’ he adds, ‘ but it is absolutely true.’

Tin; truth, which I have endeavoured to follow strictly, cer­tainly warranted Ivan’s momentary belief in the certainty of his superiority over his Polish and Swedish neighbours. He had a rumerous army, a well-filled treasury, the advantage of a strongly-constituted power, the assurance which is bom of success. All these—power, glory, and popularity, were to be swallowed up in a gulf, the dangers and the depth of which neither he nor any other man could recognise or plumb.

CHAPTER TV THE CONQUEST OF LIVONIA

I.---------------------------- HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS. II.—THE LIVONIA OF THE SIX­TEENTH CENTURY. III.—THE MUSCOVITE CONQUEST. IV.-------------

THE EUROPEAN INTERVENTION.

I.—Historical Antecedents.

The sixteenth-century struggle for the possession of the Baltic was a dispute over an inheritance. This inheritance had been left by the Hansa, that great political and commercial con­federation which the discovery of the New World ruined and left defenceless in the hands of its greedy neighbours. It was a formidable struggle, both as to the competitors—Sweden

and Denmark, Muscovy and Poland—whose enmity it stirred, and as to the interests—industry and commerce, religion and culture—it involved. Up till about 1540, Moscow’s part in the matter was quite a small one—that of an auxiliary⁷ of the two Scandinavian Powers. But at that period the common adver­sary, the Hanseatir Towns, was almost worn out, and as an inevitable consequence, the quondam allies fell out over the division of the spoils.

Historically speaking, the claims of the Muscovite com­petitor were the most ancient. Even such early works as Nestor’s have been argued to contain proof that Livonia and Esthonia formed an integral part of the ancient Russian Empire. When the old chronicler enumerates the peoples under the yoke of the Varegian Princes, he speaks of Liv and Tchoud, settled on the Baltic coasts. But such proofs as these are rather dubious in their nature. The first undoubted at­tempt by the Russians to get a footing 011 the Livonian coast dates from the year 1030, when the town of Iouriev was founded on Tchoud territory⁷, under Jaroslav the Great. But the exist­ence of this establishment, which received a serious check at the hands of the Semigalian inhabitants of that neighbourhood, soon became most precarious, and it was threatened, in the following century, by a still more redoubtable competitor—the Germans were close at hand.

The history of the German colony in Livonia goes back to the foundation of Lubeck by Henry the Lion, about the year 1158. The merchants of the new city, seeking an opening in the direc­tion of the Scandinavian countries and the Far East, played the part of Columbus to that other America. A struggle then arose between Germans, Russians, and Scandinavians, each seeking to get first possession of the course of the Eastern Dvina, already connected with the whole river system of Russia, and even with the basin of the Dnieper. Livonia was the key of this situation, and here, as in many places, then and even nowadays, German colonization was backed up by German missionaries. During the latter half of the twelfth century—the exact date is not settled—Meinhard, a canon of the Augustine Order, built a church near the town of Uexkull. which became the seat of a bishopric and the nucleus of a fortified town. Meinhard’s successor, a Cistercian, Bishop Berth old, was a prelate after the manner of Barbarossa, who wore a sword on his hip, and used it oftener than his crozier. In the year 1198, backed by a crusading Bull from the Pope, he appeared with an army and a fleet at the mouth of the Dvina. A series of successes and reverses ensued, and it was not till the days of the third Livonian Bishop, Albert, a de­scendant of a "noble Bremen family, who founded Riga, and

the Order of the Brothers of the Sword, that a final conquest was effected. The new confraternity was modelled on that of the Templars, though less directly ruled by the Pope. It had a Grand Master, who resided at Riga, and a Chapter, including five chief Masters, and all the members of the Order were bound ^;n equal submission to the episcopal authority. It thus con­stituted a strongly centralized power. But the regular and the secular element soon fell out of harmony, and in the course of the struggle that swiftly ensued, the Order was led to develop the material and political side of its organization, to the detri­ment of its spiritual calling. This brought it face to face with fresh rivals, and involved it in ruin.

In Prussia, and hard by these knights with red crosses on their white mantles, dwelt the Black Cross Knights of Hermann von Salza, created an Order of Hospitallers by the Pope in 1191, converted into a religious Order by German Princes in 1198, and endowed with an establishment on Slav territory by Conrad, Duke of Mazovia and Cujavia, who, as ill-luck would have it. appealed to these knights, in 1225, to put down and convert the Prussian idolaters. In the following century St. Bridget was to denounce, and prophesy terrible chastise­ment for, the misdeeds of these false apostles, ‘ who univ fight to feed their own pride and grs tify their covetousness.’ Greedy and overbearing, they felt hampered within their own dominions, and the neighbouring country of Livonia struck them as a desirable prize. In 1236 an unhoped-for chance favoured their ambition—the almost total destruction of the Brothers of the Sword in a fight with the Lithuanians at the Saula. Rome, solicited by both Orders, decided on their fusion, and the Red Cross Knights disappeared.

But in this new arrangement the neighbours had to be con­sidered. In 1238, Denmark received Revel, Harrien, and Wirland. In 1242, after a desperate encounter with Alex­ander Nevski’s Russians on the Peipus, the Black Cross Knights, who had begun to spread along the Finnish coasts, were forced to retire, and give up their most recent conquests. At the close of the thirteenth century the Order had to reckon with yet another hostile element—the burgher class in the towns, which was growing very powerful, and which made common cause with the Bishops against the knights. The knights won the day and towards the middle of the fourteenth century they celebrated a greater triumph still : Courland, Livonia, and Esthonia fell under their exclusive rule, Denmark only preserving a nominal claim, to be put forward at a later date, to her ancient conquests.

It was but a short-lived triumph. In the next century, Poland came upon the scene, and on September 1, 1435, the troops of

the Order and the Russian-Lithuanian bands under Svidrigailo, which had been artfully drawn into a fratricidal struggle, suffered a crushing defeat at the famous Battle of the Swieta. At that moment the Knights of the Black Cross were in jeopardy even in Prussia. On July 15,1410, a quarrel, then two centuries old, renewed since then, and perpetuated under various forms, was fought out in a memorable combat, for the commemoration of which preparations are now being made at Cracow and Moscow. More appropriately divided, this time, into two hostile camps, the world of Germany and the budding world of Slav­dom had set their picked warriors face to face, and at Griinwald, on that great day, the flower of German chivalry fell before the onslaught of the Polish-Lithuanian army under Iagiello and Witold, and the power of the great Order bit the red dust of that historic battlefield.

Into the balance of that fight Poland had cast her own fate. The Order, ready to join hands against her even with the Slavs, while, in its hate of their very name, it called her, to whom it owed everything, the ‘ hereditary foe,’ had plotted her ruin, and w^rou]d have shrunk from nothing that might insure it. In the previous century it had laboured to induce Sweden, Hungary, and Austria to accept a plan of partition, the earliest of them all (Treitschke, Historische und Politische Aufsatze, 1867, p. 35 ; compare Martens, Recucil dcs Traites, v., Inlrod., p. vi). From that same period, too, while striving to obstruct the understanding between Poland and Lithuania which was to be its ruin, it had shown an inclination to adopt the future watchword of secularized Prussia—an alliance with Moscow and against the benefactors thus rewarded.

The Battle of Griinwald settled all these accounts for a time. The knights, obliged, in the following year, to accept a peace at Thorn, which diminished their Prussian dominions, felt their Livonian interests threatened by the Polish-Lithuanian agree­ment, which they vainly strove to break, and the Muscovite alliance was still a far-off dream. Meanwhile the reflux of Mus­covite expansion in Livonia itself had to be faced. In 1483 the belligerents were fain to make a truce, and before this had expired, the Russians had built Ivangorod, their own Xarva— a standing threat to the Teutonic Narva on the opposite bank —on the eastern side of the mouth of the Narova River.

At the same time, the Order was undergoing a process of internal decomposition, soon to be hastened by the appearance of the Reformation, and the conversion of Albert of Branden­burg, appointed Grand Master in 1510. In 1525, when, at the Landtag of Wolmar, Albert, after an unsuccessful war, accepted the suzerainty of Poland over his secularized States, Livonia seemed inclined to follow the same course. The courage of

Walter von Plettenberg, who led the Livonian party in the Order, failed him; but. from the towns Protestantism was pouring forth with resistless strength, shaking the knights’ fortresses to their foundations, iinding its way even into the Bishops’ courts, leaving nothing of the Catholic establishment standing, save its external trappings, and casting the whole country into a state of anarchy which, whencesoever it came, rendered the final catastrophe inevitable. In 1554, Plettenberg’s successor, Fiirstenberg, began to treat with Moscow ; but in 1557, having shown an inclination to defy Poland, he was forced to appear before King Sigismund-Augustus at Pozwol, and accept an offensive and defensive alliance against Russia. It became clear, then, that Livonia was to be the lists on which that country’s own fate was to be fought out between its neigh­bours, and for their benefit. She was to save nothing for her­self, not even her honour.

II.—The Livonia of hie Sixteenth Century.

The Muscovite invasion, to which all this was the prehide, and all the horrors that came in its train, have been represented in the German literature, and even in the popular poetry of that epoch, as a Divine chastisement. Truly, the spectacle the country then presented was both sad and repulsive. The Order was fast nearing its end. The warlike spirit of the old knights had died out ; there was no civic spirit to take its place. The vow of celibacy had given rise to a state of unbridled and filthy debauchery. Immoral women swarmed round the knights’ castles, and the perpetual orgies in which they lived and the luxury they displayed reduced the poor to a state of hideous misery. Sebastian Munster, in his ¹ Cosmography,’ published in 1550 (French translation, dated 1575, p. 1618), has given us a dark and revolting picture of this revelry, and the distress which was the reverse of the medal; and a preacher of that period—Tilman Brakel, of Antwerp—has not left us a more favourable account of the lives of the upper clergy, greedy and dissolute, living in the midst of concubines and bastards.

But morals were corrupt at that time all over Europe, and this feature would not in itself suffice to explain the weakened condition of every local institution. To this other causes con­tributed. Ever since the twelfth century, the country had been offering the contradictory spectacle of a German colony, engaged, after the fashion of the Greek settlements on the coasts of Sicily and Asia Minor, in forming an independent State, without any national basis at all. The local population, of Finnish or Lettonian race, though it submitted to the foreign

masters who thus imposed their yoke, had nothing in common with them—neither tongue, nor customs, nor religion. Forced into Catholicism, and now driven towards Protestantism, it continued equally indifferent and hostile. Hence there was no solid foundation, no real link with any metropolitan or central religious power. The Emperor’s power over the Order and the Pope’s power over the Church were both of them purely nominal. There was no real centralization and no real unity, only a perpetual fight between the secular and regular elements, in spheres the frontiers of which were ill-defined, and perpetually altering. The general tendency of all towns was indifferently to repudiate the authority of both the rival powers. Anarchy reigned everywhere. As Droysen has justly observed (Gcschichtc der Gegenreformaiion, 1893, p. 204), in that hour, when the seven provinces of the Low Countries were evolving a new European State out of a great war, viribus unitis, the State of Livonia wats crumbling, viribus unitis, under the centrifugal action of its own dissociated elements.

Against the fourfold threat of invasion—Polish, Muscovite, Swedish, and Danish—there were no home resources at all. As a military pow'er, the Order had disappeared, and there was no money, or no inclination to give it, for recruiting an army— no hope of outside help. The Order d^;d indeed reckon on appealing to the German Fatherland in the hour of,danger, but for two centuries it had never failed to claim from that same Fatherland every right and license dear to a haughty and suspicious particularism. Poland was offering support, and even insisting on its acceptance ; but Poland, tom by intestine quarrels, weakened by the vices of her own Government, and absorbed by the great work of her union with Lithuania, was more to be feared as an enemy than welcomed as an ally. In 1554, Gustavus I., King of Sweden, would fain have taken advantage of the difficulties besetting Ivan, then busy with his Eastern conquests; but the league in which he invited Livonia, Poland, and Lithuania to join him fell to the ground, and, left alone to cope with Moscow, he was forced, in 1557, to agree to a forty years’ truce. Thus the unhappy Livonia was left face to face with the fourth rogue, who found plenty of reasons or pretexts for attacking her.

What reasons ? In the tacit agreement entered into by a portion of Western Europe to keep the door shut between her­self and her powerful neighbour in the North-West, the Baltic provinces were fond of assuming the watchdog’s part. At this very moment the famous business of Hans Schlitte gave proof of their zeal in this matter. This Saxon adventurer, who, in 1548, had received the Emperor Charles V.’s permission to recruit artisans and men of learning in Germany for the Tsar’s service,

was stopped by the Livonians, with his troop of followers, cast into prison, and kept there unti’ all his men, some 100, or even 300—the authorities contradict each other as to the exact figure—had dispersed. Another reason. Once Novgorod had been incorporated into the Russian Empire, the conquest of Livonia became necessary to that Empire. The new masters of the city had begun by destroying the German counting-house, or niemiehkii-dvor; but the trade thus taken from the Hansa at once passed to the Livonian towns, Riga and Narva,, fresh centres of operations by which Moscow suffered—hostile cities where foreigners were forbidden to leam Russian, and all credit given to Russian merchants was punished with fines (Richter, Geschichte der Ostsee Pro- vinzen, 1857, ii., p. 422).

What pretexts ? In old days, between the Livonian town of Neuhausen and Pskov, there had lain a belt of wild country, over which, after many years of contest, the Russians had obtained a sort of suzerainty, based on an annual tribute of xo pounds of honey, paid by the Livonian husbandmen living on the land. When the bee-swarms disappeared, together with the forests in which they had lived, this tribute had first of all been converted into a money payment—fixed, according to some authorities, at six crowns a year—and had finally fallen into disuse. In 1503, Moscow revived the ancient memory, and endeavoured to confuse the issue with her pretensions on Derpt, the Iouriev of the old Russians. In 1554, just after the taking of Astrakan, Ivan added more recent griefs: violations of his frontiers and confiscations of orthodox churches by Pro­testant fanatics. In 1556, having insured the safety of his new possessions in the East, he began to use sterner language. One of his predecessors had already sent the Livonians a whip as an admonitory hint. The Tsar’s Ambassador seems to have borne this precedent in mind. The tribute of 10 pounds of honey or six crowns was transformed, in his mouth, into a tax of one mark for every member of the population, and he claimed arrears amounting to 50.000 crowns.

The Bishop of Derpt flattered himself he would get out of the difficulty by a diplomatic quibble ; he promised full payment, but made the execution of his engagement dependent on the Emperor’s approbation. And to the Emperor the Livonians forthwith wrote, in what sense my readers will easily imagine. Terpigorev, the Ambassador, pretended he did not understand all these artifices. The Emperor ? What had the Emperor to do with it ?

‘ Yes or no—will you pay the money ?’ Instead of the coin, they brought him an explanatory letter for Ivan.

‘ Ho, I10 !’ said he, as he carefully put the paper into a silken

bag, ‘ here’s a beast that promises to grow big and fat!’ And, ordering refreshments to be served to the astonished magis­trates, he gambolled joyously about, jumping on the tables. Terrified, the city fathers dilated on the impossibility of getting so large a sum of money together in a few days.

* Come, come, there are twelve barrels full of money in the cellars of your Town Hall!’

‘ Maybe so, but we are not the only' people who have the keys. Revel has one, and Riga has another.’

‘ Very good, very good ! If you don’t choose to give the money, the Tsar will come and fetch it !’

And the Tsar really was coming. Had not Macarius likened him to Alexander Xevski after the Siege of Kazan ? Ivan was to pin his pnde on justifying the flattery by following in the national hero’s wake, and going back to the road out of which, since the thirteenth century', the necessities of her defence against the Tartars of the East had forced Russia. But the times were changed. Poland, Sweden, Denmark, and the whole, of Europe were to take part in the struggle now ; even Spain herself, to serve her dream of extending her universal monarchy to the distant North, aimed at seizing the Sound, disputed the Danish alliance with Mary Stuart, and claimed an interest in the fray.

III.—The Muscovite Coxquest.

In February, 1557, a Livonian deputation made its appear­ance at Moscow, begged for further delay, and was dismissed. Ivan refused to see the envoys himself, desired Adachev to pack them off, and organized a punitive expedition. It was swift and cruel. Towards the close of the year, an army, largely made up of Tartars, and commanded by Schah-Ali, the late Tsar of Kazan, invaded Livonia, and ravaged the country in a frightful manner. Not a feature was lacking. Women were abused till they died, children were tom from their mother’s wombs, houses were burnt down, crops were destroyed. There may be a certain exaggeration in the chronicles of the country, but at that period war was hideously barbarous everywhere, and Schah-Ali’s Tcheremisses were probably no whit inferior to the Duke of Alva’s more disciplined bandits. Having chosen out the most beautiful of their female captives, and satisfied their lust on them, they tied them to trees, and exercised their skill as marksmen on their living targets. This may have occurred, though the presence of two Russian commanders—Prince Michael Vassilevitch Glinski and Daniel Romano vitch Zakharine, brother of the Tsarina Anastasia— probably’ laid some restraint 011 these savage performances.

But the expedition was not so much a conquest as a summons, manu militari. As Terpigorev had said, the Russians had come to fetch the money ; thus some amount of terrorism may have appeared necessary.

Scarcely any resistance was offered. Over a distance of some 200 versts the invaders only met a few weak detachments, easily put to flight or cut to pieces. But as yet no result was apparent. Most probably Ivan had not settled on any definite plan. He was working a little at random. In January, 1558, Schah-Ali, having amassed a huge amount of booty, agreed to a truce, and more delegates travelled to Moscow. They brought an instalment of the sum claimed, and they obtained a hearing. Thanks to the intervention of the Russian merchants concerned in the trade with Derpt and the neighbouring towns, and thanks, too, it may be, to certain other gold pieces prudently bestowed, unhoped-for concessions seemed within view. Ivan had already consented to treat, and to waive his claim to tribute, on account of the exhaustion of the country. But all the negotiations were upset by an unexpected piece of news. Narva, refusing to accept the truce, had continued to exchange cannon-shots with Ivangorod ; the town had surrendered in April, 1558, but the fortress had continued to hold out ; now (May 11) it had been carried by assault. Instantly Adachev, who was in charge of the negotiations, changed his tone. Hitherto the question had been, in somewhat nebulous and confusing terms, that of a tribute to be paid by the Bishopric of Derpt. Now a quite different claim was put forward ; the whole of Livonia was called upon to accept, not only a similar obligation, but the suzerainty of Moscow, ‘ on the same terms as the territories of Kazan and Astrakan.’ Fiirstenberg, Grand Master of the Order, and the bishops of Derpt and Riga, were to proceed to Moscow, and there do homage, and Narva and the other lately-conquered towns were to be simply an­nexed to the Empire.

This method of proceeding by stages, and as it were by a succession of forward leaps, has always been the traditional policy of Russia. But Ivan certainly did not expect his new conditions to be instantly accepted. He was drawing a bow at a venture. Punishment had been wreaked, and he was now broaching conquest. The war went on, and the unhappy Livonia was no more fit to face it than before. The towns alone checked the invasion for a. time. In his despair, Fiirsten- berg, who could only get 8,000 men together, made over his command to his coadjutor, Gottliard Kettler, w'ho did no better. The fortresses yielded in their turn : first Neuhausen fell, then Marienburg. Cowardice and treachery were in every corner ; the German chroniclers themselves admit it.

‘ Marient/urg, das edle Sc/doss U^rar uebergehcn ohtie Schoss,’

sang Taube, the Livonian.

In July, 1558, the Siege of Derpt began, and the Bishop and his immediate circle seem to have hastened the surrender so as to insure certain personal benefits for themselves. In the wars of the sixteenth century this capitulation constitutes an exceptional case, and one which does honour to Moscow'. The Russian Commander-in-Chief, Prince Peter Ivanovitch Chomski, granted the natives of the town a full amnesty, the free exercise of their religion, the maintenance of their ancient municipal laws, judicial autonomy, and liberty to carry on a free trade with Russia. And at first these conditions were scrupulously observed. Moscow’s tactics altered with her plans. After the assault at Narva, a regular system of pillage had been arranged, the traces of which are still apparent in the St. Petersburg Kunstkarnera. The country was rich, though it could find no money for defensive purposes. In the house of one citizen, Fabian von Tisenhausen, 80,000 marks in gold were found. But the very graves were ransacked, we are told. In those day the laws of war permitted or authorized even worse profanations. Once they had sacked everything, the victors grew less fierce, and even showed great muderation. The privileges granted at Derpt were extended to Narva. Steps were at once taken to restore the town, and the husband­men round about it were libtrally encouraged and helped.

Ivan, indeed, thought things had gone too far in this direc­tion. He only ratified Chouiski’s charter subject to certain restrictions : a Russian member to be admitted to the muni­cipal tribunal ; the appeal to the Riga court to be replaced by an appeal to the Muscovite Voievode or to the Tsar ; and trade with all Russian towns, save Novgorod, Pskov, Ivan- gorod. and Narva, to be taxed. As an offset, the natives of Derpt were to be allowed to settle in any part of the Empire that suited them. These advantages must have been suffi­ciently alluring, for before autumn came, twenty other towns had offered their submission.

Yet the war was not nearly over. Revel still held out, and in September, when Choulski. after the invariable habit of Russian Generals, retired before the approach of winter, Kettler seized the opportunity and took the offensive. Gather­ing m.ooo men, he recovered Ringen, after an attack which was said to have cost him 2.000 men, and pushed on as far as Siebieje and Pskov, the suburbs of which town he burnt. Ivan, threatened by the Crimean Tartars, was fain to gulp down his wrath and agree to a truce in May, 1559. But the next year the Crimean danger had passed away, and he had his revenge.

(In August 20, under the walls of Fellin, Kourbski met the flower of the Livonian nobility, gathered for one mighty effort, and crushed it at a blow. The fall of Fellin very soon after­wards gave him possession of the person of Fiirstenberg, who had already resigned in Ivettler’s favour. The former Grand Master, with other prisoners of high rank—the Landmarschall Philip Schal von Bell, his brother, Wemer Schal von Bell, Comtor of Goldringen, and Heinrich von Galen, Bailiff of Bauschenburg—was sent to Moscow, and treated, according to the Livonian chronicles, with great barbarity. The prisoners, we are told, after being led through the streets and beaten with iron rods, were put to further tortures, massacred, and their bodies left to be devoured by birds of prey. As regards Fiirstenburg, this assertion is certainly disproved. He was not killed ; he was given a landed property in the Government of Iaroslavl, and as late as 1575 he declared, in a letter to his brother, that he had no reason to complain. Some Danish Ambassadors happened to be at Moscow when he arrived there. They ascertained that the ex-Grand Master was being well treated, and on their return journey they testified to this effect before the magistrates of Revel. But they added that the other prisoners had been put to death.

These executions, we must admit, were logical, according to Ivan’s view of the situation. As the progress of his arms in Livonia woke ancient memories, flattering to the national pride, the Tsar, not unnaturally, ended by looking on the possession of the country as his vested right, and its inhabitants as rebellious subjects of their legitimate lord. When the King of Denmark insisted on his own claim to Esthonia, did not Ivan reply that Iaroslav had established a far more valid claim 500 years before, when he built Iouriev, and covered the face of the country with Orthodox churches ? Livonian and German authorities are unreliable, and Russian authorities, unfortunately, non-existent, as far as this war is concerned. It hnds no echo even in the national poetry of the country. The fall of Kazan, the conquest of Siberia, and the interests, religious and economic, they involved, produced a far deeper effect on the imagination of a race which then, as now, was both realistic and mystic to a high degree. The realities to which the Livonian massacres, void of all brilliant feats of arms, led up, were nothing to it ; they spoke neither to its mind nor to its heart.

Yet they were beginning to be clear enough in Ivan’s brain. Three parts of the work of conquest were accomplished. Kettler and his comrades, reduced to a few strongholds in Livonia and threatened in Esthonia as well, applied, turn about, to the Emperor, to Denmark, Sweden, and Poland. Any chance of intervention seemed most problematical.

IV.—The European Intervention.

All over Europe, in truth, the impression produced was very deep. From the very outset of the war, the Protestant writers, always ready to denounce Spanish intrigue, had asserted that Philip II., who, as a Catholic monarch and as King of England, had a double interest in taking advantage of the quarrel, would strike at Protestantism in Livonia, and gain a footing on the Baltic seaboard. The Pope, no doubt, was playing this game with him. The Emperor was called on to act. But Ferdinand I. was Emperor now—a bureaucratic Sovereign, eager to apply quietism to politics. He called for reports, opened a correspondence with Ivan, exchanged views with the Kings of Denmark, Sweden, and Poland, and did not budge an inch.

Ivan, indeed, tonk pains to humour this high authority. The relations between the House of Hapsburg and the Moscow Government, which had begun in the fifteenth century, could only be kept up, on the Russian side, by dint of a constant and deliberate sacrifice of the susceptibilities and pretensions it reserved for its other neighbours. This time, therefore, with many an evasion and recantation, the Tsar went so far as to impute the misfortunes of Livonia to her having forsaken the Catholic faith !

The seaboard towns and the German Electoral Princes offered a better hope, for all of them expressed a desire to come to their Livonian brothers’ assistance, and recognised the urgency of the necessity. Yet at the Augsburg Reichstag in 1559, this fine zeal ended in a vote of 100,000 florins subsidy ! The Deputaticnstag of Spire took the matter more seriously, declared the whole of Germany threatened and Mecklen­burg in imminent peril; but here, too, the result was trivial— another subsidy of 400,000 florins, an interdict on Russian trade, and some talk of a solemn embassy to Moscow. The prohibition, simultaneously imposed, of any intercourse between Livonia and Poland, or other neighbouring Powers, betrayed the real anxieties of the gathering, and none of its decisions were carried into effect. As Droysen puts it, all the Germany of those days knew how to do was qveruliren, pro- testiren, dupliciren, und tripliciren. Ferdinand did something on November 26, 1561, by publishing the celebrated manifesto which forbade the navigation of the Narova. This amounted to forbidding the introduction of Western merchandise, and especially of war material, into Russia. But England had already discovered other roads, and was using them, in spite of the denials which fell from the lips of the astute Elizabeth, who had just (1558) succeeded her sister Mary Tudor. And,

on the other hand, in spite of a more or less sincere feeling in favour of the Livonian cause, the Hansa itself was betraying an inclination to compete-with the English traders in this matter, and also to take advantage of the catastrophe which had rid it ot dangerous rivals at Riga, Revel, and Derpt.

Livonia was forsaken, neither more nor less, and in her despair she was driven to knock at those foreign doors which her natural defenders, even while they themselves betrayed her, had sought to shut in her face. In January, 1559, an envoy from the Order made his appearance before "the Polish Diet at Piotrkow. He found it absorbed in home affairs, and appealed to the Kmg. This King was Sigismund-Augustus, the last of the Jagellons, the representative of a worn-out race. Indolent, debauched, weak, careless of the morrow as he was, the best blood of the great Italian politicians ran in his veins. His mother was that Bona Sforza who, with the culture and habits of her native land, had brought the intriguing spirit and violent instincts of her own family to Cracow. To all external ques­tions, as a rule, her son brought a clear conception of the in­terests at stake, and a deep conviction of his own proper course. He listened to the envoy, and some two months later he began to parley with Kettler, and formulated his conditions. Poland would defend Livonia, even if that involved a war with Russia, but she must have Kokenhausen, Uexkull, Dunaburg, and Riga —the keys of the burning house. The risk was a heavy one indeed, and Bona’s pupil could not renew the mistake, the folly, into which his father Sigismund I. had lallen, letting the proffered friendship of Prussia slip, and helping, for the benefit of the House of Brandenburg, to build up a power that was crumbling away. The acquisition of a northern frontier and of the Baltic seaboard was becoming a question of life or death for Poland, and the present opportunity, though less favour­able than the last, was tempting enough.

For some time Kettler hesitated. He travelled to Vienna to seek a better bargain, made an attempt to get a hearing from the Augsburg Diet, but ended by going back to Vilna, while the King parleyed with his unruly senators, and at last the merciless logic of facts overcame all resistance. Between August 31 and September 15, two treaties were signed, whereby, in return for a promise of help against Ivan and an undertaking to respect the religion, rights, and privileges of the inhabitants, about a sixth of the Livonian territory was made over to Poland. This frontier strip ran from Drujen to Ascherade. As to the places which might be recovered from Russia, they were to return to Livonia after payment of an indemnity of 700,000 florin=, which Sigismund-Augustus was confident never would be found. But how about the Emperor’s authority ? The King

declared he would insure its being respected. And the truce he had just signed with the Tsar ? Sigismund would intervene as the legitimate Sovereign of the country in dispute, and would thus break none of his engagements.

He was in no hurry, indeed, to put this complicated and somewhat ambiguous programme into execution, and the re­pugnance manifested by the Polish Szlachta to the effort re­quired of it does not suffice to explain his inaction. The game was a risky one, and it was wise to make suitable preparation, and await the best possible opportunities. Livonia was begging for help, but she was not quite open in her dealings yet. The Polish army, valiant but undisciplined, might not be equal to the task. To have Riga would be a good thing ; but what was the use of Riga without ships, without a fighting and a merchant navy ? Sigismund, a bom diplomat, dreamt of a league which would unite the Scandinavian Powers and the Hanse towns under his own direction ; a cunning politician, he sought to provide himself with the weapons he lacked—regular troups, ports, and a fleet.

Time, alas ! was to fail him. and so was the complaisance of his fancied allies. The Hansa had other views, and the Scan­dinavian Powers had not the remotest intention of playing Poland’s game. As soon as Derpt had fallen, the nobility of Revel had appealed to the King of Sweden. Gustavus Vasa, a dying man, remembered the humiliation imposed on him when Livonia had stolen away and left him to accept the peace of 1557, which the Tsar had refused to negotiate in person. The voievodes of Novgorod had been good enough then to treat with ‘ the little King of Stockholm.’ The habit of using these intermediaries dated back to the days when Novgorod had been independent. • ‘ What,’ said Ivan, when objections were made—‘ what is Stekolna (sic) and its master ?’ A shabby little town that had turned a merchant’s son into its Sovereign ! He was doing it too much honour already ! The Livonian envoys waited for the accession of Gustavus’ son, the impetuous and ambitious Erik XIV., who received them more graciously. In May, 1561, in spite of all Kettler’s opposition, a fresh treaty stipulated that Revel, with the territories of Harrien, Wirland, and Ierwen, should be made over to Sweden. There was a Polish garrison :n Revel, it is true, but Erik’s fleet and his German mercenaries made short work of that. On June 15 the garrison laid down its arms, and thus began a duel which lasted for a century, and which, by the exhaustion of the two adversaries, was to end in the ruin of the Republic and the triumph of Russia.

Then Denmark entered the lists. As early as in 1558, King Christian II., even while sending an embassy to Moscow to

conclude a treaty of peace and claim the return of Esthonia to its legitimate owner, had opened negotiations with the Bishop of Oesel, Johann von Munchausen. This w^ras his answer to the supplications of the unhappy Livonians, who had not failed to knock at that particular door on their own account. Christian died, and an understanding with his successor was all the more easily arranged. Frederic II. had a brother, Magnus, a lad of tw-enty, and old enough to claim his share of the inheri­tance, Schleswig-Holstein. Either spontaneously or incited by Christopher von Munchausen, the Bishop of Oesel’s brother, a most enterprising man. the King was inspired with the idea of offering the following compensation to his younger brother. Johann von Munchausen, w^Tho had no right whatever to do it, sold his bishopric for the sum of 30,000 thalers ; the Dowager Queen of Denmark, Dorothea, advanced the money, and in April, 1560, Magnus landed at Arensburg, the castle of which place was made over to him by the. episcopal bailiff, and a certain number of Livonians joined him there. Christopher von Munchausen had already, and on his own authority, assumed the. title of the King of Denmark’s lieutenant in Esthonia, Garria, Oesel, and so forth. Magnus, w^Those career was to be a most extraordinary one, and who was the finished type of the adventurer of those days, was soon to call himself King of Livonia.

Thus was prepared the confused and mighty conflict which was to hold the future of the countries affected, and the chances of the various competitors, in suspense for over twenty years. And thus, too, Sigismund-Augustus’ hand was forced, and he himself driven to act sooner than his natural wisdom would have dictated. In August, 1560, Nicholas Radziwill, ‘ the Black,’ appeared at Riga with a Polish army, and, tearing off every veil, demanded the cession of the whole of Livonia, with the secularization of all the territories on the right bank of the Dvina and their direct annexation to Poland.

Kettler’s fellow-countrymen have looked on him as a traitor. In all probability he was only an unlucky player of the game. He had striven to find an ally ; but, as a certain writer has asserted, in justification of Sigismund-Augustus, nobody can ally himself with a corpse. And Fiirstenberg’s unlucky suc­cessor certainly exhausted every means of resistance and every form of delay. It was not till Poland appealed, at the close of this fateful year, to the altered circumstances and the necessity of fighting three enemies instead of one, that he was forced to give in. On March 5,1562, having, in his quality of Master of the Teutonic Order, recognised, by a document dated November 21, 1561, the union of Lithuania and Livonia, and accepted the possession of Courland and some neighbouring

districts, with the title of Duke, in vassalage to Poland, for himself and his heirs, he resigned his cross, his mantle, and the keys of the castle of Riga, into Radziwill’s hands.

The spectacle offered by the Baltic provinces at that moment was an extraordinary one, even for that period of incessant territorial rivalries. It surpassed that presented at Milan or in Flanders. The new Duke of Courland. a feeble copy of the first Duke of Prussia, was beginning his reign south of the Dvina. In the north the King of Poland was installing himself as lord and master on part of the ancient possessions of the Order, and proclaiming himself suzerain of them all. Riga, while submitting to the same authority, remained in theory a free city of the Empire, and so preserved a shadow of independence. The Swedes kept Revel and Harrien. Oesel, Wiek, and Pielten were subject to Magnus. And the Muscovites, established in the Bishopric of Derpt, in Wirland, and along the Lettonian frontier, were preparing to dispute the ownership of the whole country with all its other occupants.

‘ At present,’ wrote a gazetteer of that period, ‘ Livonia is like a young lady round whom everybody dances.’ One im­portant fact had already passed into history—the close of the period of the Crusades and of the Orders of Chivalry. Modern Europe, even while she still hesitated to receive Russia into her bosom, had joined with Muscovy in wiping out the past, and laying the foundations of a new order of politics. But this new order had yet to evolve itself out of a mighty and chaotic struggle, the incidents of which I must now briefly relate.

CHAPTER V

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE EMPIRE OF THE BALTIC

I. — SWEDEN AND POLAND. II.—THE COALITIONS. HI.------- THH

COLLAPSE OF THE ALLIANCES : MAGNUS. IV.--------------------------- IVAN'S

CANDIDATURE FOR THE POLISH THRONE. V.—THE ELECTION OF BATORY.

I.—Sweden and Poland.

Is the question of the possession of the Baltic provinces de­finitely settled even now ? Such an assertion would certainly be rash. It may very possibly become one of the objects, at all events, if not the cause, of a fresh struggle—a conflict of powers far more formidable than those whose onslaught and fierce strife the sixteenth century saw. The elements of the problem have modified, to be sure ; yet, great as the change has been, a certain amount of reality, living, or capable of second

birth, may well linger amidst the memories I must now evoke. Herein lies the chief interest of this particular page of history. In some of the episodes I shall endeavour to set forth, Ivan’s physiognomy stands out clearly, and this will be their only charm. For the sake of clearness, I shall point out, in the first place, the phases apparent in a succession of events so compli­cated and intervowen that a guiding thread of some sort is absolutely necessary. And beforehand, too, I claim my readers’ patience ; the thought of a possibly not far distant future will lead them to regard this return to an instructive past as interesting, or, at least, useful.

The first phase brings us down to the year 1564. Ivan, wavering between a Swedish and a Polish alliance, humours Denmark, and triumphantly holds his own against Poland. In the second phase, from 1564 to 1568, Sigismund-Augustus, by allying himself with Frederick II., drives Sweden and Muscovy into an agreement, and brings about a land war between Sweden and Denmark. The Tsar preserves the upper hand on land in Livonia; but while Poland is absorbed and paralyzed by her internal affairs, Ivan’s struggle with his bo'iars and the old regime also tends to distract his attention from the Livonian problem : this is the period of the Opritchnina. Third phase : The dethronement of Erik XIV. in 1568, and the accession of John III., brother-in-law of Sigismund-Augustus, bring about a reconciliation between Sweden and Denmark, thanks to the good offices of Poland. The fear of a coalition carries Magnus over to Ivan’s side. Fourth phase: The death of Sigismund- Augustus, in 1572, places Poland temporarily out of action. Ivan puts forward his own candidature for the inheritance of the Jagellons. Fifth phase : The election of Batory ends in the triumphant reappearance of Poland on the scene, and the decision of the struggle in her favour, almost exclusively.

Germany, it will be observed, does not appear in the conflict, though the soil concerned was German, or, at all events, Germanized. Yet we shall catch a glimpse of her playing the part and wearing the expression, both of them neutral, which devolved on her at that time, not without making some ineffec­tual attempts at intervention. She stood by, and awaited the favourable moment, but of her rights, her ambitions, and her hopes she did not abdicate a jot.

For half a century, as I have said, ever since 1514, when Russia had snatched Smolensk from Poland, the relations between the two countries had been in a condition which could not be described either as war or peace. Now fighting, then negotiating, doing both at once sometimes, they dis­puted, theoretically, over the possession of that one town and the territory round it, but the quarrel really covered a much

wider area. The negotiations, perpetually renewed, had ended by constituting a sort of protocol, in virtue of which every fresh parley began with the claim, on one side, not to Smolensk only, but also to Novgorod and Pskov, as the ancient patrimony of the Lithuanian Princes, and, on the other, with a demand for the cession of those three towns, and also of Kiev and all the Russian territories then under Polish rule, after which the parties separated, the envoys, Russian and Polish, declared the negotiations broken off, and took their leave, departing, in some cases, without further ceremony, but always allowed themselves to be brought back, and always, failing some final understanding, accepted a provisional arrangement of some kind. The question of the patrimonies was left to stand over; Poland would not recognise the Tsar’s new title, and the Tsar, by way of reprisal, refused to give Sigismund- Augustus the title of King, so the difficulty was eluded by drawing up the terms agreed on in duplicate—one Russian copy and the other Polish—and signing a truce.

Into relations already most difficult Livonia had introduced a fresh subject of dispute, and one which seemed to admit of no compromise whatever. Yet in 1560, at the very moment when the treaty imposed on Kettler had imparted a decisive form to the King of Poland’s intervention, Ivan took upon him­self to despatch an important Ambassador, bearing very con­ciliatory proposals, to Warsaw. An event had occurred, the consequences of which have been exaggerated, but the influence of which on the Sovereign’s mind, on the development of his character, and, to a certain extent, on the trend of his policy, cannot be denied. The Tsar had just lost his wife, that Anas­tasia whose beneficent influence as his guardian angel forms part and parcel of a legend I am sinceiely sorry to weaken. Ivan loved the mother of his elder children dearly, and the delights of home life, which she alone seems to have taught him to enjoy, probably did something to soften his fierce and violent instincts, just as the grief the loss of his companion caused him may have produced a contrary effect. More than this cannot be asserted with any certainty. And neither his love nor his sorrow, indeed, can have been so very deep, for the monarch’s first care, on the morrow of the disaster, was to seek another bride.

Sigismund had two unmarried sisters, and the chief object of the mission confided to Ivan’s Ambassador, Vokolnitchyi Feodor Ivanovitch Soukine, was to obtain the hand of one of these ladies for his master. Somewhat ungraciously, and after much delay, the King allowed the Ambassador a sight of the two Princesses at church. Whether by accident or on purpose, the younger of the two, Catherine, turned round, and

this was the prologue to one of the darkest tragedies of a period most fertile in dramatic episodes. Besides the personal charms which Soukine set himself to press on his Sovereign, the betrothed thus suggested had the advantage, in Ivan’s eyes, of representing, with a brother who had no sons, a race which had reigned, and reigned by hereditary right, at Vilna. In her the Tsar of all the Russias would possess yet another right, newly acquired and most incontestable, to claim his Lithuanian patrimony. Fed, no doubt, by his passionate and stubborn temperament, this idea was to root itself so deeply in the monarch’s mind as to become, in. the course of the following years, the directing element of his whole policy.

But very probably Sigismund-Augustus sought nothing more on this occasion than to save appearances, and so gain time. From the Polish point of view, this question of the Lithuanian inheritance, quite apart from the difference of faith, was in itself an obstacle in the way of a marriage which would have threatened the integrity of the national possessions, and might compromise the success of that other union between the two Slav races of Poland and Lithuania which the last of the Jagellons was then labouring to complete. Besides all this, Catherine had already been almost promised to John, Duke of Finland, brother of the King of Sweden. In 1562, this promise became a reality, and immediately afterwards, hostili­ties between Russia and Poland began.

Just as in past days, they fought while they negotiated, and negotiated while they fought. Ivan wrote abusive letters to Sigismund-Augustus, and Sigismund-Augustus avenged himself bv inciting the Khan of the Crimea to invade Russia. In February, 1563, the Tsar, in command of a numerous army, and carrying with him a coffin which, he declared, was to serve either for the Polish King’s corpse or for his own, won a signal advantage. First Smolensk and then Polotsk, the chief town of a Polish-Lithuanian palatinate, and an important commer­cial centre, carrying on relations with Riga, fell into the hands of the Muscovites. Until Batory’s time, their powerful artil­lery was always to tell in a war of sieges. Ivan talked more than ever of taking back Kiev ; with his usual vehemence, he jeered his unlucky adversary, who had appealed to the King of Sweden in support of his claim to Livonia, and called him his ⁴ brother.’ ‘ What King ? What brother ? . . . He might as well fraternize with a water-carrier !’ But the next year, on a battlefield which, in 1508 and in 1514, had already proved fatal to the Russian arms, on the banks of the Oula near Orcha, the Poles had their revenge. Nicholas Radziwill. ¹ the Red,’ cut the troops led by Prince Peter Ivanovitch to pieces, and the Prince himself fell in the fray.

Instantly the Tsar, forgetting all his recent scorn, attempted to come to an understanding with Sweden. Erik XIV. had lost no time about sending an embassy to Moscow when he ascended the throne in 15- 1, and since that time, in spite of the rude treatment showered on him from that quarter, and against the advice of his recognised counsellor, Philip de Momay, who urged him to prefer an agreement with Poland, he had per­severed in his course, extending his own possessions in Livonia meanwhile. To these, in the year 1563, and thanks to the self­interested assistance of Christopher, coadjutor of the Bishop of Riga, who sought the hand of the King’s sister Elizabeth, were added a number of towns—Wolmar, Wenden, Kezholm, Pemau, and Padis. Now that the Tsar was making him these unhoped-for overtures, Erik fancied his cause was won, and that they were to go halves. He had to lower his pretensions. Ivan began by claiming the lion’s share, and would only give up Revel, Pernau, and Wittenstein. Then, quite suddenly, he tried to bring the Polish Princess, now Duchess of Finland, whom he had hoped to call his own, and whom even now he would not give up, into the negotiations. He wanted almost the whole of Livonia, and he wanted Catherine, too. She was married, but that was of no consequence to him. A Duke of Finland was nothing at all. He had married a wife himself, but that, too, was nothing ; she was only one of his own subjects— a mere slave, therefore. At a later date he declared he had never intended to interfere with the freedom ot the lady he coveted, nor tamper with the sanctity of the bonds into which she and he had both entered. He had believed Duke John to be dead. ... He had not thought of marrying Catherine or making her his mistress. . . . He only wanted to hold her as a hostage. . . . His explanations are multifarious and most improbable. The brutal fact remains : his claim, impudently manifested and obstinately maintained, to get possession, with no honest intention assuredly, of this modem Helen, on whose account nations were making themselves ready to fight. As to the motive of his obstinacy, little doubt can be felt : far less than on the lady—though he thought of her too, no doubt—it was on Lithuania that the fiery despot’s fierce desire was set.

Erik XIV. began by assuming an heroic attitude. He would not give up his sister-in-law any more than he would give up Livonia, and he was already talking of allying himself with Poland, with the Emperor, with all the German Princes, to bring this barbarous Russian to reason, when his threatening dreams were confronted by another and far more threatening reality. Negotiations had been going on since 1561 between Poland and Denmark ; they had just been brought to a con­clusion. On a treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, signed

at Stettin on October 5, 1563, had followed an agreement with Lubeck, whereby the Hanseatic League joined the coalition. Ivan, on his side, had also negotiated, and signed at Mojalsk, on August 7, 1562, a treaty with Denmark, which bound the two Powers to act against Poland and Sweden, the Tsar recog­nising the Danish rights over Esthonia, Oesel, and Pilten. Sweden found herself alone ; she was fain to capitulate. It may be that her sacrifice was too eagerly and too complaisantly made. Erik’s envoys went to Derpt, agreed to negotiate with the Governor of Novgorod and Russian Livonia, Michael Iakovlevitch Morozov, only, and accepted almost all the con­ditions Ivan had previously demanded : they gave up Livonia, except for Revel, Pernau, Wittenstein. and Karkhus, and by a secret clause they undertook to give up Catherine’s person. The Tsar, at all events, never ceased to claim the execution of this last engagement, concerning which, it must be confessed, we have no precise and absolutely reliable testimony. Erik had always been opposed to a marriage which carried his brother into the Polish camp, and the presence of Danish envoys in Poland at the moment of the wedding would seem to indicate that diplomatic arrangements, the vexatious effects of which Sweden was now called on to endure, were not un­connected with it. The question of the independence of Fin­land seems to have been put forward at the same time, and Erik, without waiting for any confirmation of his suspicions as to that matter, lost no time in making it impossible for his rebellious brother to realize them. After a shortlived struggle, he captured him, and shut him up in the Castle of Gripsholm. Catherine shared her husband’s imprisonment. The King, therefore, was in a position to dispose of her according to his redoubtable partner’s will.

Was this ever his intention ? Or did his plenipotentiaries exceed their powers ? The problem has never been solved. The one undoubted fact is that the Treaty of Derpt was not ratified at Stockholm. Fresh negotiations only resulted in the conclusion of a truce. However all this may have been, Erik, engaged in a double war against Poland and Denmark, was forced, whether he would or no, to become Ivan’s ally, and this position set his foot on a dangerous declivity, to the bottom of which he was destined to slip. From this time forward two coalitions stood face to face, while Magnus, now reduced to Oesel, Dago, and a few strongholds, fought for his own hand in the general melee, and watched his opportunity to join whichever side promised him most.

II.—The Coalitions.

Sigismund-Augustus tried to draw in even the Low Countries, but he only succeeded in vexing the States by the measures he took to cut off the Narva trade. In 1565, while success and reverse were pretty evenly balanced in Livonia, the Poles taking Pemau and the Swedes harrying Oesel, two successive disasters overtook Sweden : in January, Frederick II. closed the Sound, and so cut her off from Europe ; and in November, the Emperor Maximilian, yielding to the remonstrances of Frederick of Saxony—the real Agamemnon of this war between the nations—published a manifesto which laid the Swedes under a ban, as breakers of the peace, allied with a barbarous monarch. This paralyzed Erik’s progress in Livonia, and his brother’s party began to lift its head. Yet Maximilian was being constantly worked on in an opposite sense by the repre­sentatives of certain German trading-houses which had interests at Moscow. Their agents were busily employed in turning public opinion. One of them, Veit Zenge by name, the Duke of Bavaria’s commercial envoy at Lubeck, went further than his fellows. Did not Ivan glory in his own German origin ? This was, in fact, one of the Tsar’s manias. Veit Zenge even felt sure he had Bavarian blood in his veins! In return for the honour of entering into closer relations with the Emperor, and receiving one of his orders, the Muscovite Sovereign would give 30,000 of his best cavalry to fight against the Turks, and a large sum of money into the bargain ; he would even relinquish his claims to Livonia, and place his Church under the Pope’s authority ! Matrimonial arrange­ments might set a convenient seal on this agreement, so desirable in the interests of Christendom in general. Ivan had a son and daughter, both of marriageable age, and in the Moscow terems there w^rere beauties who might well set all the Princes in Germany a-dreaming. These conceits, discussed at all the German Tagen, did not fail to produce their effect on the decisions of the Empire and its ruler, both of them already inclined to an indolent and prudent neutrality.

In 1566, Magnus, hard pressed by the Swedes, sought a re­conciliation with Poland. His pretensions were high : he asked the hand of Sigismund-Augustus’ second sister, with Livonia as her dowry. The last of the Jagellons did not take the pro­posal seriously, and set himself, in 1567, to strike a mighty blow, and personally lead a campaign against Livonia. There was a stir at Dantzig. This sea-coast town, which had scant taste for the Polish domination, and was discontented with its own lot, had shown a preference, from the very outset, for the

hostile camp. The agents it employed at Warsaw soon calmed the agitation. ‘ The King had the gout in his right arm and his left leg, and that was the greater part of his equipment.’ The campaign, indeed, turned out a miserable failure. The royal army, reckoned beforehand at 200,000 Poles and 170,000 Lithuanians, did not bring a tenth part of these numbers into the field. Nevertheless the Russians, after an unsuccess­ful engagement with some of these troops at Runnafer, mani­fested a desire to treat. Ivan’s home difficulties were heavy on him ; the Opritchmna was beginning. In Poland, the union with Lithuania, which, though an accomplished fact, had still to be finally organized, the strained relations with the Prussian towns, and internecine quarrels, combined to make, peace earnestly desired. But Ivan laid claim to Revel and Riga, and began an epistolary argument with the Lithuanian nobles, which was not calculated to prepare the ground for pacific agreement.

Kourbski, after fighting bravely and winning brilliant suc­cesses with the Tsar’s armies in Livonia, had allowed himself to be surprised under the walls of Nevel in 1562—an event apparently prepared, to some extent, by his previous and dubious relations with Poland. Since that time he had been kept in a sort of semi-disgrace, and the irascible boiar, thus all the more incited to reh 1 against his master’s despotic tendencies, had ended by raising the standard of revolt after the Russian fashion — i.e., by crossing the frontier. The conclusion drawn in Poland was that the Opritchnina would shortly furnish more rebels of the same kidney, with whom it would be well to enter into relations, and thus Ivan became aware of a number of letters addressed to certain of his subjects by Gregory’ Chodkiewicz, Grand Hetman of Lithuania, by some other Lithuanian noblemen, and by the King himself. Angry and disturbed, his first idea was to convoke, in the year 1566, the assembly to which I have already referred (p. 136), and which unanimously pronounced against any concessions at all in Livonia, while the landed proprietors on the Lithuanian frontier declared themselves ready to die rather than give up an inch of ground. The Tsar, thus comforted and strength­ened, undertook to dictate answers to the Polish corre­spondents. It would have been better, perhaps, to treat, them with silent scorn ; but Ivan was always sorely afflicted with the letter-writing itch. Wherefore Sigismund-Augustus, who had offered the Prince Ivan Dmitrievitch Bielski a splendid appanage in Lithuania, learnt what it meant to propose such bargains to the Tsar’s subjects. ‘ I am fairly well provided,’ wrote the Prince to the King, and addressing him as his brother, ‘ but you might do a wiser thing—give up Lithuania to my

master, by which means you might make sure of keeping Poland as his vassal, and becoming, like myself, the subject of the best of masters !’ The text of the othei answers may easily be divined. They are curious specimens of the learning the Terrible knew how to apply to the service of his spite, call­ing his adversaries Sennaherim and Navkhodonosor {sic), and of that Oriental infatuation by which he was occasionally inspired.

At that moment the Tsar felt the wind was veering round in his favour ; and, indeed, Erik had come back to the charge, and seemed inclined to give in altogether, provided Ivan left him free to settle his own account with Poland. He was even ready, if we may rely on Dahlman {Dissertatio de occcesione fcederum regi% Erici XIV. cum Russia, Upsala, 1783), who hud access to the original diplomatic documents, to give up Catherine herself.

As early as in 1566, the King, we are told, invited deliberation as to the granting of this concession to the Tsar ; and when his counsellors refused to agree to it, he instructed his envoy, Gyllenstjema, to hold out till the very last, but yield the point if the alliance could not be had on any other terms. This information appears all the more likely to be true because it seems less possible, considering the circumstances, that Gyllenstjema can have dared, this time, to exceed his powers. Now, on February 16,1567, at the sloboda of Alexandrov, where the Opritchnina began its bloody orgies, the Swedish pleni­potentiary certainly did sign a treaty of alliance, all the clauses of which were explicitly made to depend on this condition. Ivan joined his fate with that of Sweden, on the basis of the uti possidetis in Livonia and freedom of the contracting parties as regards future conquests (except Riga, which the Tsar reserved for himself) ; he promised his intervention in favour of a reconciliation between Sweden and Denmark and the Hanseatic League, and his armed assistance if his interven­tion failed. But all this only if Catherine’s person was given up to him. The whole treaty was to be annulled if the Princess were to die, and the execution of the final clause thus to become impossible.

The admiration with which this diplomatic document has inspired certain Russian historians is not very easily justified. Ivan pro\ ided liberally for himself ; the retention of Riga in Russian hands was the death-blow of the Swedish Revel, and deprived Poland of her best reason for disputing the possession of Livonia with her two rivals. The eventual support of the Russo-Swedish coalition by the Hanse towns also insured the undoubted inferiority of the Polish-Danish alliance. But Ivan, not content with these advantages, made them all depend on

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the performance of a condition which might prove impossible, and which was certainly disgraceful. Besides his share of Livonia, he demanded, not a wife indeed, nor merely a woman, but the heiress of the Jagellons, a part of Poland! And on this he insisted, against all reason and against all apparent possibility, for the lady was married, and even if she became a widow, was not very likely to consent to marry the man who had carried her off. Unmoved, he followed up his idea, and this proves that the mighty crisis in which he was then involved within the borders of his Empire did not disturb his mind so much as has been supposed : but he developed and applied his idea in a way which points to a certain weakening of the intellectual faculties corresponding with a simultaneous exasperation of the worst instincts of his nature. In the case of men of robust temperament, drunkenness produces this partial derangement, and Ivan, in the fierceness of his conflict, in the constant use and abuse of his strength, and the hideous stupefaction of the sufferings inflicted under his direction, was drunk for several years- -drunk with rage, with pride, with blood—though he went his way, all the same, stumbling, and contrived, in spite of some falls and many extravagances, to maintain a marvellously complete sense of what he had to do, of his interests and his duties.

Fortune, which may be said to have favoured him on this occasion, forbade the execution of the treaty of the sloboda of Alexandrov. In May, 1567, a Muscovite embassy proceeded to Upsala to claim its ratification and the surrender of Catherine’s person. Ivan, meanwhile, had bethought him of asking the hand of one of Erik’s sisters for his son, now eighteen years of age. The girl was sixteen, and her beauty was already renowned. But the Tsar demanded Revel with her as her dowry. This was asking too much, and, further, the Russian envoys found an Opritchnina, in Erik’s country, which, as to misconduct and excesses, quite rivalled their own. Wrestling with an aristocracy which could not forgive him,his origin, and was disgusted by his violence, ‘ the son of the crowned merchant,’ as Ivan had dubbed him, was raving too, and at the Castle of Gripsholm the scenes of a distressing drama were being enacted, one by one. For some time the ex-Duke ofj Finland, imprisoned within its walls, had been expecting death. A verdict pronounced in 1563 had condemned him, and the King’s favourite, Persson, himself doomed to a terrible end, was pressing the execution of the sentence. Erik, though blood had flowed in torrents at his command, ever since 1562, had some scruples of conscience. To satisfy Ivan, he had endeavoured to separate Catherine from her husband, but the intrepid daughter of the Jagellons, proof alike against the most

awful threats and the most tempting promises, showed the King’s emissaries a ring engraved with the words ‘ Death only. . . .’ The miserable monarch, at the end of hi? arguments and his resources, threatened himself by the rising rebellion around him, and, dreaming of a safe refuge in Russia, ended, as his most determined apologists admit (Celsius, ‘ History of Erik,’ xiv., French translation, 1777, ii. 139)—though Persson denied it, even on the scaffold—by thinking the advice of his gloomy counsellor the best that offered. John’s death would settle everything. The Muscovite envoys were actually making ready to receive their prey, when Erik’s reason, already trem­bling on the steep abyss of his meditated erme, gave way com­pletely. Confusing their mutual positions, he fancied himself the prisoner, restored the captive of Gripsholm to freedom, and besought his pardon. The attack lasted till towards the close of the following year, and Ivan’s envoys still hoped to turn it to account for the attainment of their ends. But the Swedish Council continued its opposition, and in a lucid interval, Erik, instead of granting the Tsarevitch his sister’s hand, thought he was doing quite enough when he offered him that of Virginia Persdotter, the daughter of one of his many concubines ! Ivan was deeply angered, and in 1568, the last scenes of the drama approached : Catherine’s husband ascended the Swedish throne, threw the brother who had so nearly been his execu­tioner into a dungeon, and thus inaugurated a new era in the more and more complicated struggle of which Livonia con­tinued to be the object. In this struggle, Magnus was about to claim a leading part.

III.—The Collapse of the Alliances : Magnus.

The new King of Sweden, married to a Jagellon, was the natural ally of Sigismund-Augustus and the chosen instrument of the Catholic reaction against Protestantism. The treaty of 1563 between Sweden and Russia was practically annulled, and the Swede passed over to the enemy s camp. A gifted poli­tician, well trained in matters of war, though more of a theorist than a fighting soldier, John, by the struggle he was soon to begin with Moscow, by the heroic defence of Revel in 1570-1571, and the brilliant victory of Wenden in 1577, was to endow his country with a military glory which was to endure a century and more, until the disastrous day of Poltava. In November, 1568, at Roeskilde, he believed himself on the point of obtaining peace with Denmark and Lubeck, but he was unable to ratify the concessions his plenipotentiaries had allowed their oppo­nents to wring from them. In the mediating hands of the Emperor and the King of Poland, the negotiations dragged on

till 1570, and then the Danish cause was compromised by an understanding between Magnus and the Muscovites, while Sigismund-Augustus, who interfered with the preparation of the treaty, and demanded that Sweden should give up all her conquests in Livonia and make common cause against Russia, still lurther complicated the problem. For had not the Polish King just signed a three years’ truce with Ivan, thus leaving the Tsar free to support Magnus against the Swedes ?

I am tempted to fear my readers’ heads must be beginning to swim, but I am helpless. I am simplifying and abridging to the best of my ability, though my efforts, no doubt, make little show. Was Magnus acting as the representative of Den­mark in Livonia ? This point, which is still disputed, was unendingly discussed in those days. There were perpetual diplomatic gatherings and congresses, the lHgious question of the dominium maris Battici, and the quite as thorny one of the navigation of the Narova, were both called up, and the end of it all was a treaty, signed at Stettin ^;n February, 1571, in which almost the whole of Europe, the Empire, and, through the Emperor’s agency, France, Spain, England, Scotland, and even the Hanse towns—though they were not overpleased— figure alongside of the contracting parties, and express their agreement—which treaty was not put into execution any more than its fellows had been.

Theoretically, this arrangement, which reconciled Sweden and Denmark, left Ivan at war with the Swedes and the Poles, who would now be free to join all their forces against him. But, in exchange for the free passage of the Sound granted by Denmark, and that country’s proffered mediation with the Tsar and Magnus, Sweden had undertaken to respect the traffic on the Narova ; now the King of Poland was to interfere, and Sweden was soon to break her promise. The Emperor had undertaken, on his side, to buy back the territories Sweden had been holding in Livonia ; neither he nor his successors ever thought of doing this, any more than Livonia ever thought of acknowledging the Emperor’s suzerainty. Denmark emerged triumphant from the struggle, and kept an apparent supremacy over the Baltic ; but the key to the dominium maris Balttci remained in Livonia, and through Magnus, whom he was soon to convert into his tool, Ivan still held the dominant position there.

Neither Poles nor Swedes could contrive to check him. Sigismund-Augustus’ dreamt-of fleet continued a dream, and the German and Flemish corsairs the Emperor managed to equip were always fought by others, sent out by the Tsar under a famous leader, Kersten Rhode, who pushed on as far as Dant- zig. Thereupon Denmark intervened, and seized the bold

pirate’s person ; but Denmark’s attempts to gain a footing on the Livonian coast were fruitless, likewise. Ivan exchanged artillery fire with Erik’s successor in Finland, whither he sent an army and Ambassadors; but the Swedish envoys found them­selves checked by the Tsar’s claim for the execution of the 1567 treaty in its integrity. First of all they were kept at Nov­gorod, and then dragged from Moscow to Mourom, and from Mourom to Kline, in a state of genuine captivity, embittered, according to their own reports, by the most odious acts of violence. Under the twofold pretext of the Swedish failure in keeping the undertaking, and of some affront of which the Russian envoys would seem to have had to complain when they reached Stockholm, the unlucky messengers of peace were treated as if they had been captives of war. Their hands were tied behind their backs, they were marched through the streets amidst a hooting mob, and threatened with the bastinado if they did not give the Tsar satisfaction on even- point, including the surrender of Catherine’s person. The ex-Duke of Finland was not dead, since he was a reigning Sovereign, and Catherine had become Queen of Sweden ; but Ivan pretended to know nothing about that. So many stories were going about the world !

In the midst of his struggle with the internal crisis his reforms had evoked, theTsar had just had to endure another and a terrible trial. From 1563 to 1570, he had vainly striven to stem the Tartar invasion with which Poland threatened him. In vain had his envoys, Nago'i and Revski, carried concilia­tory messages and splendid gifts to the Khan. Poland did as much, and more, and the Sultan, irritated by the conquest of Kazan and Astrakn, supported Poland. In 1569, a combined Tartar and Turkish expedition threatened Astrakan, and Simon Maltsev, the Tsar’s envoy to the Tartars, who had been taken captive by the Cossacks, was a rower on one of the Moslem galleys. In 1570, Ivan agreed to pull down a fort he had lately built on the Terek, but Selim II. instantly claimed Kazan and Astrakan, and the Tsar’s acceptance of his suzerainty. Natur­ally enough, the negotiations were broken off, and in May, 1571, the Tartars, having crossed the Oka unopposed, appeared before Moscow. This time Ivan followed the tradition of his ancestors, and took refuge first at the sluhoda of Alexandrov, and finally at Rostov. The capital, thus left to its fate, was put to fire and sword. According to testimony which is probably exaggerated. 800,000 men perished in the flames, while the "Metropolitan, shut rip with part uf his clergy in the Cathe­dral of the Assumption, waited for death ; and Prince Ivan Dmitrievitch Bielski, who had been left in charge of the defence, was stifled in the cellar in which he had sought refuge.

The Tartars, as was their wont, shrank from the assault on the Kremlin, and retired with 150,000 prisoners; this figure, again, seems improbable, but allowance must be made for the fact that on such occasions as these the whole of the neigh­bouring population would flow into the capital.

In any case, the disaster was tremendous and the humiliation extreme. On his homeward march the Khan wrote to the Tsar : ‘ I have ravaged your land and burnt your capital for Kazan and Astrakan, and you, who call yourself the Muscovite Sovereign, have not appeared in their defence ! If you had possessed any valour or any decency, you would have shown yourself! I want no more of your riches now, I w'ant Kazan and Astrakan, and I have seen and known every road in your Empire!’ Ivan swallowed the insult. It was not only as a fugitive that he remembered his ancestors, and his madness, as I have already said, admitted of a great deal of method between his fits of extravagance. His reply was both humble and cunning : he begged a truce, and offered to give up Astrakan ; but his instructions to Nagoi, who still remained in the Crimea, imparted a doubtful meaning to this concession. Astrakan was to be ruled by one of the Khan’s sons, who was to receive a resident boiar chosen by the Tsar, just as in the case of Kassimov. Kassimov was one of the small Tartar khanates which had acknowledged the Moscow suzerainty in this manner, and was being slowly absorbed into Russia. These overtures were accompanied by an offer of money ; Ivan went so far as to accept the shame of an annual tribute !

Both sides began to treat. The Khan would listen to nothing unless he was given Kazan and Astrakan, without any con­ditions whatever. As the negotiations dragged, he demanded an instalment of the tribute—2,000 roubles—which he needed, so he said, to buy plate and other merchandise for some family festival. But Ivan had already taken his measures, had swiftly mobilized all his forces, and, on pretext of the exhaustion of his finances resulting from the recent campaign, sent ‘ all he had in hand ’—200 roubles. Mehemed-Ghirei realized at last that the Tsar was only trying to gain time, and in 1572, he recrossed the Oka. But on the Lopasna, 50 versts from Moscow, he came into collision with the troops commanded by Prince Michael Ivanovitch Vorotynski, and was forced to beat a retreat. Whereupon Ivan forthwith changed his tone, withdrew all previous concessions, and sent jeering messages instead of his former humble missives. ‘ The Khan still wanted money ? What ? Had he not professed his scorn for riches ?’ The Tsar’s whole soul is revealed ^;n this trait.

Yet the frightful turmoil had thrown him into a state of irritation which he was quite unable to control. He ascribed

the catastrophe to his boi'ars, who had been guilty of connivance with the enemy, and one of them, at least—Mstislavski—was to acknowledge his guilt; he multiplied executions, and vented his rage, incidentally, on the unlucky Swedish envoys. Yet in 1571, on his way to Novgorod, whither we shall have to follow him, and where w^re shall see him presiding over hideous heca­tombs, he did consent to see the Ambassadors—in the street— and have an explanation with them as to Catherine. ‘ If she had been sent to him, everything would have been arranged. It was John’s marriage with that Polish woman which had spoilt the whole business in Livonia. Since that time, the Tsar had persuaded himself she was a widow ; otherwise he would never have dreamt of parting a wife from her husband and a mother from her chi’dren. But the mischief was done, now, and either he must have the whole of Livonia or the w^rar must go on.’ When the Tsar came back from Novgorod he was calmer, as if the shedding of blood had appeased him. He invited the Ambassadors to his own table, and very suddenly caused his representatives to question them as to King John’s daughter. She was said to be fair, and he desired her portrait.

The Tsar was not thinking of his son, this time. He had married again, several times over, since Anastasia’s death, and to the end of his life he was to interest himself in matters of this kind, much after the fashion of Henry’ VIII. and the tale of Bluebeard; and the report of this Swedish embassy, drawn up by its chief, Paul Junsten (Beitrdge zur Kentniss Russland's, Derpt, 1816), abounds in details of a not less singular nature. Though the inclination he now manifested towards Sweden was so particularly friendly, Ivan resorted, at the same time, to his favourite system of epistolary polemics, and threw himself into them with all his usual spirit.

‘ You ought to tell us whose son your father was, and what was his grandfather’s name ! Was he a King ? What Sover­eigns were his friends and allies ? The Emperor of the Romans is our brother, and other great Sovereigns are our brothers likewise. Can you say as much ?’

Then came fresh explanations about Catherine. ‘ If he had known John was alive, Ivan would never have dreamt of taking his wife from him. He had always intended, indeed, to give her back to the King of Poland in exchange for Livonia. I n- happilv, blood had now been shed in toirents, in consequence of this misunderstanding, and the Tsar’s envoys had been ill- treated at Stockholm. Now they were great lords, not peasants, like John’s envoys !’ John himself, much addicted to correspondence, wrote back in his best ink, but Ivan in­sisted.

‘ Yet it is an absolute truth that you come of a family of churls !’ And once again he began his cross-examination.

‘ Your father, Gustavus, whose son was he ? . . . When our merchants used to go to Sweden, in your father’s reign, with wax and tallow, did they not see him put on his gloves and go as far as to Wiborg to turn the merchandise over, and haggle about the prices ? . . . And you talk of the Kings who were your predecessors ! . . . What Kings ? Where did you find them ? In your larder ?’

The Tsar declared himself ready, indeed, to treat with the tallow-merchant’s son, but on condition he begged his pardon, humbled himself, and submitted. He would then be treated as a relative. If not, he would find out what happened to the Khan of the Crimea without the Tsar’s having even con­descended to draw his sword to chastise him as he deserved. His boi'ars had quite sufficed for that business. And so letter followed letter, some described as ‘ severe orders,’ others as ‘ comminatory warnings,’ till Ivan, tired, or possibly put out of countenance by some particularly sharp reply, suddenly declared he did not intend to enter into any epistolary dispute.

‘ You have taken a dog’s throat to bark at me. It does not suit me to light with you in this fashion ! If your taste leans to that sort of conflict, take another peasant like yourself for your adversary !’

These letters have been published (Drevnaia Rousskala Vivliofika, vol. i., part i„ p. 23, etc. ; part ii., p. 52, etc.). They cannot have inspired King John with any desire to continue the negotiation they accompanied, nor given him much hope of its success. All the more so as the Tsar, to his certcin knowledge, was meanwhile entering ^:nto a correspon­dence with Erik in his prison, and favouring an arrangement with Magnus.

This arrangement was the work of two Livonian renegades, Taube and Kruse, the first a former councillor to the Bishopric of Derpt, and the second a member of the Livonian deputa­tion sent to Moscow in 1557. These two men, who had been the Tsar’s captives, and had been won over to his side, had become active agents of his propaganda. In 1568, they had raked up an old attempt at an agreement between Albert of Prussia and Ivan’s father, and made it the basis of a new arrangement, to which the King of Poland's present vassal seemed favourably inclined. In 1570, again, having been rewarded, in spite of their failure—one with the title of Prince and the other with the rank of boiar—they hit upon their right road and found their man. Ever since 1567, Ivan had been desirous of placing a member of the late Order as Governor

in Livonia. Fiirstenberg and Kettler both refused, and the name of Magnus occurred to the renegade pair.

Driven out of Revel in 1560, recalled the following year by his brother, who hoped to get him elected coadjutor in the rich Bishopric of Hildesheim, again dismissed, and sent back to Livonia, where he was to see the Swedes and Poles dividing up the territories he longed to possess, this Prince-adventurer— missshapen, one-eyed, and club-footed, according to the not very reliable report of the Catholic writers—having vainly essayed to ally himself with one side or the other, now found himself at the end of all his resources and expedients. IP’s joy may be imagined when Taube and Kruse offered him no less than the sovereignty of Livonia, as the Tsar’s vassal. As a matter of form, he applied for Frederick Il.’s consent, assuring him his new kingdom would remain dependent on Denmark — an untruth and a piece of nonsense. As a matter of form, too, his elder brother made a few objections, and the matter was settled. Magnus’ plenipotentiaries brought back unhoped-for and magnificent conditions from Moscow. The throne, together with that of Denmark, if male heirs failed in that kingdom, was to be hereditary in the new King’s family ; all conquests in Livonia hitherto made or to be made by Russia were to be given over to him, and the Tsar promised to help him to retake Riga, Revel, and other towns —all in retum for a simple undertaking to serve with the Russian armies in time of war. In May, 1570, Magnus pro­ceeded, with a suite of 400 persons, to Moscow, and there received, not his crown only, but a bride—Ivan’s own niece, Euphemia, on whom the Sovereign bestowed a dowry of five hogsheads of gold ! Livonia was to preserve her re­ligion and her institutions, and the Tsar undertook not to introduce any Russian officials into the country’.

It was a dream! But it was nothing more! When Germany and the whole of Europe expressed a certain emotion, the King of Denmark disclaimed all responsibility—Magnus, he said, had acted without consulting him. Nevertheless, Frederick Il.’s agents laboured, underhand, to turn the course of opinion ; it was the Emperor’s fault if Livonia was a prey for anybody to take; and besides, there was the precedent of Albert of Prussia ! When Magnus sent his brother an official announcement of his accession, Frederick-replied by a letter of congratulation. But the new King of Livonia made a bad beginning; he attempted, at the head of a body of mercenaries and Russian auxiliaries, to take Revel from the Swedes, but after a siege lasting thirty weeks—from August 21, 1570, till March 16, 1571—he was forced to beat a retreat, bum his camp, and dismiss his troops, while Taube

and Kruse fled to Derpt, and there laid plans with the Poles for an attempt, which very nearly proved successful, against the Russian garrison.

The career of these two rogues is instructive : after intrigues, desertions, and treacheries innumerable, they were one day to find grace in the eyes of Batory himself. Taube, having been forced with a high hand on the Livonian landtag, which had refused to receive him, passed away in peace on his own country property, and Kruse was on the point of performing a mission to Prussia for the King when death overtook him. Such was the morality of those days !

During the siege ol Revel, Magnus had vainly expected help from Denmark. Just at that moment, as my readers will remember (vide p. 198), the Treaty of Stettin was in course of preparation. After the signatures had been exchanged.. Sigismund-Augustus once more claimed the aid of Denmark against Muscovy. On September 17, 1571, he published a manifesto, according to the terms of which he undertook to cut off the trade of Narva, blockading the town, and giving more scope and means of action to his privateers than formerly, and thus seemed on the eve of that great effort which had so lung been expected from him. Taube and Kruse, no doubt, had already discounted the effect pro­duced. But tlieii' calculations were upset, for a time, by an unexpected incident. On July 7, 1572, the last of the Jagellons died of a chill. The extinction of the dynasty and the inauguration of the system of an elective monarchy in Poland were once more to alter the conditions of the fight, and the positions of the adversaries in the long struggle.

IV.—Ivan’s Candidature for the Polish Throne.

In Livonia, as in Poland, the inheritance left by Sigibmund- Augustus was not an easy one to take up. With Kettler, with the Scandinavian Pcwers, with the Khan, his diplomacy had been a brilliant success. But his natural indolence, alas ! had conspired with the idle and anarchical tendencies of his subjects to turn his successes into mere illusions, for there never was any sufficient display of material strength to enforce them. The union with Lithuania liadlikewise been a triumph over Moscow, but the struggle begun in the heart of Catholic Poland at that very time against Protestantism, and incidentally against every dissident form of faith, had evoked a feeling of resist­ance amongst the Orthodox populations of the annexed provinces, which drove them towards Russia’s outstretched arms. The eager proselytism of the Jesuits, already installed in the Bishopric of Wilna, only quickened the current, and

the extension of its sphere of action to Livonia introduced a fresh element of complication. In the absence of a fleet, the> blockade of Narva, though it raised difficulties with all the neighbouring maritime Powers, even with Dantzig, threatened to become a farce ; and there being no regular army, any chance of checking Ivan’s far superior forces on land appeared most doubtful. Wherefore Sigismund Augustus had hardly closed his eyes in death ere in Lithuania, and even more especially in Poland, a current of opinion began to flow in favour of a solution likely to insure the heirless kingdom something more than the benefits of the most advantageous peace. F. Voropa'i, the Polish-Lithu- anian envoy, was deputed to announce the vacancy of the throne to Ivan, and to inform him at the same time of the desire felt to see his son Feodor appear as a candidate for the late King’s succession.

The desire was by no means unanimous, nor were those who expressed it entirely sincere. The choice of Feodor was only a compromise, accepted by the mass of the influential electors because they could not agree as to Ivan’s own can­didature, which was strongly supported in some quarters, and as vehemently opposed in others. This, in Poland, as in Lithuania, was absolutely repugnant to the great nobles, who were persuaded, and rightly so, that the accession of such a ruler was incompatible with the maintenance of their oligarchy. The Radziwills are even said to have plotted to poison the Tsar’s Ambassador to the Diet of Stezyga ; but the only authority the Russian historian who has espoused this story (Oumaniets, La Pologne dcgcneres, 1872, p. 71) can put forward to support it, is the copy of a letter of doubtful authenticity. The lesser nobles could not be swayed by these reasons, or rather those very reasons led them to prefer the Muscovite candidate. In Poland, at least, the Szlachta was enthusiastically in his favour. Did the Szlachta know nothing of the Terrible’s temperament and character ? That is not 'ikely. We have proof to the contrary, indeed, in the electoral manifestoes published at the time. In these the faults and virtues of the wished-for Sovereign were laid in the balance, and the excesses of the 0pritchnina were appropriately re­marked 011 and discussed. Yes! Ivan was a severe and pitiless ruler, but in Muscovy he had to deal with subjects whose treason justified the treatment he meted out to them. Things would be quite different in Poland, where his electors’ loyalty would disarm his wrath, while his contact with their superior culture would soften his manners. And in him they would have a firm and energetic Prince, one w^Tho would be bold and enterprising. They went crazy about him, in short,

and, as Ivan’s Ambassadors were to perceive, everything in Warsaw—dress, carriages, harness, and so forth—rushed before­hand into the Russian fashion (‘ Collections of the Imperial Historical Society of Russia,’ lxxi. 763, etc.).

In Lithuania opinion seemed more divided. The country gentlemen, who had only lately been initiated into the immuni­ties, liberties, and privileges of the Polish system, and found them much to their liking, were still more alarmed at the idea of losing their benefits. But they had not shaken off the impression produced by the recent and easy capture of Polotsk, and between the. two terrors—of having Ivan for their master or their adversary—the great nobles themselves, though they hated him, and reckoned on defeating his hopes, accepted the Muscovite candidate. Taking; it all in all, Ivan had the advantage of numbers, and it must be admitted that in this particular crisis the. balance of political wisdom and breadth of view was heaviest in the ranks of the small nobility, of which Voropal had constituted himself spokesman. It had already resolutely undertaken, single-handed, a reform of the national institutions, and now, single-handed again, it had conceived the hope of insuring the success of this reform by the assistance of the dreaded but powerful monarch to whom it appealed, and of creating, under his aegis and on a Polish basis, a great Slavonic Empire, strong enough to fulfil a mission in history which neither Poland nor Russia could undertake alone.

The idea of this last union was not a new one. As early as in 1506, when, after the death of Alexander Jagellon, a shadowy election had taken place in Poland, Ivan’s father, Vassili, had come forward. The son remembered this fact, and gave Voropai a hearty reception. But why was there any talk of Feodor ? That would only perpetuate the antagonism between the two countries ! Lengthily, with many an argu­ment and metaphor, the Tsar set forth his theory and pleaded his own cause. ‘ He had only two sons,’ he said, ‘ and they were the two eyes in his head. W^Tas he to be robbed of one ? He had been given an evil reputation for severity in Poland and Lithuania. He did not propose to deny it. Severe he was, in good sooth, but to whom ?’ Voropai had to listen to the detailed story of all the misdeeds of which the Tsar had reason to complain on the part of his boiars. Were the Poles likely to trea.t him and betray him in the same way ? No, indeed ! and he would treat them accordingly. The Tsar-King would respect their privileges and liberties, would even increase them. He knew how to treat good men well. ‘ Look,’ he said to the envoy, ¹ to a good man I would give the jewelled collar about rny neck and the gown on my back. . . .’ And

as he spoke he made as though he would take them off. ¹ Even if Poland would not have him to reign over her,’ he went on, ‘ he was still ready to sign a peace, and give back Polotsk and all the lands belonging to that place, in return for the cession of Livonia up to the banks of the Dvina. Peace, and the settle­ment of the questions in dispute between the two countries, were the only really important matters, and Feodor’s election couM not serve them in anj' way.’

The Polish and Lithuanian oligarchs knew that well enough, and for that very reason, too, they had adopted this bastard solution, which, as it presented no serious advantage, was less likely to come to anything. As the mass of the electors held to their original idea, and made their preference for Ivan more clearly felt, the nobles went further still. Within a few months, a fresh Polish-Lithuanian envoy, Michael Haraburda, appeared at Moscow, and offered Ivan his choice between his own candidature and that of his son, but burdened it with con­ditions which Voropai had not mentioned. The auction mart at Warsaw was open by this time, and the Ambassador of Henri de Valois, Montluc, w^ras soon to defy all other competitors, ‘ If they ask me to induce the future King to throw a golden bridge across the Vistula. I shall reply, “ In what kind of gold would you like it—red or green ?” ’ Haraburda was less exacting, and only claimed such a rectification of the frontier as would give Poland possession of Polotsk, with Smolensk, Ousviat, and Ozierichtche as well.

Instantly a misunderstanding, destined to be of long dura­tion, and in itself an obstacle to the success of the Muscovite candidature, arose between the parties. Ivan had no idea of soliciting the Polish vote, much less paying for it. Did he want Poland ? No ; it was Poland who wanted a King to suit her. If he was the King she wanted, she must behave in a proper manner, be humble and suppliant, like all the other folk who came to beg favours of the Tsar. On this point he was quite immovable. Never would he consent to exchange his part for that appropriate to Poland, and he spoke quite clearly to Haraburda, though he mingled his refusal, reason­able enough in itself, with observations which were less so. ‘ If the Emperor and the King of France laid themselves out to please the electors, that was no reason why he should imitate the example of Sovereigns none of whose ancestors had reigned in their respective countries for as much as two hundred years. He was descended from the Roman Caesars of the very earliest centuries—everybody knew that!’

Nevertheless, as the idea itself was very agreeable to him, he seemed inclined, for a moment, to make due allowance for the susceptibilities of Poland and grant her Feodor. But the

very next day he sent for the envoy and reset the question in its real terms : No effectual union of the two countries could be insured save under his own sceptre, and it was only right the mutual advantages should be fairly balanced. Poland, therefore, should have Polotsk and Courland, but she must give up her claim to Livonia and cede Kiev. And, further, the title of ‘ Tsar of all the Russias ’ must take precedence of the title of ‘ King.’

He was asking too much this time, perhaps, but his cunning intelligence and sure instinct may have guessed the nature of the Polish magnates’ game, and also the consequences of his own succession to the throne for which he bargained after this fashion. These petty rulers, who cared for nothing but their own privileges, were only trying to fool him, and prevent his reopening hostilities during the intem-gnum; and what figure would he cut, once he had passed those Caudine Forks, their pride and their pretensions ? His last word, as he dismissed Haraburda, seems to betray the existence of such an inner thought. ‘ After weighing it all well, he thought the best thing the Poles could do was to elect the Emperor’s son; and so long as their choice did not fall on a French Prince, the Sultan’s friend, he should declare himself quite satisfied.’ On his way home the envoy was overtaken by a courier, bearing still less acceptable conditions. Whereas the idea at Warsaw had been that Ivan would turn Catholic, he announced his intention of being crowned there by his own Metropolitan, in the absence of the Polish Bishops, who were to be excluded from the ceremony ; he reserved his right to build as many Orthodox churches as he chose in the country, and himself retire into a monastery when he grew old !

Thus was the way prepared for the success of Henri de Valois. Yet on the very eve of the election, as is proved by divers witnesses belonging to the hostile camp, Ivan’s name continued popular, (see the ‘ Memoirs ’ of Montluc’s secre­tary, Choisnin, coll. Michaud et Poufonlat, p. 429 ; Lippo- mano’s narrative in the Hist. Russia MonumentaTur- geniev’s edition, i. 270; and another Italian narrative in the Manuscripts of the Bibliotheque Nationale, 15,967, fol. 21). The lesser nobles stood by their candidate, and they swayed the poll. But a speech from the Tsar’s envoy, which further accentuated his master’s haughty and unyielding attitude, spoilt everything, and, the wmd veering suddenly round, the French candidate obtained the advantage. ‘ Decidedly,’ thought everybody, i Ivan was nothing but the barbarian he had been reported to be.’

Would he have been wiser to be more conciliatory at the time, and to have shown, later, what sort of a King he must

needs be in Poland if he was to continue to be Tsar of Muscovy ? Batory was very soon to prove himself more pliable, but Batory had no boiars to govern, nor had he to support the principle of absolute power in his own country, nor uphold his claim to the Empire of all the Russias in the face of these very Poles. In spite of certain incoherences peculiar to his mental constitution and his natural temperament, the conduct of the conqueror of Polotsk and the head of the Opritchniki is easily understood—and justified.

None the less, the election of Henri de Valois was a sharp blow to him. Apart from that friendship with the Porte, the nature and consequences of which he was apt to exaggerate, this event upset the political chess-board, on which his moves were already di:ficult enough, and on which fresh compli­cations were soon to arise. John III., isolated by the rupture of the family bonds which had insured him the Polish alliance, but released, at the same ti-.ne, from the considerations they had imposed on him, was seeking an agreement with Spain, while France, which dreamt of checking this latter Power by the help of Denmark, of establishing her own protectorate over Livonia, and cutting off the trade of the Low Countries with.the Eastern markets, showed herself inclined to support Frederick II. in stronger measures yet. When this hope failed her, she was to endeavour to find the same support and make the same bargain in Stockho'm- through the marriage of one of the Valois Princes to a Swedish Princess (Forsten, ‘The Baltic Question,’ i. 624, from the Copenhagen Archives).

Ivan’s judgment of the situation and the way he faced it prove his possession of close.insight and all the qualities of a great politician. At that moment Poland did not count. The new King had work enough to do in getting settled on his throne, and the commander of his troops in Livonia could not muster 200 horses, and was waiting in vain for the payment of a draught for 3,001; florins (Mittheilungcn aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte Livlands, Riga, 1847-1858, iv. 178, etc.). The Tsar, thoroughly well-informed and quite collected, hurried on. choosing as his first task that of crushing the Swedes in Esthonia. The Poles’ turn was to come later, and meanwhile, though he did not fail to move his troops about threateningly on the disputed frontier, he agreed to prolong his truce with the new King, and was playing the kindly friend, when the flight of Henri de Valois once more destroyed all his plans.

Everything had to be begun over again. Ivan could not turn his back on the new election, all the more so as Poland and Lithuania were sure to play the game which had already answered their purpose so well with him. And the business

now promised still better. Both in Lithuania and in all the Russian provinces under Polish rule the Muscovite current, fed by the twofold influence of the Catholic propaganda, which exasperated the population, and the before-mentioned military demonstrations, which alarmed it, appeared to be growing stronger. Magnus himself had done his share, in Livonia, towards terrorizmg the unhappy country, groaning in the throes of King-birth. The Tsar’s treatment of the Danish adventurer had not been over good-natured. He had married him, indeed, to one of his nieces, Maria Vladimorovna, sister of that Euphemia whom he had intended for him, and who had died. Her father, the Tsar’s first cousin, had just been put to death by him ! At the nuptial ceremony, which was of the most pompous description, Ivan himself had led the chants, taking up his position at the choir-desk, leading the orchestra with his iron-shod stick, and now and then beating time on the performers’ heads. Peter the Great’s feats of imperial virtuosity at a later period were a mere imitation. But the promised dowry—the five hogsheads of gold—re­mained a promise and no more. Magnus, reduced to a very modest appanage in his little town of Karkhus, must earn the money and the royal state for which he was still waiting. He did his best, with a body of Tartars added to his German troops, left the Swedish possessions, which were better defended, alone, and turned all his efforts to those of Poland, striving to obtain the capitulation of the Castle of Salis, and threatening Pernau and Riga. The great Polish and Lithuanian lords took this to be a further reason for persevering in their strata­gem, and ‘ amusing ’ their terrible Russian neighbour with the bait of a crown they intended ultimately to refuse him. But the lesser nobles made a rhyme, ‘ By byl Fiodor jak Jagiello— Dobrze by nam bylo ’ (‘ With Feodor as with Jagellon—We should be happy ’). The reports of the Nuncio, Vincenzo Laureo, con­firmed by the testimony of the Dantzig agents, very reliable as a rule, leave us in no doubt as to the feeling thus manifested (Vierjboiski, Vincenzo I.aurco, 1888, pp. 69, 238, 257 ; and Forsten, ‘ The Baltic Question,’ i. 627).

But Ivan’s knowledge of the ground on which he had to manoeuvre was not sufficient to enable him to turn this feeling to account. The enormous difference between the political life of the two countries escaped him. Deceived by appearances, and interpreting the wishes expressed in his favour and the messages which seemed to summon him to Lithuania and Poland, and place both countries at his disposal, by the light of his half-Asiatic ideas of sovereignty, the Tsar, instead of sending an embassy to receive the votes of these electors, already won over to his side, expected them to send an embassy

to him. Great was the surprise of the preparatory Diet of Stezyga (May, 1575) to behold nothing but a mere courier from the Tsar—a courier, too, who had nothing to offer, nor even a promise to make. Better thmgs were hoped for at the Diet of Election in November. The Primate Uchanski, head of the temporary Government, who had been so won over to the Russian candidature that he had furnished Ivan with copies of letters to be addressed by him to the chief mag­nates, was quite sure the Tsar was going to announce himself a convert to Catholicism. Deputies and senators were scan­ning the horizon, and sending out couriers to meet the Musco­vite mission and the brilliant proposals and splendid largesse it was certain to bring with it. A bitter disappointment ! With the decisive hour came a solitary letter from Ivan, couched in haughty terms, and announcing for a later date an embassy of moderate rank, as was befitting, seeing there was no monarch to whom it could be accredited.

What had been happening at Moscow ? The embassy in question, which had been despatched in the month of August,

1575, under the leadership of Lucas Zakharievitch Novossiltsov, had orders to appear before the Diet. Its instructions were to press Feodor’s candidature, and support it by promises of money and honours to be distributed among the chief nobles. But it had halted on its way, delayed by the Tsar’s order. It had occurred to Ivan, at the same time, to send a confidential man, Skobeltsyne, to Vienna, and commission him to sound the Emperor as to an agreement between the two Powers con­cerning the Polish-Lithuanian inheritance. As the conditions of the Tsar’s candidature, for the vacant throne were not such as he would have desired, as neither the Lithuanians nor the Poles seemed to be bringing him the crown on a golden charger, Ivan made as though he would let them have their way, but fell back meanwhile on another idea, already discussed several times and in various quarters—that of a partition of the escheated inheritance. The Empe^ror’s son Ernest was one of the candidates ; let him take Poland, and the Tsar would withdraw his own candidature, and take Lithuania. Skobeltsyne came back empty-handed : the Vienna authori­ties believed their cause in Poland safe. But Ivan had sir.ee heard that the Emperor regretted his reception of the Russian envoy, and that an Imperial mission was on its way to Moscow. It was for the. issue, of this negotiation that Novossiltsov must wait.

And this time, by too easily concluding that things really unaffected by his absolute power would bow to his will, Ivan thoroughly missed his calculation. The Diet did not wait. In September, 1575 the Sultan pronounced against any Mus-

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covite candidate, and in favour of Batory, and supported his view by marching out an army of 120,000 Tartars. There was a panic at Warsaw, and on December 12, Batory was elected, together with the Emperor Maximilian himself, on whom part of the votes fell, to the exclusion of his son Ernest.

This division evidently left some margin for the arrange­ment already suggested by Ivan ; but the conferences begun at Mojai'sk in January, 1576, with the Imperial envoys Cobenzl and Printz von Buchau, bore no fruit whatever. Maximilian, instead of forestalling Batory in Poland, as he should have done, insisted on sending his son there, and requesting the Tsar’s support for his candidature. He further claimed the evacuation of Livonia and an alliance against the Turks, and, in exchange, he offered Ivan Constantinople and the Empire of the East!

The game had been played—and lost.

YV.—The Election of Batory.

Ivan tried to cut into the game again, and this time rather awkwardly. At that moment the Opritchnina had set Ids head in a whirl. He wrote separate letters to the Polish and Lithu­anian lords, recommending Ernest to some, with the most terrible threats of reprisals if they gave the preference to the Sultan’s candidate (Batory), and proposing himself to the others, either as King of Poland or as Sovereign of Lithuania apart from Poland. Unfortunately, Novossiltsov, whom he had at last allowed to proceed, strengthened him in his mistaken course. Chodkiewicz and Rudziwill told the envoy that nothing would induce them to accept Obaturci {sic). They had only voted for Maximilian in despair, when they saw the Tsar made no sign. Ivan fancied he was still master of the day and the morrow. Any man, indeed, might have been deceived. As late as in April, 1576, the Nuncio Laureo wrote to Rome that if a fresh election was rendered necessary by the division of the vote, the Russian candidate would certainly win the day, because Ernest was so hated. But both Maximilian and Ivan should have made haste. For while they were each wasting precious time, the Emperor parleying with the Poles, and the Tsar sending Prince Zakhar Ivanovitch Sougorski to Vienna to reopen the negotiations begun at Mojaisk, Ohalura hurried to Warsaw, and had himself crowned there.

Even then Ivan did not despair, and invited the Emperor to join him in common action against ‘ the usurper.’ But when anybody spoke the word ‘ Poland ’ to Maximilian, he answered with the word ‘ Livonia,’ and after his death, which occurred

during that same year, his successor, Rudolph, followed in his footsteps. So that, the election being a settled thing, the Tsar was brought back to the Livonian problem, the solution of which to his own advantage, he might imagine would now present fewer difficulties. Batory was King indeed, but, like Henri de Valois, his kingdom kept him very busy. A revolt at Duntzig, which refused to recognise him, brought him a heavy extra task, and the check the French influence had re­ceived at Warsaw had been reflected at Stockholm. Turning his back on all his past fancies, and resuming possession of his brilliant powers, Ivan set himself at last to turn circum­stances to his own profit. The previous year, in his desire to have free play in the Polish business, he had loosened his hold on Sweden, and agreed to a curious truce, which put a stop to hostilities in Finland and in the province of Novgorod, only. Immediately after this, concentrating all his forces in Livonia, he besieged Pemau. an important strategic point which Sigis- mund-Augustus had made a stronghold for his privateers. Here the Tsar lost 7,000 men ; but the town was taken, and one after the other, Helmet, Ermes. Rujen, and Purkel shared the same fate. Then, leaving the Poles, and going back to f is old plan, which consisted, as my readers will recollect, In settling his account with the Swedes first of all, Ivan made his way into Esthonia. Within a few weeks, in the course of the spring of

1576, Leal and Lode, Fikel and Hapsal, fell without a struggle. At Hapsal, on the day of the capitulation, the inhabitants gave banquets and dances. ¹ Strange folk, these Germans,’ said the Russians ; ‘ if we had given up such a town, without any reason at all, we should not have dared to look any man in the face, and the Tsar would not have been able to devise a torture sharp enough to punish us!’ . . . Oesel was abandoned ; Padis surrendered after a month’s siege, and the Swedes made an ineffectual attempt to recover the town.

But these triumphs came to an end. In 1577, the Russians, commanded by Prince M. F. Mstislavski and by I. V. Chereme- tiev, appeared at Revel, but were fain to retire, after a six weeks’ siege, before the heroic resistance offered by the Swedes. Chdremetiev had sworn to take the town or perish, and he was killed. This Swedish nut was decidedly a hard one to crack ! It broke Ivan’s teeth, and he thought it wiser not to be too obstinate. If needful, he could go shares with these com­petitors who refused to be driven off the field. So. rallying all his forces at Novgorod, the Tsar took the field in person, and, instead of renewing his unsuccessful attempt on Revel, as everyone expected, fell suddenly on Polish Livonia. This was as easy as cutting cheese. In the course of a few days the whole country, except for Riga, was in the invaders’ hands.

And it was abominably handled. Ivan, between his last huini-iation at Revel and his former one at Warsaw, was in a fury. At Lenewarden he had the eyes of the aged Marshal, Gaspard von Munster, torn out, and then had him whipped to death (Karamzine, ‘ History of Russia,’ ix. 465, note). Other men who had commanded fortified towns were impaled, quartered, hacked to pieces. At Ascheraden the screams of 'orty virgins, violated all at once in a garden, rang across the Dvina, from one bank to the other, for four hours (Forsten,

‘ The Baltic Question,’ i. 667). The new feats of arms per­formed by Magnus served to exasperate the Tsar. He sus­pected his partner of having made terms with the Poles. This was going rather far. The ‘ King of Livonia ’ had not reached this point yet ; but between the Tsar and him, the Livonians unhesitatingly chose the lesser evil, and Magnus took advantage of their feeling to act as if he were master, and make his shadowy kingdom a reality. Without orders to that effect, he occupied Kokenhausen, Ascheraden, Lenewarden, Ronneburg, and Wolmar. on his own account, took possession of Derpt, and went so far as to claim that the Russians were not to molest his ‘ faithful lieges ’ there. This was but another dream, and the awakening was bitter. Ivan hurried to Kokenhausen, had fifty of the ‘ King’s ’ Germans put to death, and ordered him to appear before him. ‘ Obey, or go back whence you came! We are not far from each other, and I have soldiers and biscuit !’ The wretched man tried to negotiate a reconciliation. Ivan had his emissa.ries whipped, and repeated his order. The next morning Magnus cast 1 imself at his feet. ‘ Idiot !’ shouted the Tsar.

‘ Beggar, whom I received into my family and fed and shod ! Do you think you can hold out against me?’ He had him shut up in a hut, and kept him there, lying on straw, for several days. Then, from Ascheraden. where his soldiery behaved in the manner I have already described, he dragged him to Wenden. The town surrendered, and the garrison blew itself up with the fortress. Ivan had one of the notable inhabitants, George Wicke, impaled in presence of his fellow-townsmen, and then proceeded to Derpt with his prisoner, who expected the same fate.

Contrary to all expectations, he was pardoned. The Tsar, who now* thought his final victory assured, was inclined to mercy. But Magnus, though obliged to content himself with a few^T small towns, had to undertake to pay a sum of 40,000 gold florins, and he had not a crown to his name ! Very soon Oberpalen, the last bulwark of his ephemeral royalty, fell into the hands of the Swedes, and that was the end of his strange adventure. He fled, reached Pilten, and offered himself, with all his possessions beyond the Dvina—his in name only, indeed

—to Batory, who refused to enter into any definite arrange­ment with him. Until 1583, when he died, the ex-King led a miserable life, reduced sometimes to the extremest poverty, assisted at others by his brother, by the Elector of Saxony, and the King of Poland, who all tried to make use of him in their turn. His widow, a poor creature, of whom Frederick II. used to say that anybody who gave her a little sugar and an apple could make her quite happy, went back to Moscow with her two-year-old girl, and mother and daughter both died in the Monastery of the Trinity during the reign of Ivan’s successor.

But Ivan was soon to perceive he had made a terrible mis­take. He thought he had finished with the Poles, and that all •he had to do now was to treat with the Swedes. He should have followed the contrary course, and his first plan had been the best. Batory would probably have agreed to an arrange­ment ; at the time of his election to the throne of Poland a powerful conspiracy was promising him that of Hungary' (Szadeczky, Batory Istwan, in the Szazadok of December 15, 1886, and-in the Ungarische Revue, April-May, 1887). To a Transylvanian, Hungary' was worth more than any Livonia.

. But Ivan, in a way, had bereft him of his freedom of choice by forcing him to turn his back on this hope, and face an aggression which no King of Poland could leave unpunished without shutting himself out from all possibility of remaining at War­saw. Thus war with Muscovy was forced on Maximilian’s lucky rival, and when, in 1577, the submission of Dantzig insured him quietness in that quarter, he prepared to cast his sword, his genius, and his fortunes—the fortunes of a crowned parvenu —into the balance.

As an excuse for Ivan, it may be urged that nothing, either in the past history’ of Poland or in the :< rmer career of her new ruler, furnished any reason for anticipating the tremendous impetus with which she and he were to fall, like a hurricane, on the Tsar and his Empire, at a moment when both were still suffering from the effects of the painful internal crisis through which they had lately passed. This crisis certainly had a con­siderable effect on the incidents of the struggle now nearing its end, and on its final solution. Therefore, before I come to this closing episode, I must show how Ivan had come to be weakened and half-disarmed within the borders of his own country.

CHAPTER I

THE POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL EVOLUTION

I.—THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES. II.—THE DIS­GRACE OF SYLVESTER AND ADACHEV. III.—THE FLIGHT OF KOURBSKI.

I.—The Conflict of Ideas and Principles.

‘ After the Battle of Montlhery (1465), the Bishop of Paris, with councillors and Churchmen, waited on Louis XI. at Tour- nelles, and besought him in all gentleness to allow his affairs to be directed, for the future, by good counsel. This counsel was to be given him by six burghers, six Parliamentary council­lors, and six clerks of the University. . . . Sixteen years later, in 1481, the Comte du Perche was arrested, by Louis XI.’s orders, and shut up in the narrowest cage that had yet been constructed- -a cage only a pace and a, half long—all because he had tried to get out of France. . . (Michelet, Histoire de France, vii. 301 ; viii. 343).

Between the years 1551 and 1571, a somewhat similar drama was played out at Moscow, amidst circumstances which, though certainly different, possessed many points of analogy. I have already referred to the current of ideas which marked the opening period of Ivan's personal government. The Livonian war, with the diplomatic complications which accom­panied it, brought in a draught of European air, which only increased the strength of this current and the complexity of the problems tossed on its eddies. Ivan’s father had already presided over the establishment of a foreign quarter in his capital, and under his own particular protection. The Poles and Lithuanians settled there were soon absorbed into the

216

rest of the population, but Ivan’s victorious campaigns shortly brought in a fresh contingent of foreign neighbours, prisoners of war, or involuntary immigrants, gathered on the battlefields and in the towns and country places of Livonia. The suburb on the right bank of the Iaouza to which they were confined long preserved a certain autonomy, for it became a centre of Western culture, and a nursery for men destined to play a con­siderable part in the national history. We have already noted the careers of Taube and Kruse. Other Livonians, who belonged, like them, to this German sloboda—such men as Kloss and Beckmann—figured in the Sovereign’s immediate circle, and were 'actively employed in his diplomacy.

The disembarkation of the English navigators on the northern coasts of the Empire in 1554 opened a new era of European dealings with Russia, and another current began to flow in the opposite direction—from Muscovy to Europe. Ivan IV. sent Michael Matvieievitch Lykov, voievode of Narva, whose father had blown himself up rather than surrender that town, to travel in Germany, for purposes of study and observa­tion.

And the eastward journeys taken by Russians, which had hitherto been made for pious objects only, began to alter their character. Vassili Pozniakov, a merchant, sent in 1560 to carry pecuniary assistance to the Patriarch of Alexandria and the Archbishop of Mount Sinai, was also commissioned to describe the habits of the countries through which he passed, and his narrative of this journey attained the extraordinary good fortune of being handed down to posterity, and gaining huge publicity, under a false name, and thanks to a misunder­standing.

The fifteenth century had already bequeathed a variety of pilgrims’ narratives, quite as interesting, according to the testimony of Sreznievski the linguist, as that of Vasco di Gama, to the national literature. Of these the general public knew nothing, and twenty years after his return to Moscow, Poznia- kov’s report was equally ignored. But now another traveller, Tryphonius Korobeinikov, attracted general attention. The story of his adventures,, reproduced in over 200 known copies, and which ran through forty successive editions, is generally read, even nowadays. It has been accepted in chrono- graphic works, and even by hagiograpliic writers. Now, Pozniakov and Korobeinikov were one and the same person, or, rather, the second man’s story was a simple transcription of his predecessor’s. Korobeinikov had been to Constanti­nople, indeed, twice over, in 1582 and 1593, but he never got as far as the Holy Places.

This confusion, unjust as it is to the memory of the more

enterprising of the two travellers, testifies to the progress made in this particular in a very short space of time. True, Poznia- kov’s narrative owed its principal interest to the religious element which formed its chief basis, and also to the picture it drew of the sufferings of the Christian populations under the Moslem yoke. None the less, the curiosity and sympathy it stirred are proof of an enlargement of the minds of its numerous readers. Muscovy was issuing from the lair in which she had crouched for so many years. She was venturing outside, and from without, others were beckoning and calling to her. That adventure of Hans Schlitte which I have already mentioned had another side, puzzling enough, it is true, but which seems to show that this servant, employed by the Tsar to recruit European workmen and artisans, considerably widened the scope of his own mission (Pierling, La Russie et le Saint- Siege, i. 324, etc.). He imposed both on Charles V. and Pope Julius III., and put himself forward as an Ambassador deputed to treat for the reunion of the two Churches. Ivan was probably quite unaware of this attempt, but the Hano­verian adventurer, well recommended by the Emperor and warmly welcomed at Rome, made so much stir about it, that interest was awakened both in Germany and in Italy, and that Poland was somewhat disturbed. Thus the episode may be included in that series of gropings which were to result in the final rapprochement between modernized Russia and Europe.

Schlitte, as we know, failed even as to that portion of his mission in which he was quite straightforward, but his very failure had indirect results which served the cause. Ivan, when he heard of the treatment inflicted on his agent by the Livonians, published a ukase at and round Novgorod which forbade the sale of German prisoners in Germany or Poland ; they were all to be sent to the Muscovite markets. And at the same time the Tsar commanded that all captives appearing well versed in mining operations and the working of metals should be sent to him at Moscow.

Veit Zenge, the Bavarian agent already known to us, dwells* in one of his curious reports, dated 1567, on the Russians’ extraordinary facility for assimila' ing every element of foreign culture—industry, commerce, and art. After the taking of Narva they had at once entered into relations with the Low Countries and even with France. Once a thing was shown them, they copied ii immediately, and with singular ease. Ivan did not choose this receptivity should be limited to things only. The beginning of printing—that mighty weapon of intellectual growth which the preceding century had be­queathed to the modem world—dated, on Slav territory, from

the year 1491, and amongst the craftsmen Schlitte was to have sent him, the Tsar had asked for printers. There had been printers at Wilna since 1525. In 1550 Ivan applied to the King of Denmark, who sent him, two years later, a man, half printer and half apostle, Hans Missenheim by name, who brought with him a Protestant Bible and some books concerning religious polemics. We have no clear knowledge of the result of this last attempt. The apostle has left no trace, but the printer certainly had pupils, for in 1553, we note the presence of two Russian typographers, Ivan Fedorov and Peter Timofieviev, and in 1556, that of a typefounder, Vassili Nikiforov, at Moscow and Novgorod. In 1564, the printing of the first book produced by the native presses was com­pleted. It consisted of the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul. The edition, though faulty as to spelling, is of handsome appearance. But the work of the printers Avas interrupted, unhappily, by a popular disturbance (p. 72). My readers will be reminded here of Louis XI., who had to defend the first printers he brought in from Nuremberg against accusations of sorcery. Fedorov and Nikiforov were driven to seek refuge in Poland, but in 1568, Andronik Nievieja, one of their disciples, took up their work at Moscow, and printed a Psalter, of which a later edition appeared in 1578, at the Sloboda of Alexandrov.

Church books still! Church books indeed ; but in such works as these their readers—even their Western readers- — found many things we have forgotten how to seek in them. It was literature, at all events ; it was intellectual food, and, with the writings of Ivan and Kourbski, of which I shall soon have to speak, and the travellers’ narratives, to which I have already referred, this same epoch witnessed the beginnings in Russia of a secular literature which even reached the borders of romantic fiction.

Thus set in motion, the national mind began by transforming certain stories of exotic birth—part of the literary inheritance of the preceding century—which it amplified and adapted to current events. Thus, in the legend of Drakoul, Prince of Wallachia, the incident of the nailing of the foreign envoys’ caps to their heads by the voievode’s order was applied to Ivan. In Ivachka Peresvietov’s famous epistle to the Tsar, he speaks of two other little books which, he says, he has handed to the Sovereign. One of these is still unknown to us. The other is a sort of novel, half political and half historical, in which the sayings of Peter, Palatine of Wallachia—which are reproduced, indeed, in the epistle—and the chastisement inflicted by Sultan Mahmet on unjust judges and pettifoggers are used to justify the reign of terror inaugurated by Ivan.

This story was published in the ‘ Memoirs of the University of Kazan ’ in 1863.

The external influences thus entering the Muscovite world of the sixteenth century by all these various paths evoked reactions of divers kinds. In the upper classes of society, among those lettered boiars of whom Kourbski was the most eminent representative, they naturally gave birth to leanings such as those Louis XI. had had to put down in the preceding century. They brought with them a breath of liberty, a germ of independent development, and incited to a direct conflict with that autocratic system which, by virtue of the national atavisms, was gaining continuous and increasing strength. Very different was the impression produced on the mind of the representative of that system. All Ivan perceived in the lessons that came to him from the West was their practical teaching as to the reorganization of his Government on a more modem, but a by no means more liberal, basis. Forced into an expensive war, he realized all that he lacked, from the military, financial, and administrative point of view, to enable, h’m to cope successfully with his European adversaries, so much better equipped than he, and when he tried to provide himself with their war machinery the whole of that bygone world of ancient rights and hereditary privilege and family precedence rose up in his path, and interfered, even on the battlefield, frustrating the movements of his troops, thinning their numbers, and disorganizing the highest commands.

Ivan was certainly no opponent of the family principle, to which he owed his own titles, to say nothing of his excessive pretensions. He was disposed to choose assistants of humble birth, because he needed men who would serve him and obey him. But when one of them fell into the hands of the Tartars and besought his help, he did not fail, when he sent the money demanded for his ransom—2,000 roubles—to write : ‘ Your likes were not worth more than fifty in the old days !’ To serve, to obey, this is what the great boiars, now enrolled in the class of the sloojilyie loodi, knew not how to do, and did not care to learn.

The war in Livonia, with the general mobilization of all avail­able forces it entailed, and the maintenance of that cumber­some organization its continuance involved, made a conflict —the continuation, under a new form, of the old struggle between Muscovite Russia and the Russia of the appanages— quite inevitable. The ancient Russia of the appanages was a confused agglomeration of principalities, large and small, within which the directing principle of politics was the contract between the Prince and the free man who took service with him, as and when he chose; hence no constraint, nothing

fixed, nothing eternal. Muscovite Russia was a centralized State, based on universal and obligatory service, on the divi­sion of the population into classes bound to perform definite tasks—forced labour in the lower ranks, employed in commerce or in manual toil, and all feeding the State treasury; ‘ men who served ’ in the upper ranks, employed in the State armv or in administrative service, and obliged, from childhood till they drew their last breath, to give the State their whole life’s labour. All of these, whether descended from the free com­rades or the free peasants of the old days, were now turned into the living straps and wheels of the Government machine —voievodcs, starosts, for criminal or land affairs—set like so many suction pumps over the very springs of the national life. Wherefore, at every step, liberty was strangled utterly, and duty, regulation, slavery, reigned supreme.

Already, towards the middle of the preceding century, Ivan’s grandfather had found himself obliged to crush two of the great Timilies, the Riapolovski and the Patrikiev. This blow only strengthened the resistance which had its focus in the cell of Maximus the Greek. The twofold current, religious and in­tellectual, of that period corresponded, indeed, with the antagonism in politics. While Joseph Volotski and his followers, the Iosiflianie, were popularizing the Byzantine doctrine of absolute power, the partisans of the old system of freedom found sympathizers among the monks ‘ from beyond the Volga.’ The two oppositions, political and re­ligious, joined hands on the question of the division of pow^Ter and the legitimate influence to be exercised over the Sovereign. One claimed the bolar’s right to sit on the council, and the other that of the Church to intercede.

Ivan’s attitude with regard to the problems thus put for­ward strikes us as being partly in close conformity with his historical precedents, and, as to another part, quite peculiar to himself. He cannot be taken to be the first autocrat, nor even the first terrorist, Russia had ever known. From the fifteenth century onwards, terrorism had become an habitual weapon of government in the hands of the Russian monarclis.

Was Ivan the Terrible the representative and champion of a powerful and strongly-centralized monarchy, which he had received with all its ancient traditions, but which he sought to renovate; the disappointed idealist imagined by some Slavophils, who in his despair, so they assert, struck with Lis own hand at wiiat he had failed to transform grew wilder and wilder as the ruins thickened round his feet, and ended at last, in a very madness of murder and destruction ? This seems a somewhat hasty conclusion, which must not be unquestion­ingly accepted.

In the Tsar’s case, as I have already admitted, there was some admixture of intoxication and even of frenzy ; hut both the person and the policy of Ivan have their admirers, and his work has been by no means doomed to come to nought. Some of his reforms even yet impart their special and recog­nised character to Russia, and to her political and social organi­zation.

We have quite as much difficulty 111 recognising him in the tragic actor, for ever seeking picturesque poses and dramatic effects, depicted by Constantine Akssakov (‘ Works,’ 2nd edition, i. 114, etc.), as in the base and vulgar despot stigma­tized by Kostomarov, or the mere maniac ranked by Mik- ha'ilovski (' Critical Essays,’ 1895, p. 112) as a common lunatic. From his ancestors, Ivan inherited a State the archaic basis of which was in process of transformation. Certain prin­ciples of the old appanage system he sought to eliminate, but others he sought to maintain, subject to their being brought into harmony with the necessities of modern existence. From his intellectual masters, from Joseph Volotski and Vassiane Toporkov, he learnt that his power, divine iri its essence, could not be circumscribed, nor divided, nor controlled ; and Nature, to conclude, had endowed him with a headstrong temperament, violent and irritable, a fiery and disordered imagination, and a mind, quick, subtle, penetrating, and in­genious. but ill-balanced, most unsettled, and prone to exaggera­tion and excess.

The peculiar way in which he understood his part and played it was the outcome of all these things. He felt it to be very great, and concluded that everything else must be sub­ordinated to it. When he met resistance he broke it down, as his fathers had done before him ; but his effort was greater, because the resistance was more powerful, and his violence was greater, too, because he was violent by temperament.

He did not admit, any more than his ancestors had done, any encroachment on his will in the form of unsolicited advice ; but the practice of his own will and pleasure, which he followed like them, was mingled with a certain roughness and extravagance, because he was rough by nature, and of a most fanciful mind. Yet his fancies, as I shall endeavour to show, never went so far as to lead him out of his path, and though he persevered in it—if not in everybody’s teeth, in the teeth of the majority at all events—he claimed to be no despot at all. In this particular, realist as he was in practice, he had built himself up a theory borrowed from the most transcendental ideology. What was it all about, and for what reason was the Tsar imposing this severe law, or that effort, on his subjects, who were trying, some of them,

to escape it ? Was it to create a great Empire for himself, to conquer Livonia as he had conquered Kazan and Astrakan, to win triumphs, cover himself with glory ? No indeed ! His one and only c.im was to bring his people to a knowledge of Divine truth ! Vainly, then, and falsely, did they attack his person and rebel against his rule. For this rule, properly under­stood. far from being despotic, had nothing personal about it. The powers that really directed it were : the Divine mercy, the grace of the Mother of Christ, the prayers of all the saints, and the benediction of the ancient Sovereigns ! The reigning Tsar only intervened as the living expression of all these hypostases, amongst which the bolars, importunate and per­fidious counsellors, muddlers or traitors, ' barking dogs who strove to bite their master,’ had no place at all. The Tsar, when he listened to none save whom he would, and punished as he saw fit, was only insuring the existence within his own Empire of—the kingdom of God !

It is clear that with a man who claimed such authority and such a mission, discussion was impossible, and no division of power practicable. Let us pass on to the historv of the struggle.

II.—Tiie Disgrace of Sylvester and Adachev.

There has been a dispute, and it still continues, as to the character and performances of the men to whose influence Ivan was pleased to submit, and whose advice he condescended to take, for a certain time. The most probable solution of the question, taking into consideration the many apparent con­tradictions in their actions and opinions, is that they began by halting between the two parties which stood face to face. At a later period, following the natural bent of their origin, their intellectual associations, and their political connections, they brought over a portion of the opposition to their side, and ended by attempting to form a special group, a select centre, of which they themselves would have been the leaders. Kourbski’s passionate apology leaves us in very little doubt on this head.

After the year 1551, the great council of the Empire, the boiarskaia douma, only sat in the most intermittent fasliion, for it had been relegated to a secondary position by the ‘ private council,’ the inception of which at this period I have already mentioned (p. 37), and which is easily recognised as a repro­duction of analogous institutions belonging to the history of the Western monarchies : the consistorium principis or con­silium aulicum of Germany, the commune consilium of the Norman Kings in England, or the consilium regium of France.

On this council Adachev and Sylvester sat with Kourbski and some other boiars and Churchmen, amongst whom Kourbski mentions the Metropolitan Macarius and three Morozovs, Michael, Vladimir, and Leo, while other documents give us the names of Princes Dmitri Kourliatev and Simon Rostovski. Until the period of the war in Livonia, Sylvester’s influence seems to have been preponderating, at all events, if not un­divided. His position as an ecclesiastic, his masterful tem­perament, and his meticulous pedantry, together with the qualities of a supple and wily courtier, revealed in the Dom­ostroi, naturally gave him a strong hold over the mind of the young Sovereign, who was profoundly religious, and not over sure of himself, as yet. But in 1553, the first difficulty between the mentor and his pupil arose. In the course of a somewhat serious illness, Ivan was led to occupy himself with the matter of his succession. The hereditary succession to the throne by primogeniture had only recently been established, and the Tsar thought it prudent to make the nobles swear allegiance to his son Dmitri. Suddenly, Prince Vladimir Andreievitch, the Sovereign’s uncle, put forward his own claim. This was a return to the old appanage system, according to which uncles took precedence of their nephews, and the rage and agitation of the sick man may be imagined, when he saw most of his boiars side with this claimant, and support his pretensions. What were their motives ? A certain regard for the old custom, no doubt, but, above all things, a feeling of jealous pride as to the maternal relatives of the young Prince to whom they were expected to pay homage. The government of such a child should certainly have suited them—it would have insured them years of oligarchy. But for whose benefit ? When the Chou'iski and the Bielski fought for power, in Helen’s days, it had been a struggle between the descendants of the ancient Sovereigns, at all events; now it would be a fight between mere parvenus. And round the bed on which Ivan lay, expecting death, the vielmoji obstinately clung to their non fiossumus. ‘ We will not kiss the cross for the Zakharine.’ To ‘ kiss the cross ’ meant to take the oath. Already Vladimir and his mother were doing all in their power to stimulate their supporters’ zeal,, opening their treasuries, showering promises, while the Zakharine themselves had taken fright, and seemed inclined to bow their heads.

At this crisis, Ivan’s failing eyes sought Sylvester and Adachev. They were certain to support the few defenders of the legitimate heir with all their strength ! Disappointment! The only men who proved energetic and faithful, and succeeded in rallying a few boiars to the cause, were Prince Vladimir Vorotynski and the diak Ivan Mikhai'lovitch Viskovatyi.

Neither Sylvester nor Adachev lifted a finger. They did not refuse to take the oath themselves, but they observed the most cautious neutrality, and carefully abstained from taking any part in the passionate discussions which disturbed the quiet of the very chamber in which the dying mai lay, and increased his suffering. The favourite’s own father, the Okolnitchyi Feodor Adachev, went so far as to declare himself openly in Vladimir's favour. Thus a whole day dragged out. The next morning the Tsar was better, and Dmitri’s partisans increased in number. In a fright, Vladimir hurried to the sick-chamber, in which hitherto he had not deigned to set his foot. Those who had been faithful from the outset stopped him on the threshold, and one voice—one only—was raised to beg admit­tance for him—the voice of Sylvester, bound to the monarch by old ties of friendship !

Ivan recovered, and he did not forget. In performance of a vow made during his illness, he departed on pilgrimage to the monastery of St Cyril at Bielooz'ero, taking his wife and son with him. If Kourbski is to be believed. Maximus the Greek endeavoured to prevent the accomplishment of this pious undertaking. The monks of Bielooziero were the disciples of Joseph Volotski, and on his way thither, at the monastery of Piesnoche, on the Iakhroma, the Tsar was to meet an illustrious disciple of the same school, Vassiane Toporkhov, who had been exiled by the boiars in 1542. The Albanian monk is even said to have warned Ivan that his boy would die on the journey, and, whether as the result of the exposure of a delicate child to the winter weather, or of an accident—for, according to some versions, Dmitri was drowned—the prophecy camc true. The Tsar brought home a corpse. But he saw Toporkov, and, according to Kourbski, again, asked his advice. What was he to do to keep his boiars in order ? * Never have anybody about you except people who are less intelligent than yourself,’ was the reply. It is not very likely that the answer, which is very nearly impertinent, took this form exactly, although the story, introduced into one of the letters written by Kourbski to him, was never contradicted by the Sovereign. We may, therefore, conclude there is some truth in it. But what is still more certain is the state of reciprocal irritation and distrust which reigned between the Tsar and his boiars from the very morrow of the experience through which they had just passed. The refractory nobles’ refusal to take the, oath was nothing, clearly, but yet another form of their incessant protest against that new order of things of which Dmitri’s succession would have been a perpetuation.

In the course of the following years the opposition grew stronger. Some historians, reiving on the absence of active

15

resistance or armed rebellion, have gone so far, indeed, as to deny the existence of any struggle at all. They have confused the Muscovy of the earliest Tsars with the France of Louis XI. Owing to the absence of strongly-constituted classes in Russia, the resistance, in her case, could not assume the same character, become collective in its nature, oppose violence with violence. But the men who, like Bielski, offered their services to the enemy, and besought that enemy’s assistance to enforce their abolished privileges, or who, like Mstislavski, showed theTartars the road to the capital—such fugitives and traitors were in­surgents, neither more nor less !

Now, just in the year 1554, this flow of emigrants to foreign parts increased to an alarming extent. In July, Prince Nikita Dmitrievitch Rostovski was stopped, and arrested on one of the roads leading to Lithuania. It was then discovered that all his family and his numerous relations, the Lobanov, the Priimkov, had been in treaty with the King of Poland. From the point of view of the old appanages, there was nothing criminal in all this. It was no more than a putting into prac­tice of the ‘ right of departure,’ and so strong were the ancient ideas and habits, si’ll, that the Tsar did not dare to use too much severity. Rostovski, on the intercession of a great number of influential persons, was merely interned at Bieloo- ziero. But the Tsar was none the better pleased with those who interceded for him, and amongst these, again, was Sylvester.

From that time forward, probably, the pope’s position and that of Adachev were very much undermined. The two comrades’ behaviour when the Livonian war began did nothing to restore their credit. They loudly espoused the cause of the bolars, who, in their dislike of the effort the war necessitated and of the disturbance it caused in the traditional trend of the Muscovite policy, condemned the whole enterprise. Yet up to July, 1560, Adachev seems to have been actively employed in diplomatic work. It was not till this period that, being sent into a kind of honourable exile far from Court, he re-entered the ranks of the army, then in I.^:vonia, as third Voicvode of the lirst regiment. At the same time, Sylvester went into voluntary retirement at the monastery of Bielooziero, the common refuge of all fallen grandeurs. In his ‘ History of Ivan’ Kourbski has confused events and dates, and connected these disgraces with the illness and death of the Tsarina Anastasia. According to him, the ex-favourites were accused of having poisoned her. The Tsarina fell ill in November, 1559, and died ten months later, after the departure of Adachev and Sylvester, and the very duration of her sufferings would seem to preclude any suspicion of foul play, which, indeed, would have been punished after quite a different fashion. After that

event Sylvester and Adachev underwent a trial. Disgrace is in itself a downward slope, and no doubt some sentiment of caution or some remnant of consideration prevented Ivan from at first revealing the full depth of his resentment. But even now the accused men escaped. One received a sentence of still more distant banishment, to the monastery of Solovki on the Frozen Sea, while the other, after a short stay at Fellin, in Livonia, where he had been appointed voievode, and where, in all probability, he did not keep himself quiet, was sent to prison. Xo attempt on the Tsarin; ’s life was recognised, evidently, nor, most likely, discussed by the judges ; for as to proof people were not over particular in those days. In later years Ivan, in fits of fury, and with the angry clamour of some wild aurochs bellowing in the forest for his mate, reproached his faithless friends with having parted him from ‘ his doe.’ But even then, though he called Sylvester before the ‘ judgment-seat of the Divine Lamb,’ he would not, he said, ‘ seek judgment against him ’ here below. And in his very charges he contra­dicted himself. At one time he accused the two parvenus of having sought to place their aristocratic supporters on a par with the Tsar, at another he asserted their intention of dragging their followers down to their own level. He blamed them for having carried out some of the reforms he cared for most, and which he was still pursuing, such as the conversion of the freeholds into fiefs. The grievances pleaded in the Tsar’s correspondence with Kourbski are nothing but arguments for the purposes of his controversy, and when he came to polemics, Ivan was never ovemice as to correctness or good faith. To demonstrate the interference of third parties in the affairs of his Government, he did not hesitate to exaggerate and alter facts. Sylvester and Adachev, according to his story, had brought him into such a state of tutelage that they even measured out his hours of sleep to him. ‘ I was like a child ; I had no will at all!’ And this argument was also used as a retort when Kourbski complained that his own strength had been overtaxed. ‘ By whom ? Was he not master, then, with the pope,’ and ‘ Adachev, that dog taken off a dung- heap ?’

The war in Livonia, undertaken and carried through against the advice of the whole of the ‘ little council,’ in itself suffices to dispose of all these allegations. After the Siege of Kazan, ‘ all the wise men,’ as Kourbski testifies, advised the Tsar to remain in the town for some time. We know he did nothing of the sort. Later, in 1555, the same counsellors met with better success when they begged the Tsar not to flee before the Tartars. A consideration of these facts will enable us to gauge their undoubted influence. Some information as

to Sylvester’s personal share in it is furnished by one of his letters to the Metropolitan Macarius, concerning the appoint­ment of a prior. It proves that the Tsar commissioned the pope to look into the merits of the candidates brought to his notice. But he had to embody his conclusions in a report, and in the Sovereign’s absence, the whole business remained un­settled.

From the day on which they refused to stand by Dmitri, Sylvester and Adachev ceased to be Anastasia’s friends. Their destiny may have been affected by her premature, end, and it is probable, likewise, that their fall was hastened by some other event, of which we know nothing. All this period of the reign is wrapped in obscurity.

The close of Sylvester’s life, too, slips out of the historian’s ken. Adachev died in prison at the end of two years. ‘ If they had not parted me from my doe,’ Ivan kept saying,

‘ Saturn would not have had so many victims !’ The con­fession is worth remembering. Kourbski mentions a widow of Polish origin, Mary Magdalen by name, accused of guilty rela­tions with Adachev, and executed, with five of her sons. At the same time, several of the ex-favourite’s relations—his brother Daniel, with his twelve-year-old boy, and his father-in- law, Tourov, three brothers of the name of Satine, whose sister had married Alexis Adachev, and others—are said to have been put to death. A great deal of blood was certainly spilt. Ivan was then beginning a system of wholesale executions, by families at a time, and it was to be long before the red stream was dried up. To the ferocity which marked the habits of that period—my readers will not have forgotten the bloody heca­tombs of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, of Philip II. and Charles XI.—he added the fierceness of his violent nature, and the caprice of a half-Oriental despot. Kourbski mentions, at this time, a Prince Michael Repnine, invited to one of the Tsar’s banquets, who refused to take his share in the general merri­ment, and, pulling off a mask the company had tried to force upon him, trampled it underfoot. A few days later, Ivan had him killed in church, while the Gospel was being read. A similar adventure is said to have befallen Prince George Kacliine. The monarch, though he did not disclaim all the facts, denied that he had ever profaned the sacred edifices. According to Guagnino, another member of the upper aris­tocracy, a young Prince Dmitri Obolenski-Ovtchinine, likewise perished, about this time, in consequence of a quarrel with the Tsar’s new favourite. Feodor Basmanov, whom he had offended by an insulting remark—‘ My ancestors and I, we have served our Sovereign like honest men. You serve him like the men of Sodom !’ But on this point Kourbski contradicts the Italian

chronicler, and here is another and an instructive proof of the degree of confidence of which Kourbski himself is worthy. Amongst the friends of Sylvester and Adachev involved ir their disgrace he mentions, together with Prince Dmitri Kourliatev and other less prominent members of the group, dozens of whom were massacred or exiled, a certain Prince Michael Vorotynski. This gentleman, a valiant soldier, who had won glory on many a battlefield, was sent to Bielooziero for the. first time in 1559, sent back there soon after his recall from exile in 1564, and passed on this second occasion through the torture-chamber, we are assured. After being roasted over a slow fire in the presence of Ivan, who himself raked the hot cinders under his body with his staff, he is said to have died on his return journey. Now, as to this person’s first exile, we have official and documentary evidence, and it proves him to have enjoyed a considerable amount of comfort. He com­plains that he has not been sent the Rhenish and French wines to which he has a right, and asks for various supplies —fresh fish, dried raisins, lemons, prunes—for himself, his family, and his twelve servants, all kept at the Tsar’s expense in a prison which would seem to have been by no means a Gehenna. Can it be that people so well treated within the prison walls were thus cruelly handled before being sent there ? (‘ Historical Documents,’ 1841, i., No. 174).

The only absolutely convincing documents we find among the records of the many trials connected with that of Sylvester and Adachev contain no reference either to torture or to execution. These prosecutions generally arose out of some plan to go abroad, imputed to one bo'iar or another, and in­variably ended in mere precautionary measures ; the culprits, whether acquitted or pardoned, had to undertake not to leave the country, and to find security to that effect. This occurred in the case of Prince Vassili Mikha'ilovitch Glinski in 1561, and in that of Prince Ivan Dmitrievitch Bielski in the following year ; on this last occasion, nine-and-tvventy prominent men, for whom 120 others went security, gave their signatures.

It will be noticed that this form of procedure implied an acknowledgment of the right claimed by the interested parties. Theoretically, indeed, this right remained unaffected. It had formerly been exercised as between one appanage and another, and the reason of its existence had passed away now Russia was a unified whole ; yet it still subsisted as the counterpart of that freedom claimed, without the smallest regard for frontier lines, by the nomad peasants themselves. But since the fifteenth century, a twofold current of emigration, affecting every class, had been flowing with increasing strength between .Muscovy and Poland.

Guedymin’s descendants swarmed at the Tsar’s Court, and at that of Warsaw, the descendants of Rurik were legion. Through a Princess of Tver, who married Olguerd, many Polish families descended from that Lithuanian Prince were related to Russian houses. The ancestors of the Odoievski, the Bielski, and the Vorotynski had lived partly in one country and partly in the other ; some of them had served Casimir, and some had served Ivan the Third. The Mstislavski had only left Lithuania in 1526, when they made way for the Czar- toryski, a member of which family had once been Governor of Pskov. In 1521, the last Duke of Riazan had sought refuge in Lithuania, and with him representatives of some of the greatest of the Muscovite famines—a Bielski, a Liatski, a Yichniovietski, a Cheremetiev.

Still the stream flowed on, and the Terrible himself hesitated, at first, to check it effectually. Prince Ivan Dmitrievitch Bielski, in spite of the heavy security already mentioned, soon made a fresh attempt, and was once more pardoned. Ivan Vassilievitch Cher6m£ti6v’s turn came in 1564. Kourbski declares he w^ras tortured, loaded with chains, and punished, in the person of his brother Nikita, whom the Tsar had strangled. Concerning Nikita we know nothing, but very shortly after this, we find Ivan Vassilevitch in possession of all his posts, and it was not till long afterwards that he was exiled to Bielooziero, where he seems to have provided himself with a fairly comfortable retreat.

These details are indispensable to the understanding of an episode identical in its nature with all those we have just reviewed, but which the unrivalled personality of its hero lifts out of the ordinary category’.

III.—The Flight of Kourdski.

Bom towards the year 1528, descended, through the ancient Dukes of Smolensk and J aroslavl, from Vladimir Monomachus, and belonging, like them, to the elder branch of the Ruriko- vitchy, Prince Andrew Mikhailovitch Kourbski was naturally involved in the disgrace that fell upon his friends. After his failure under the walls of Nevel, and the subsequent unsuc­cessful and suspicious negotiations with the Swedes for the cession of Helmet, he had special reasons for meditating escape. In 1564, declaring, as all who did like him declared, that nothing but pressing danger had driven him to such a course, he took the plunge. If he had stayed, so he averred, his head would have been in danger. Well received by the King of Poland—he had probably taken his precautions to insure this—he was assigned an establishment w^rortliy of his

^rank, and did not hesitate to bear arms against his fatherland in his new master’s service. He spent nineteen years in his adopted country, and did not make himself beloved there. ■His wanderings have passed into a legend. My readers may know the story of Vaska Chibanov, the bearer o: the first letter addressed to Ivan by the refugee, ‘ From my master to Your traitor.’ They may have seen a picture of the scene. Ivan, having received the message, leans, as he reads the letter, on his hunting-spear, and drives it into the messenger’s foot.... A 'Moscow bookseller, who bears the name thus glorified by the heroic henchman, takes a pnde, nowadays, in adorning his publications and circulars with this picture, which has no his­torical foundation. Chibanov did not go to Poland wdth Kourbski. It was on the scaffold, on which he suffered after being arrested with all the fugitive’s other servants, that he proved his fidelity by refusing to deny, and by defending, his master. Kourbski’s letters, litce Ivan’s replies, were probably not sent to their destination in this fashion at all. Messengers for such a purpose would doubtless not have been easy to find. These missives were open letters, intended for publication, and reached the persons to whom they were addressed by means of their publicity. One of the Tsar’s lucubrations covers sixty pages, and the monarch would certainly not have gone to so much trouble for Kourbski alone. The fact that this argument was carried on coram publico hits the incident above the dulness of everyday life, and constitutes its chief interest for us, now.

In that lazy land of Poland, where he had found shelter, Kourbski must have had a great deal of time on his hands. He turned it to account by writing a ‘ History of Ivan,’ to which I have already referred, and in which he has done his utmost to condemn his former master’s personal govern­ment, and extol the ‘ little council ’ and its members. To this end he divides the reign into two parts—the period of glory, previous to the disgrace of Sylvester, Adachev, and Kourbski ; and the disastrous, criminal, and shameful period which fol­lowed on that event. In the service of his cause, he has drawn largely on liis imagination, and has composed a list of Ivan’s misdeeds, in which, as we have seen, many errors may be de­tected. Yet part of his accusation has been accepted, tacitly or explicitly, by the accused person, and part has been verified by other authorities. The historian also turned his attention to ecclesiastical history, and that, considering his own ante­cedents, in a somewhat unexpected spirit. In Russia he had been the fri“nd, not only of Maximus the Greek, but of that Artemi who was accused of heresy before the conciliable of 1531. In Poland, where he was face to face with a Catholic propaganda which threatened his coreligionists, he suddenly discovered, in

some dark comer of his mind and heart, a spirit of fierce and suspicious Orthodoxy.

And at the same "lime, the patriotic instinct stirred in the voluntary exile’s heart. As a Polish poet once said in ex­quisite verse, ‘A man’s country is like his health: it is not till he has lost it that he knows its worth.’ Kourbski sending Prince Constantine Ostroski liis Slav translation of one of St. John Chrysostom’s homilies, indignantly exclaims against the idea that this magnate, who, though a subject of the Polish King, belonged to the Orthodox faith, should have thought of translating it into that ‘ barbarous language ’—Polish ! And he plunged into violent disputes with the Lithuanian partisans of Theodore Kossoi and other Muscovite heresiarchs, once his own friends. And he warred against the Jesuits, those ‘ wolves brought into the fold,’ even though he turned their zeal to account against the Protestants. And, not to howl with the wolves, but to be better able to fight them, he began to learn Latin in his old age, and advised one of his comrades in exile, young Prince Michael Obolenski, to leave his wife and children and put himself to school, at Cracow first of all, and then in Italy—a precursor of the troops of students, male and female, who now besiege the doors of our teaching centres. Some of the fruits of this busy effort—fragmentary translations of St. John Chrysostom and Eusebius, and a preface written for the ‘ New Pearl ’ (Novyi Margarit)—have been preserved to us.

But, above all other th’ugs, Kourbski mended his best pen with a view to his explanation with Ivan. In his pleadings we find more rhetoric than truth, less reason than passion. He enumerates his services and the ill-treatment he has endured ; he vents imprecations on the Tsar’s crimes and his abuse of power, on his dissolute life and the unworthiness of his new favourites—such men as Basmanov and Maliouta-Skouratov, debauchees or bloody ruffians. Copiously and laboriously, he exhausts all these facile themes, yet never lays a finger on the heart of the question, the complex and deep-seated causes of the disagreement between the Sovereign and the portion of society which refused to accept the master’s will.

This fact diminishes the historical value of the document. But that its author should have been able to sting the Tsar of all the Russias into taking up the gauntlet and entering on a liter.arY duel; that he should thus have made his own disgrace and rancour echo far and wide, and drawn the ancient struggle between past and future, between the partisans of the old and new system, between the two rival branches of the house of Rurik, into these narrow lists, is in itself a great matter, and marks an epoch of cap'tal importance in the national history. It is an eloquent affirmation of the entrance

of the great Northern Empire upon the track of mudem life.

By his rank, Ivan might have scorned the offered provo­cation, and his overweening pride would have seemed to make such a course most probable. But his own tempera­ment, and, added to that, his modem instinct, gained the day, and to this circumstance we owe, not only a most precious historical document, but a remarkable writer. I do not refer to Kourbski. His style is diffuse, confused, and dull. Ivan’s is more prolix still; he sheds no light on the dispute, and shows no more anxiety than his opponent to bring it back to its proper limits. His pleading, like Kourbski’s, is all one­sided, and he limits his replies and his own attacks to facts and interests of quite secondary importance. Did he have such a boiar killed in church or in his dungeon ? Did he or did he not attempt Kourbski’s hfe ? All this is not really important. But, still, the Tsar invests his arguments, in part at all events, with that which the other never succeeded in putting into his. Not style indeed—Kourbski’s style is bad, but Ivan has no style at all—but spirit, vehemence, sustained energy, words that tell, phrases that hit the mark like an arrow from the bow. ‘ You who call yourself just and pious, how came you to fear death so much that you sold your soul to save >our body ?’ And he proves his learning, too—gives us bits of Scriptural exegesis. This is a controversy between two learned men ! Kourbski has quoted Scripture to prove that a monarch ought to listen to his counsellors. Has he forgotten Moses, then ? He has denounced the executions ordered by Ivan as crimes. And how about King David ? As to the right of departure, put into practice by the noble fugitive, as to the other privileges claimed by him and his ad­herents, not a word. The sole political theory the meaning and formula of which the Tsar condescends to evoke and set forth, is that of the absolute power. ‘ We are free to punish and to reward as it seems good to us, and no Russian Sovereign has ever given an account of his actions to anyone on earth.’

I have already pointed out, and shall again have to show, in the political history of the Moscow of that period, a sort of tacit agreement whereby realities were concealed under appear­ances, and which sometimes ended by completely disguising facts and persons, and the parts these persons played. These two adversaries, though they crossed pens in public, as I have said, were to observe an agreement of this kind, and, to the very end, to avoid tearing the veil asunder, though under its shadow they dealt each other mighty blows. To defend himself against the mass of quotations with which the Tsar sought to crush him, Kourbski appealed to the superiority

of his own literary education. ‘ You ought to be ashamed to write like an old mad woman, and send so ill-composed an epistle into a country full of people who know grammar and rhetoric, dialectics and philosophy !’ The allusion to the publicity of the controversy is clear enough here. But both parties continued to shirk the pith of the question.

The dates of the first three letters thus exchanged are un­known. Ivan dates the fourth from Wolmar, the day after he took that town, in 1577. The victor does not fail to draw arguments from his late triumph. He has won it without the help of Kourbski and his friends. Ivourbski’s reply appeals to Cicero ; but this time his opponent swerves. He writes again, but no answer comes. Batory has appeared upon the scene, and given the Tsar other things to think of.

In his own country, Ivan’s great antagonist has found apologists and detractors, all equally convinced. The first seem at present to be carrying all before them, and while they await the statue which will no doubt stand, some day, on one of the. Moscow squares, they are erecting a literary monu­ment which is not devoid of value to the glory of the nation. In the eyes of the learned author of the ¹ History of Russian Literature’ (Pypine, ii. 171, 172), as in those of an older biographer (P . . . ski, Kazan, 1873), Kourbski, with all his faults, and in spite of them, is the most eminent representa­tive of the civilizing ideas assimilated by the Russia of the sixteenth century. He marks the comparatively high level to which a Russian of that period, far from the Western centres of information, hampered in his search after know­ledge, choked by Government terrorism, might yet raise himself. Kourbski was a man of science, too, who strove to widen the. field of knowledge which had satisfied most of his fellow-citizens. He was also the first public writer his country possessed, and, to crown it all. he was its first citizen, in the true sense of the word, the first who fell in love with the idea of progress, and was capable of lifting his voice against a brutal despotism.

These are noble titles, but they need verification. Kou^b- ski’s Moscow career is still veiled in great obscurity. The details of his residence in Poland are better known, for life there was more open. These details do not reflect much honour on the "wanderer. Though sufficiently well provided with money and land by the country of his exile, he was an odious master, a hateful neighbour, and the most detestable and unruly of subjects. While he was translating St. John Chrysostom and calling out against despotism, he committed, or allowed his stewards to commit, abuses of his own power quite as monstrous as any of which Ivan may have been guilty

—such as shutting up J ews in dungeons full of water . . . and leeches. At war with everybody, beginning with the King, who was certainly anything but a tyrant; in perpetual rebellion against every authority, even in such matters as the taxes payable on his new properties, or the recruits he was bound to furnish from them, he made himself generally hated.

What he would seem to have especially represented and personified is that class of men with whom Ivan found himself forced to straggle—men whose intelligence was open to cer­tain elements of civilization and certain ideas of freedom, but who interpreted them all in a narrow sense, to suit their own caste or clan interests. Some people have gone so far as to deny that he was one of the group of boiars who clung obsti­nately to their superannuated privileges ; but did he not put forward his claims to the Duchy of Jaroslavl ? The fact of his poverty has been alleged. If that is so, he was nothing, when he passed over into Poland, but a vulgar fortune-hunter* for in addition to the Starosty of Krev, to ten villages and 4,000 diessiatines of land in Lithuania, the town and castle of Kovel, and twenty-eight villages in Volhynia, a very liberal sum of money was bestowed upon him. And this would have in­volved an abominable deceit practised on Sigismund-Augustus, who, as his letters granting the concession prove, believed himself to be giving an equivalent for the wealth left behind in Muscovy.

All these advantages Kourbski gained m his newly-chosen fatherland, after having dreamed at Moscow, if not of recover­ing the appanage of his ancestors—and yet one of his peers, Chouiski, when he ascended the throne soon afterwards, was to claim exactly similar rights—at all events of protecting what remained of his inheritance against the encroachments of the State, and increasing it at the rtate’s expense ; of defending his right to sit on his master’s councils, too, and make himself heard there, as well as his claim to yield him just so much obedience as might suit his own convenience. Thus, partisan of pro­gress though he may have been, he remained a laggard, dally­ing behind his time, amidst the formal traditions of bygone centuries. He had an ideal, no doubt — the political ideal, though he did not dream it, perhaps, of the hospitable country he despised and detested, even though he had come to break bread at her board. But this ideal, anarchical enough in its own birthplace, dangerous and even fatal, was not susceptible of transportation to Muscovite soil. Once across the frontier, it collided with different conceptions and habits, it was trans­formed into a mere negation—refusal of service, desertion, treachery. And thus it comes about that in the popular legend, and in spite of all the exile’s pains to endue, him with

that appearance, Kourbski’s crowned adversary is not, and never lias been, the persecutor of innocence oppressed. He is, and always has been, ‘ the destroyer of treason on Russian soil.’ That is the one thing the Russian people has per­ceived and understood in the drama in which itself played the part of the ancient chorus, together with the fact that when the Tsar massacred or ill-used his boiars he did it in defence of the humble and the weak.

This needs explanation, and for that purpose, Kourbski’s career may serve. Most of Ivan’s historians have refused to admit that the people sided with the despot. What did he offer the mass of the peasants, husbandmen yesterday, lialf- serfs to-day, and soon to be utterly enslaved—to these beings whose backs were bent in never-ending labour, bound to the soil, and more and more ground down, more mercilessly cheated, as the needs of the State mcreased ? Yet the facts speak for themselves. Ivan has been sung, lauded, extolled, by the population of helots whose slavery and misery he deepened. When suffering has reached a certaLi pitch, any change, even if it should increase the torture, is a benefit. In 1582, the peasants of one of the Polish properties bestowed on Kourbski made a complaint against their new master. They had known others, who had not made their life any too easy, but this one they could not endure ! The complaint was admitted to be well founded, and my readers may imagine in what fashion Kourbski had been in the habit of treating the unhappy moujiks on his Russian vottchina. There were thou­sands of Kourbskis in Russia, and this one was a liberal, a man of progress ! The hatred all these men inspired built up Ivan’s popularity.

The exile died at Kovel in 1583. His family, which had embraced Catholicism in Poland, returned to Russia and to the Orthodox faith, and died out in 1777. In the struggle between the old regime and the new order of things, Kourbski, the most illustrious of the champions of the past, was, taking him all in all, neither a hero nor a martyr. And for this reason, before we plunge into the heart of that battle, where the bloody phantom of the 0pritchnina awaits them, I have desired to show him to my readers, as an example of the kind of adversaries with whom Ivan had to deal.

CHAPTER II THE OPRITCHXINA

I.—THE FICTIONS AND REALITIES OF THE DRAMA. II.—THE TERROR.

III.—THE TSAR SIMEON. IV. THE OPRITCHXINA AT THE BAR

OF HISTORY.

I.—The Fictions and Realities of the Drama.

Most of my Russian readers and some of my French ones have read the adventures of Prince Serebrianyi, as related by Alexis Tolstoi. The hero of the tale, returning to Russia after an embassy to a foreign Power, meets a troop of armed men. whom he takes, by their appearance and behaviour, for lawless bandits. He sees them sack a village and murder or violate the inhabitants. He acts according to the dictates of his brave heart, and then only, when the law has laid its hand on his collar, does he discover he has been guilty of treason. The men he had taken for brigands are the Tsar’s servants, and their performances a perfectly regular specimen of the new order of things imposed on the country. The culprit is conducted to the monarch’s new residence, the Sloboda of Alexandrov, and passes from one surprise and horror to another—from the courtyard where roving bears bar the way of suspicious-looking visitors, to the banqueting-hall, the road to which is fringed with torture-chambers and dungeons, and where the Tsar, surrounded by guests disguised in monkish attire, distributes gloomy smiles and cups of poisoned liquor. Everywhere his foot slips in blood : an evil smell of carnage hangs in the air, the joyous yells of the drunken feasters mingle with the shrieks of pain wrung irom prisoners who are being tortured close by. The whole palace is a Gehenna, a charnel-house. And wherefore ? No man knows, or rather all men guess : the Tsar is amusing himself, and these are his pleasures.

The novelist has not relied wholly and solely on his imagina­tion. He has sought to write history, and history, in the person of her most illustrious exponents in his own country, has furnished him with the elements of his picture, with his outline and his pigments. This is the Opritchnina, as the story is told by Karamzme, by Soloviov, by Kostomarov, and in our own days by Klioutchevski and Mikhailovski—a hideous tale of massacre, ordered, without reason, without object, by a Sovereign who treated himself to this bloody play, per­petrated, shamelessly and remorselessly, by men who rode up and down the country with their insignia, a dog’s head and a

broom, hung at their saddle-bow, and whose watchword was murder and pillage. Soaked with blood, laden with plunder, they made their way home, donned a monk’s frock, to add profanation to their other crimes, and with their master, him­self disguised as a prior, plunged into the vilest orgies. These were the Opritchniki.

But other and later historians have applied themselves to the same task, and their inquiry into the same facts, and scrutiny of the same individuals, has led them to a different view of the same drama, and another interpretation of the strange riddle it presents. Behind that terrifying scene and its horrible surroundings they have discovered an idea ; under the deceptive appearances of a sanguinary madness they have thought they perceived a carefully-digested plan, carried out with as much tenacity as vigour : they have discerned the existence of huge projects of reform, political, social, and economic, put into action by means that were reprehensible, indeed, but which may have been necessary to some extent. The riddle has not been entirely solved. It still holds out against its interpreters’ efforts. But one fact is certain: in their manner of interpreting and representing the Opritch- nina, the historians of the old school have fallen into a three­fold error. They have mistaken appearances for realities, accessories for essentials, and a part for the whole.

I shall explain myself better by taking one example. Imagine a history of the French Revolution—and this, perhaps, is not an entirely gratuitous supposition—cut down to the evocation of a few scenes and characters culled from the Jacobin Club, the Temple prison, and the Place de la Nation. This would be the equivalent of what was given us for a length­ened period as the foundation and essence of ten years of the political existence of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. And this cannot be wondered at, when we consider that the docu­ment most indispensable to an understanding of the episode, the decree which constitutes the Opritchnina, though preserved in the archives, has remained unpublished, and continues inaccessible, even in our own day. Other documents have either been lost or have also remained unknown. I now proceed to the facts we do possess.

Kourbski’s flight, which was preceded and followed by similar attempts, some successful and others continually threatening to become so, had placed Ivan in a position calcu­lated to render his future most perplexing and uncertain. To accomplish the tasks he had set himself, at home and abroad, one necessitated by the other—for his internal reforms supplied the necessary instruments for his external enter­prises—many men and large sums of money were needful.

Where was he to find them ? Except when, more concerned about their own privileges than the common weal, they were losing battles through fighting over their respective places, or making compacts with the enemy, the men melted into space. As to money, the same men, either as heads of the administra­tion or holders of the soil, chief wealth of the country, dis­posed of that, keeping its use or control in their own hands. Whether as voievodes, lieutenants, judges, members of the Supreme Court, chiefs of the various offices, they were every­where, held everything, except when, on the ancient vottchiny, where each had his own court and his own soldiery, exercised a jurisdiction whicii was almost without appeal, and refused to pay taxes, almost without exception, they were putting on kingly airs, or else claiming theoretically superior titles, and putting forward pretensions against those of the ‘ younger branch ’ at Moscow, which, empty and void as they were for all future purposes, were worrying enough, nevertheless.

As to breaking up the system of his administrative and military organization, Ivan could not dream of such a thing. The life of sixteenth-century Moscow resided in her traditions. Over individuals, the Tsar’s power was unlimited ; but it failed in face of an order of things of which he himself, his rank, his prestige, and his authority, were integral parts. While the Princes and boiars, accustomed to look on the govern­ment of the country as their own property, a sphere belonging to them by prescriptive right, regarded their functions as independent of any investiture on his part, and considered the Miestnitchestvo a guarantee for this hereditary privilege, the Sovereign found it difficult to say them nay, seeing his own power had the same origin, and was founded on the same title. All these descendants of Rurik or Guedymin, boiars and Tsar alike, had ruled in Russia in the old days— each man apart, on his own appanage. The Government was collective now—one man on the throne, the others at the head of an office or a province. But none the less were they all members of the same company, of the same faimly, and no man of them had any right to say, ‘ This house is mine, you must go out of it!’ And as far as the individuals were con­cerned, how would Ivan have iiUed their places ? The dozen of men, such as Skouratov and Griazno'i, whom he succeeded in pushing into the foremost rank, after Sylvester and Adachev had disappeared, ‘ taking them out of the mud,’ as he said himself, and generally out of that class of the Popovitchy (sons of popes) which still plays so prominent a part in what is called ‘ intelligence ’ in Russia, could not furnish him with the capital, material and moral, represented by the others. Out­side the ranks of that aristocracy with which his policy had

brought him into conflict he had no resources at all—every­thing was a blank. Between those two products of history, the boiarstvo and the satnodierjavie, no divorce was possible. A compromise was the thing needful, and it was on a com­promise that Ivan decided at this tragic moment. But he took good care not to say what he meant to do. The Russia of the sixteenth century, as we have already seen, was a country of mysteries. There was a mask on every face, and everything was hidden under some disguise.

On December 3, 1564, a Sunday, Ivan had all his treasures, his money, his plate, his gems, his furniture, and his ikons, packed on to waggons, and, followed by a huge train, many boi'ars chosen out of various towns, and his whole Court and household, he left his capital with his second wife, Maria Temrioukovna, a half-savage Circassian, as violent and passion­ate as himself. For some time, nobody in Moscow heard anything of him, and no man knew whither he had betaken himself, or wherefore he had departed. He went first of all to the village of Kolomenskoie, where bad weather detained him for a fortnight. He then spent some days at Taininskoie, another village in the neighbourhood of Moscow, and near the Troltsa, and finally took up his quarters in a suburb of the little town of Alexandrov, north of Vladimir. There he revealed the motives and object of his unwonted exodus. On January 3, a courier reached Moscow with a letter from the Tsar to the Metropolitan. In it the monarch, after dwelling at length on the misdeeds of the voievodes and officials of every degree, and the clergy, upper and lower, declared he had ‘ laid his anger ’ on them all, from the greatest to the least. This was what was called the Opala, a sort of ban, which placed all those affected by it in a state of disgrace and incapacity to perform any active function, whether about the Court or in the service of the State. At the same time Ivan announced his determination to leave the Empire and establish himself ‘ wherever God should counsel him to go.’ There was something contradictory in the terms of the message. The Tsar was abdicating, then ? And yet he used his authority to punish his subjects. But this message, again, was accom­panied by another, addressed to the merchants and ‘ the whole Christian population of Moscow,’ and its contents were to the effect that, as far as they were concerned, the Tsar had no cause of complaint, nor any feeling of displeasure.

What was the meaning of it all ? Probably people knew that as partially then as they do now. But so accustomed were the Russians of that day to riddles, that they did not hesitate as to the course they should pursue. The Tsar, displeased with a certain section of his subjects, was medi-

i

tating some dark design against them, the nature of which would not be revealed till its effects made themselves felt. What was apparent at the present moment was merely the usual setting of the scene. Obediently all men prepared to bear their part in the coming comedy. The boiars betrayed the correct amount of emotion, the populace rose up, shouted aloud, and was much affected. The merchants offered money, the most eloquent fashion of proving their share in the general feeling, and the Metropolitan was called upon to intercede with the Sovereign. Ivan was entreated not to forsake his people, but to rule as best pleased him. and mete out such treatment as he deemed fit to those of whom he thought he had reason to complain. A deputation took its way to Alexandrov, and the Tsar allowed himself to be mollified, but he made his own conditi ms ; he intended to keep all traitors and rebels in disgrace, to put some to death, and confiscate their fortunes, and he would not go back to Moscow till he had organized his Opritchnina.

This, in the common parlance of that day, was the name applied to the dowry paid to the wives of the great Princes. At banquets, certain special dishes which the amphitryon kept in front of himself, and the contents of which he divided amongst his chief guests, were called 0pritchnyie. And a par­ticular class of peasants settled on the lands belonging to certain monasteries were known as Opritchniki (from opritch, a part). Let my readers now cast their minds back to the ukase of October 10, 1550 (see p. 148), which gave the district of Moscow a territorial and political constitution of its own, and settled a selection of sloojilyie lioudi, taken from every rank of the nobility and every province of the Empire, within its borders. Without any essential modification of the existing order of things, solely by virtue of this transplanting process and of a change in the nature of the tenure, Ivan had summoned the men just transplanted to form the nucleus of a court, an administration, ar.d an army, all reorganized on a new basis. The Opritchnina of 1565, in its fundamental idea, was neither more nor less than the extension and wider application of this original plan.

Ivan now divided his Empire into two parts. One of these was to preserve its ancient organization and its ancient govern­ment— in other words, the voievodcs, lieutenants, bailiffs, and kormlenchtchiki of every kind were to carry on the adminis­tration as it had been carried on hitherto, a college presided over by two boiars taking the place of the Supreme Council as the centre of the various services. The other part, which comprised various portions of the country, a certain number of towns, and several quarters of the capital city, was converted

16

into a sort of dowry or appanage, which the Tsar kept for himself, and on which, with a thousand boiars or boiars’ sons, chosen by himself, he was about to follow up the experiment of 1550.

I must insist here on the scope of this experiment, which may be summed up in two principal features : the transfor­mation of the freehold properties ,nt.o fiefs, and the removal of owners from one holding to another. To take the pro­prietor of an hereditary freehold, subject to no charges of any kind, to tear him out of the corner of the soil on which, for centuries past, his fortune and importance had sprouted, grown, and struck their roots ; to part him from his natural adherents, break off all his natural connections, and, having thus uprooted him, isolated him, and removed him from his own sphere, to set him down elsewhere, as far as possible from his native place, to give him another property, but on a life interest, and on terms exacting service, and the pay­ment of the usual taxes from him, and thus to make a new man of him, a man without a past, without backing, defenceless— this was the constitution of the system. So, at least, we may suppose, for Ivan never revealed his secret. But, though the fact has hitherto passed unnoticed, the evident connection between the two decrees, that of 1550 and that of 1565, does indicate a system, and all we know of the two measures, of their character and their application, is in favour of the cor­rectness of the conjecture I have adopted, after the example of Monsieur Platonov, who seems to me to have approached nearest to the truth (‘ Essays on the History of the Political Disturbances of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,’ St. Petersburg, 1899, i. 137, etc.), and Monsieur Milioukov, whom I am inclined to think a little further removed from it (‘ Essays on the History of Russian Culture,’ 1896, i. 147, etc.), by his determination to see nothing, either in Ivan’s reforms or in Peter the Great’s, except financial expedients.

Ivan’s horizon was certainly wider than this. During his lifetime, and even after his death, silence has been kept, by superior order, concerning all this undertaking. Questions on the subject must have been foreseen when an embassy from the Tsar went into Poland in 1565. Muscovite diplomacy was in the habit of providing against possible indiscretions by foreseeing such inquiries, and dictating the replies before­hand. Thus, if the envoys were asked what the Opritchnina was, they were to answer, ‘ We do not know what you mean. There is no Opritchnina. The Tsar is living in the place of residence he has been pleased to choose, and such of his ser­vants as have given him cause for satisfaction are there with him, or are settled close by ; the others are a little farther

off—that is all. If peasants, who know nothing about anything, talk about an Opritchnina, people should not listen to them.’ The same orders were given to other embassies, in 1567 and 1571 (‘ Collections of the Imperial Society of Russian History,’ vol. lxxi., pp. 461, 777).

But facts began to speak in their turn. The part of the Empire originally given up to the Opritchnina was gradually increased till it comprised a good half of the Tsar’s dominions, and till the Opritchniki numbered 5,000, instead of 1,000, men. In 1565, the provinces of Vologda, Oustioug, Kargopol, Moja'isk, and Viazma were added; in 1566, all the Stroganov properties ; in 1571, part of the province of Novgorod. Each fresh extension was accompanied by a distribution of freehold lands or fiefs, taken from their original possessors. These received territorial compensation in other provinces, where they replaced, by a process of exchange, the Opritchniki who had been substituted for themselves on their old holdings—unless, indeed, they had the good luck to be received into the Opritchnina without undergoing expropriation or exile. And the districts claimed by the Opritchnina in the central provinces were just those in which the remnants of the old appanage system were largest and strongest. It laid its hand, thus, on the hereditary patrimonies of the Dukes of Rostov, Starodoub, Souzdal, and Tchernigov. It swallowed up, too, the territories ‘ beyond the Oka,’ the ancient inheritance of yet another group of appanaged Princes—the Odoievski, the Vorotynski, and the Troubetsko'i. Some of these, Prince Feodor Mikhailovitch Troubetskoi, Prince Nikita Ivanovitch Odoievski, allowed themselves to be enrolled under the banners of the new system, and proved its zealous servants. The rest were forced to migrate. Thus, in exchange for Odoiev, Prince Michael Ivanovitch Vorotynski received Starodoub-Riapo- lovski, some hundred miles further west. Other landowners in that country were given lands in the districts near Moscow, round Kolomna, Dmitrov, and Zvenigorod.

One instance will suffice to show the practical consequences of this moving to and fro. Out of 272 freehold domains in the district of Tver, the proprietors of 53 gave the State no service of any sort or kind ; some of these were the lieges of Prince Vladimir Andreievitch, the Tsar’s cousin, the others owed service to descendants of the old appanaged Princes, one to an Obolenski, another to a Mikoulinski, or a Mstislavski, a Galit/.ir.e, a Kourliatev, or even to some plain boi'ar. The Opritchnina altered all this. It brought about a general devolution of everything that was owed on the one and only master who had set himself in the

16—2

place of all the others. At the same time it suppressed the local military bodies, thanks to which the Tsar’s unruly vassals frequently made themselves more dangerous to him than to his foes ; it proclaimed the law of individual service, and over all the country its rule affected it estaWished a system of direct and indirect taxation levied for the benefit of the Treasury.

Swayed, too, by economic and financial considerations which I do not dream of denying, it most particularly sought to obtain possession of the towns along the great trade routes of the Empire, and to this change of system—this is worth observing—the traders affected were by no means opposed. The representatives of the English company craved admission to it as a favour. The Stroganovs followed the same course. The only roads between the capital aid the frontier which escaped the Opritchnina¹ s attention were those running south­ward, through Toula ar.d Riazan, and these were probably omitted because no apparent advantage was to be derived from their inclusion.

It is only with the greatest difficulty that any full inventory of the territories annexed by the Opritchnina has been drawn up, for documents precise enough to serve as a foundation for the calculation do not exist. It seems to have ended by comprising a great slice of the central and northern provinces, bailiwicks, and towns, and of the coast as well (pomorie), all the districts of the Zamoskovie (Moscow region), all the regions ‘ beyond the Oka,’ and two districts (piatiny) out of the five which constituted the province of Novgorod—those of Oboneje and Biejetsk. The Opritchnina, the northern boundaries of which thus rested on the ‘ great ocean-sea,’ as it was called in those days, cut comerwise into the territory handed aver to the old system, the Ziemchtchina (zihnia, land), as it was called, while it ran southward as far as the Oka, eastward towards Viatka, and westward up to the Lithu­anian-German frontier. The provinces of Perm, Viatka, and Riazan on the east, and the dependencies of Pskov and Nov­gorod, with the frontier towns, Vielikie-Louki, Smolensk, and Sieviersk, on the west, were net included in the new organiza­tion. Southwards the two zones of the Ziemchtchina were connected by the Ukraine and by wild steppes (dikoie pole).

In the centre of the country, as I have just said, the Opritch­nina only affected certain localities, and the bailiwicks, towns, and town quarters under its jurisdiction were mingled in un­imaginable and indescribable confusion with those of the Ziemchtchina. But of the important towns, the old system only kept Tver, Vladimir, and Kalouga, and it may be said.

generally speaking, to have been pushed back towards the far ends of the Empire. This was a reversal of the history of Rome, which assumed immediate, authority over her most distant provinces, so as to draw the steel-clad circle of her legions round the heart of the Empire.

Towards the year 1572, the Opritchnina lost its original name. It was then called the Court (dvor). At that moment it already possessed all the characteristics of a regularly constituted State organization, and in its working, indeed, it preserved all the administrative forms of the old system, so much so that it is not easy to discover, from any document of that period, which of the two branches thus wedded together has issued it. In principle the Opritchnina did not even sup­press the Miestnitchestvo: it simply forbade the application of that system within its own borders. Its action and that of the Ziemchtchina ran on parallel and concerted lines, and both possessed a common centre in the Offices of War and Finance. Diaks attached to these two branches of the Government overlooked the distribution of the business connected with each. It seems probable, at least, that affairs followed this course, for the coexistence and concerted labours of the two sets of officials are an established fact, which suffices to destroy the legend of an Opritchnina confined to the duties of a mere political police force. In 1570, authentic documents show us the Opritchnina and the Ziemchtchina summoned to deliberate, through their respective representatives—all of them boiars— on questions connected with the Lithuanian frontier. The discussions were held separately, but an agreement was reached. There is no trace, of any enmity or conflict. That very same year, and the next, detachments furnished by both organiza­tions went campaigning together against the Tartars, and perfect harmony appears to have reigned between them.

The solution of the problem confronting Ivan furnibhed by the Opritchnina was certainly not wholly satisfactory. What was needed was something which would have annulled the twofold contradiction which afflicted his whole Empire : a contradiction in politics arising out of the fact that the his­torical march of events had endued the Sovereign with an absolute power founded on a democratic basis, which he was obliged to exercise through an aristocracy; a social con­tradiction resulting from the fact that this same Sovereign, in his quest of fresh food for the growing ambitions of his Empire, and to insure it, was forced into making over his productive class, bound hand and foot, to the arbitrary will of his non­producers, his ‘ men who serve,’ his soldiers, and his tax collectors.

As far as the destruction of the aristocratic element is con-

cemed, the Opritchnina proved a failure. But it shook it sorely, and Ivan’s plan probably did not go beyond this result. Apart from the great and mighty lords it enrolled, and by enrolling disarmed them, only an elect few of the aristocratic class escaped, such as Prince Ivan Feodorovitch Mstislavski and Prince Ivan Dmitrievitch Bielski, both of them placed at the head of the Ziemchtchina—two inoffensive utility actors. It destroyed all the political importance of the class, and the effect of this was to be manifest, even after Ivan’s death, in the preponderating part played by parvenus created by him, such as Zakharine and Go'dounov. Others of his subjects, of yet humbler extraction, peasants, Cossacks, Tartars, recruited in increasing numbers to fill the gaps caused by his confiscations and wholesale executions, not to mention his transplantings, ended by forming a comparatively numerous body, and a powerful weapon for levelling and democratic purposes. ‘ My father’s boiars and my own have learnt to be traitors,’ wrote Ivan to Vassiouchka Griaznoi, ‘ so we have resolved to call on you, vile varlets, and from you w^re expect fidelity and truth !’ And Vassiouchka replied : ‘ You are like unto God ! You make a little m;in into a great man !’

This revolution—for a revolution it certainly was—could not be accomplished without some kind of struggle. Everywhere, in the lowest classes, where it broke bonds that were centuries old, in the towns and country places, into which it intro­duced strange elements, on the great landed properties which it divided up, calling a new agricultural and industrial proletariat into existence, it wounded innumerable feelings and interests. I have already shown how, by destroying the ancient administrative autonomy of the peasants, now made subject to their new proprietors in all those matters as to which they had hitherto dealt directly with the State, it contributed, indirectly, to the establishment of serfdom. It had a more immediate effect in quickening the current of emigration amongst the elements thus disaggregated, and hastening, through the increase of the calls made on them, the exhaustion of the resources dependent 011 those elements. From this point of view, Ivan’s undertaking is open to much blame, and his conflict with Poland was soon to demonstrate the weak side of a work in other respects useful, and no doubt even necessary.

Its execution was attended by excesses of various sorts, which cannot fail to attract severe judgment. This is the common law of all great crises of this kind, and few which have escaped it are known to history. But the historian cannot regard the Opritchnina from one point of view only, and he must allow for some undoubted exaggeration in all the various

reports of the violence which certainly soiled and jeopardized it at the time, and which in the eyes of posterity, has veiled and warped its real character and genuine aims. These reports, generally emanating from interested witnesses, like Kourbski, or deliberately hostile ones, such as most foreigners were, can­not be unquestioningly accepted. Means of verification are, unhappily, almost entirely non-existent. I will endeavour, however, to get as near the truth as possible, even if I fail to reach it altogether.

II.—The Terror.

Ivan had reserved himself the right of chastising certain of his boi'ars ; nobody could imagine he would relinquish it. Kourbski having escaped him, the Tsar fell on the fugitive’s accomplices, real or supposed. Under this accusation, Prince Alexander Borissovitch Choui'ski, with his young son Peter and several of his kinsmen, including two members of the Khovryne family—Prince Ivan Soukhoi Kachine, Prince Dmi⁺ri Chevirev, and others—were put to death. Other poor wretches—Prince Ivan Kourakine, and Prince Dmitri Niemogo—paid with their heads for misdeeds as to which we have no information. Sentences of banishment and confiscation followed, and it was not till the Terrible had thus satisfied his rage and begun his dreaded work that he consented to return to his captial. One chronicler tells us the inhabitants could hardly recognise their Sovereign ; his face was distorted, and he had lost all his hair. This feature may be noted as a premonitory symptom of what a lively imagination has been able to add to the realities of the drama, already sufficiently gloomy. As the Tsar, like all the men of his period, was in the habit of shaving his head, his sudden baldness can hardly have struck his observers, and soon, indeed, he was to give only too certain proofs of his health and strength.

My readers will recollect the episode of the Polish letters intercepted by Ivan. Some of the persons for whom these missives had been intended, and on whom suspicion now fell— old Ivan Petrovitch Tcheliadnine and his wife, Prince Ivan Kourakine-Boulgakov, three Princes Rostovski, and others— were whirled into the tempest, handed over to the executioner, tortured horribly, and put to death. Even the Church had her turn. Apart from the solidarity of interest which bound her to the victims of the new system, she here found a more pressing opportunity than ever for claiming that right of inter­cession which was her most precious privil ge and her noblest claim to glory. In the person of one of Macarius’s successors as Metropolitan of Moscow, she was to draw down the tliunder-

bolt on her own head. Macarius himself had already come forward, very cautiously, but not unmeritoriously, in favour of several of the attainted adherents of the Church. He had pleaded for Vorontsov, and probably for Sylvester himself. His immediate successor, a monk from the monastery of Tchoudov, Athanasius by name, was more timid, and remained an impassive spectator of the first violent episodes of the Opritchnina. Falling ill, he resigned his see, in 1566, to the Archbishop of Kazan, Herman, who only held it for a very short time. Ivan’s new favourites plotted his removal, and suggested a successor, the choice of whom would be quite inexplicable if, owing to the lack of any other information, we were to accept that reputation for savage brutality attributed to them.

Philip, abbot of the monastery of Solovki, a member of the illustrious Kolytchev family, who had been driven from Court by the disgrace into which his kinsfolk had fallen, and forced to become a monk, was noted for his great virtues and his re­markable powers of government : Ivan, it is said, had known and loved him in his youth. The metropolitan see was offered to him. He began by refusing to accept it unless the Opritch­nina was done away with. Finally he yielded, and gave a written undertaking not to interfere in politics, nor in the Tsar’s private life. This last, which was growing more and more ■'rregular and dissolute, was beginning to cause general dis­satisfaction. But at the same time, Ivan recognised the new pontiff’s right of intercession : ‘ Your duty is not to go against the Sovereign’s will, but to endeavour to turn his wrath aside.’ In the result, the Tsar soon began to avoid seeing the Metro­politan. But they lived too near each other. Even when he was at the Sloboda at Alexandrov, Ivan was obliged to pay occasional visits to his capital, and put in an appearance in the churches there. On such occasions, meetings were inevitable.

One Sunday—it was on May 31, 1568—the Tsar entered the Cathedral of the Assumption, attended by his Opritchniki dis­guised as monks, and asked, as usual, for the Metropolitan’s blessing. Philip held his peace. Three times Ivan returned to the charge, each time in vain. At last, when the boiars reproached him, the pontiff broke the silence, and before the astounded company a tragic dialogue between the two men ensued. In a long discourse Philip enumerated all the Sovereign’s crimes and all his debauchery, the monarch vainly striving to interrupt him.

‘ If the living souls were to hold their peace,’ said the priest, ‘ the very stones of this church would speak, and cry out against thee !’

‘ Hold thy peace !’ said the Tsar over and over again—

I that’s all I say to thee ! Hold thy peace, and give us thy "blessing !’

‘ My silence lays a sin upon thy soul, and calls, down thy death. . . .’

¹ Hold thy peace ! . . . My subjects, my kinsmen, rose against me, and plotted my ruin. . . . Rebel no more, along with them, or quit thy see !’

‘ I never asked to be put into this see. I used neither money nor intrigue to obtain it. Why didst thou call me from my hermitage ? . . .’

Ivan controlled himself, and even made as though he would return to a more humane state of mind. But the very next day he had Prince Vassili Pronski put to death with frightful torments, and in the following month of June, another dispute at the monastery of the Holy Virgin settled the Metro­politan’s fate. The Bishops of Novgorod, Souzdal, and Riazan lent themselves, like cowards, to a sham trial, in which Philip’s successor at the monastery of Solovki—Paisil—appeared as a hostile witness. Without waiting for sentence, and the moment he was summoned before this court, the Metropolitan attempted to resign his insignia of office. But Ivan stopped Lim.

‘ Wait,’ he said ; ‘ thou hast no right to judge thyself !’ And he ordered him to say Mass the next morning, j ust as usual. It was St. Michael’s Day. Meanwhile the sentence condemning the accused man to perpetual imprisonment in a monastery was to be pronounced, and the Tsar, faithful to his love of theatrical effect, was preparing a coup de theatre. When Mass began, the Opritchniki entered the cathedral, stripped the Metropolitan of his vestments, cast a tattered monk’s frock about him, threw him on to a sledge, and drove him off, sweeping up the ground behind him and beating him with their brooms. He was shut up at Tver, and thither, the next year, Ivan, then on his way to Novgorod, sent him the fiercest of his myrmidons, Maliouta-Skouratov. The Tsar actually dared to claim the prisoner’s blessing ! Some narratives assure us that Skouratov brought a violent scene to a close by strangling the ex-Metro­politan. But, according to other witnesses, he was taken to the Sloboda at Alexandrov, and there burnt alive. The corpse of the holy man, which was brought back to the monastery of Solovki after Ivan’s death, became an object of general venera­tion. In 1652, under the reign of Alexis, he was canonized, and his relics still attract crowds of faithful believers to that Cathedral of the Assumption in which his martyrdom began.

Ivan, more, and more resolved to strike hard and spare no­body, could not permit anyone to interpose between himself ar.d those he thought it necessary to remove out of his path. He was about to deliver blows just as terrible within his own

family. When, in his altercation with Philip, he spoke of the kinsfolk who had rebelled against him, he was thinking, no doubt, of his first cousin, Vladimir Andreievitch. As early as in 1563 he had suspected him of being concerned in a plot, publicly reprimanded him, and obliged him to break with all his associates, and even with his mother Euphrosyne, who had been forced to take the veil. In 1566, he deprived him of his appanage, and only gave him very poor compensation—two small towns, Dmitrov and Zvenigorod, to replace Staritsa ! In 1569, the unhappy Prince, who, according to a foreign chronicler, had offered to pass over into the King of Poland’s service, disappeared, either murdered or beheaded, or poisoned, with all his family, with a poison he himself was said to have prepared for the Tsar ! x\ll the witnesses on this subject dis­agree. Taube and Krause, who are responsible for the last version, declare Ivan was present at the death agony of the whole family, and diverted himself, when that was over, by the sight of all the womenservants of the household, who were stripped of their garments, driven naked through the streets, beaten with whips, and finally shot or cut down, and their corpses left to be devoured by birds of prey. This story must be received with caution. Vladimir’s eldest son was still alive in 1572, for Ivan mentions him in his will, which bears that date. As for Euphrosyne, Kourbski reports, and Ivan has not contradicted him, that, whether at that moment or later, she was taken out of her convent and drowned.

All these terrors are governed by a law of progression. The passions they excited and the sensations they dulled, united in a cry for constantly stronger and more startling effects. Vladimir may have given Ivan cause to suspect him of a certain guilty connivance with Poland. In the following year a whole town was to answer for a similar suspicion. A certain Peter, called Volyniets, who came from Volhvnia—a vagabond who had a crow to pick with the Novgorod authorities—denounced the inhabitants of that town, declaring they were inclined to go over to Sigismund-Augustus, and that a written agreement to that effect would be found behind the picture of the Blessed Virgin in the monastery of St. Sophia. In Russia, till far into the eighteenth century, such hiding-places remained in constant use. Peter Volyniets was an utter miscreant, but previous events gave some colour to his accusations. Novgorod, a free town, had already gravitated in the Lithuanian-Polish orbit, and, when her independence had been threatened, had placed herself, by a formal deed, under the protection of King Casimir, and that as his dependent. The document the informer had described was found in the place he had mentioned, and bore the signatures, apparently authentic, of the Archbishop,

Pimenius, and many important persons in the city. An inquiry, the papers connected with which are mentioned by Karamzine (‘ History of Russia,’ vol. ix., p. 299, note), brought out facts as to complicity, in which some of the Tsar’s new favouiites—Basmanov, Founikov, his Treasurer, and Visko- vatyi, his Chancellor—seemed to be involved. No less a thing had been contemplated than the giving over of Novgorod and Pskov to Lithuania, and the substitution, on the throne of Moscow, of Vladimir for Ivan, to be achieved with the help of Poland. The illustrious historian cannot really have studied the papers referred to. for all that remained of them in his day was a memorandum in the lists of the archives, and their dis­appearance must be taken for granted. Thus we find ourselves face to face with a fresh riddle. This time Ivan was to make fearful reprisals, exceeding everything of the sort that had ever been seen even at Moscow., and under his rule. That they were prompted by some motive, even if they were not fully justified, is more than likely. But to what extent ?

The Tsar had paid frequent visits to Novgorod, and his relations with the Archbishop and his clergy had hitherto been most excellent. Pimenius had just spent fifteen weeks at Moscow, and departed bearing a large sum of money given by the Sovereign to restore a church. The storm that broke over the town in J anuary, 1570, was therefore quite unexpected. At that inclement season of the year, Ivan started forth with his Opritchniki and a whole army corps, as if he were going forth to war. A military execution it was to be, indeed, and one before which the memories of the first Livonian campaign, hideous as they had been, were destined to pale. The punish­ment began on the frontier of the province of Tver, and in­volved the systematic destruction of the whole country. All along his road from Klin to Novgorod the Tsar left nothing but a desert behind him. On January 2, his outposts made their appearance under the walls of the town, and hemmed it in completely. The monasteries in the suburbs were sacked, and the monks, 500 of them, taken away- The next morning, when the Opritchniki entered the town, they carried off the priests and deacons from every church, and all these men, whether priests or monks, were sent to the pravieje. They were bastinadoed every morning and every night, and ordered to pay twenty roubles each. The records lead us to believe that some were so fortunate as to be able to pay the money, and thus obtain their freedom. A hideous fate awaited the rest. The Tsar’s myrmidons had meanwhile been busily engaged in emptying all the houses, and collecting the inhabitants within a military cordon. On January 6, a Friday, Ivan arrived, accompanied by his son and 1,500 Strieltsy, and his first order

was that every monk who remained in the pravieje was to be flogged to death. Then the corpses were to be taken back to the monasteries and buried there.

Now the secular clergy was to have its turn. On the Sunday, when the Tsar went to Mass, he was met on the bridge, accord­ing to custom, by the clergy, headed by the Archbishop, who, as usual, offered him his blessing. Ivan refused it, calling him a ‘ ravening wolf,’ but nevertheless commanded Pimenius to officiate as usual in the Church of St. Sophia. He was pre­paring him a course of treatment which was to be a repetition of the story of his dispute with Philip. According to custom, again, he accepted an invitation to dine at the Archbishop’s table. He seemed merry enough, and was eating with a hearty appetite, when a shrill cry was heard. At that signal the Opritchniki flew to perform the task assigned them beforehand. In a moment the Archbishop’s house was given over to pillage, and he himself stripped of his insignia and cast into prison with all his servants. During the days that followed, the terror attained colossal proportions. On the great square of the town, where, in a parody of judicial procedure, the usual apparatus of implements of torture was displayed, the Tsar proceeded to mete out summary justice. The townsfolk, led before him by 100 at a time, were put to the question, roasted over a slow fire by some new and, as it would appear, particularly ingenious process (podjar), and then condemned, for the most part, to death, and sent out to be drowned. Covered with blood, and gasping, they were bound on sledges, driven rapidly down a steep incline to a place where, owing to the great rapidity of the current, the river never freezes, and there cast into the abyss. The children were tied to their mothers, so that they might drown with them ; and Opritchniki armed with pikes, who moved about in boats on the surface of the river, took good care no victim should escape.

These massacres, according to the ‘ Third Chronicle of Novgorod,’ lasted five weeks, and the days on which the number of persons of both sexes who suffered did not exceed 500 or 600 were few and far between. On some the tale of victims reached 1,500. The ' First Chronicle of Pskov ’ reckons the total at 60,000. Th^se figures seem improbable. As to the general statistics of the executions ordered by Ivan, we possess a document left us by the monarch himself, and the information he supplies agrees, in many cases, with that supplied by Kourbski and the various chroniclers. My Russian readers will have guessed that I refer to the Sinodiki, a kind of obituary list the Sovereign was in the habit of sending to the monasteries, to request the monks’ prayers for the persons he himself had sent out of life into death. His

cruelty, like that of Louis IX., was always, even when it affected Churchmen, attended by pious scruples and devout practices. As regards Novgorod, the list preserved at the monastery of St. Cyril only contains 1,500 names; but another Sinodik, belonging to the monastery of the Blessed Saviour at Prilouki, proves that the names thus enshrined were those of the more prominent victims only. Guagnino and Oderbom speak, in the same category, of 2,770 persons as having been killed at Novgorod, without reckoning the humbler folk.

Be that as it may, the slaughter was immense and abomin­able, and when there were no more human beings for him to strike, Ivan turned his fury against inanimate things. As he had shown peculiar ferocity in his dealings with the monasteries, which he had taken to be the chief centre of the spirit of revolt, he strove, and for the same reason no doubt, to destroy the trade and industry of the great city. All the shops within the town, and the very dwelling-houses in the suburbs, the chief home of its commercial and industrial life, were first syste­matically stripped, and then razed to the ground, the Tsar personally superintending the process, while his Opritchniki scoured the whole of the neighbouring country within a radius of from 200 to 250 versts, if we may believe the chroniclers, and ravaged every place impartially.

At last, on January 13, 1570, when nothing was left him to destroy, Ivan commanded the chief of the townsmen who had been spared, so many for each street, to be brought into his presence. The poor wretches, already more dead than alive, were asking themselves what yet more hideous fate could be reserved for them. Contrary to all their expectations, the monarch, pacified, turned a gracious eye upon them, and made them a most friendly speech, advising them to cast off all fear, and five peaceful lives, praying God to preserve the Tsar and his Empire from all such tremors as Pimenius.

This was the Terrible’s farewell. That very day he departed; taking with him the Archbishop, and his priests and deacons, who, though they had not ransomed themselves from the pravieje, had not shared the monks’ cruel fate.

Novgorod drew a breath of relief; but the town had received a blow from which it was never to recover. Together with the flower of its inhabitants, the prosperity of the city had received its deathblow ; and even it Ivan had a thousand reasons for his pitiless treatment, he had carried it too far. But while we make some allowance for the inevitable exaggeration of every witness who deals with this gloomy episode, we must not fail likewise to remember similar events belonging to a not distant epoch of the history of Western Europe. Taking it all

in all, and if we only look, among ten similar scenes, at the story of the sacking of Liege by Charles the Bold in 1468—an opera­tion performed with the friendly help of his cousin of France— we shall perceive Ivan to have been nothing but a plagiarist. Turn to your Michelet : ¹ The horror of this destruction of a whole people lies in the fact that it was not a bloody assault, the rage and fury of a victorious foe, but a long-drawn execu­tion. The persons found in the houses were guarded, kept back, and then thrown into the Meuse in an orderly and methodical manner. Three months later the drownings were still going on. . . . The burning of the town was also con­ducted in the most orderly fashion ’ (Histuire de France, viii. 148). And Henri Martin, writing on lines supplied by Commines, Jean de Troyes, and Olivier de la Marche, says: ‘ Women, nuns, were violated, and then killed, priests’ throats were cut on the altar-steps. . . . All the prisoners the soldiers had spared were hung or drowned in the Meuse ’ (Histoire de France, vii. 44, etc.).

The copy follows the original in every particular, the number of victims, in this case, being reckoned at 50,000 and more. The very setting of the scene is the same ; the carnage in both cases took place in winter-time, in November and December.

From Novgorod, Ivan went on to Pskov. All through one night, while he was encamped in one of the suburbs of the town, the bells kept ringing. A dreary watch ! But the punish­ment was here confined to a general pillage ; and, in the popular mind, this unhoped-for clemency was attributed to the inter­vention of one of those visionaries who then swarmed all over the Muscovite Empire from one end to the other. This iouro- divyi, Nicholas Salos, took it upon himself to offer the Sovereign a slice of meat. ‘ Lent!’ cried Ivan. ‘ Lent!’ came the reply; ‘and thou art making thyself ready to devour human flesh ?’ It is more probable that the satiety which was the result of all his carnage, and the humble demeanour of the inhabitants, who had been well drilled by their voievode, dis­armed the monarch’s wrath. But at Pskov, even as at Nov­gorod, many families were removed, and taken away into the interior; and in this matter, too, Ivan was only following an illustrious example. ¹ Louis XI. swore there should be no more town of Arras—that all the dwellers in it should be driven out, without even taking their furniture with them, and that he would take families and craftsmen out of other provinces, even out of Languedoc, and bring them to repopulate the fortress.’ I quote Michelet once more (Histoire de France, viii. 322).

I should add that shortly afterwards, when Pskov was be­

sieged by the Poles, the townsfolk offered a most heroic resist­ance. Would they have stood so firm without their terrifying lesson in fidelity ? We may be permitted to doubt it. The two cities, whose forcible annexation to the Empire had dis­turbed their habits and damaged their interests, could hardly have been forced into the observance of their new duties by any incentive less strong than fear.

Going back to Moscow, Ivan treated himself to a triumphal entry, as if he had been returning from a successful campaign, and to an entertainment in the form of one of those mas­querading processions in which, at a later period, Peter the Great was to take so much delight. Preceded by one of his jesters, mounted on an ox, he was seen parading along at the head of his Opritchniki, and displaying, like them, the insignia of that dreaded confraternity—a broom and a dog’s head. This over, he applied himself to his preparations for trying the numerous accomplices of the crime he had just been punishing at Novgorod and Pskov. This occupation filled many months, and it was not till June 25, 1570, that the Tsar summoned his subjects to attend the execution of the culprits who had been declared guilty. There were three hundred of them, and all issued, mutilated and worn out, from the torture-chumbers which had already robbed them of everything but the faintest breath of life. To Ivan’s astonishment, the great square was empty. The instruments of torture that stood ready—the stoves, and red-hot pincers, and iron claws, and needles, the cords which were to rub human bodies into two halves, the great coppers full of boiling water—had failed to attract, this time. Whether at St. Petersburg or at Moscow, even down to the middle of the eighteenth century, no other sight could stir curiosity to such a point, and the audience was almost always very numerous. But there had been too much of this sort of thing lately, and the executioners were growing too long-armed. Everj.' man sought to hide deeper than his neighbour. The Tsar had to send reassuring messages all over the town. ‘ Come along! Don’t be afraid! Nobody will be hurt! . ..’ At last, out of cellars and garrets, the necessary spectators were tempted forth, and forthwith Ivan, inexhaustible and quite unabashedj began a lengthy speech. ‘ Could he do less than punish the traitors ? . . . But he had promised to be merciful, and he would keep bis word ! Out of the three hundred who had been sentenced, a hundred and eighty should have their lives !’

But to make up for it, those who were not spared were to pay for all the rest. Ivan the Terrible certainly was a perfect virtuoso in the art of inflicting suffering and causing death. Yet in this matter, too, he was only following an inclination

common to the men of his time, whose imagination was prob­ably inspired and excited in this direction by the very books of piety they read. In this respect some of these menologies, full of highly-coloured imagery—a curious specimen of which has been lately published under the name of St. Basil by the brothers Ouspienski (1902)—were singularly and cruelly sug­gestive. Guagnino dwells complacently on the tortures in­flicted, m the course of this hideous day, on Viskovatyi the Chancellor, who was hung up by his feet and cut into pieces like a butcher’s carcass ; and Founikov the Treasurer, who was sprinkled, turn about, with ice-cold and with boiling water, ‘ till his skin came off him like an eel’s.’

Before he went home to the new palace in which he was now living—the Kremlin had been given up to the Ziemchtchina— Ivan is said to have gone to Founikov’s house, and carried off the Treasurer’s wife, a young and beautiful woman, sister of Prince Athanasius Viaziemski. As she either could not or would not tell where her husband had hidden liis treasures, the Tsar had her stripped in the presence of her daughter, a girl of fifteen, set astride on a cord stretched between two walls, and dragged backwards and forwards from one end to the other. The unhappy woman was then thrown into a convent, where she soon died of the hideous treatment she had received. For some years her brother had been one of the Tsar’s con­fidential men, and the Sovereign would never take medicine from any other hand. He, too, was handed over to the execu­tioner. Basmanov, the prime favourite, met the same fate. He was killed by the Tsar’s order, and, according to some witnesses, by the hand of the heir to the throne, Feodor. Pimenius was taken to the Sloboda at Alexandrov, was the butt of the Opritchniki there for some time, and was finally sent into exile at Venev, in the province of Riazan.

Guagnino, an Italian and a Catholic, who collected the materials for his gossiping chronicle in Poland, is an altogether unreliable witness ; but Horsey, an Englishman, gives quite as hideous details of the executions he claims to have seen. He saw one man—Prince Boris Telepniev, whom he calls Telnupa— impaled, and lingering on the stake for fifteen hours, while his own mother was violated before his eyes by a hundred Stneltsy, until she died. But this same Horsey speaks of 700,000 men as having been massacred at Novgorod! I shall have something to sav, later, about these foreign witnesses whose testimony we are forced to turn to account, seeing we possess no other. Believing these people too easily, most historians have ended by admitting that Nero and Caligula were both surpassed at Moscow, and by supposing Ivan to have lived, at this period, in a state of mental disorder which, if it

did not actually reach madness, was very close to it. I have already explained my view as to this point. 1 will now add that the Tsar himself has left us the most conclusive informa­tion as to his state of mind at this time. I have referred to his will, dated 1571. This instrument must be recognised, without any contradiction, as the work of a man whose feelings had been deeply and painfully wounded but who had preserved all his faculties intact. No doubt his habitual striving after poetic effect, his inherent exaggeration of view, and of the manner in which he puts things forward, forbid our accepting what he says literally. But the very pains he takes and the artifices he employs exclude any idea ot madness, at that time, at least. He certainly bewails himself, makes his complaint, pleads his own cause, too cleverly for any madman. He feels himself unsteady on his throne, and the future of his family strikes him as being no better insured than his own present. He is an exile within his own Empire, waging a struggle, the end of which he cannot foresee, with most dangerous enemies. His strength is worn out, his mind sick. He bears wounds innumerable on his body and his heart, and not a soul has he found to heal them, nor sympathize with his sufferings ! His good has been returned with evil—for love he has been given hate! He admits, indeed, that his trials are the well- merited result of the Divine wrath, which has thus punished the many infractions of its law of which he has been guilty, and condemns him to live a wandering life, far from his capital, out of which ‘ his selfish bo'iars have driven him.’ His sons, more happy than himself, may succeed in weathering the storm. And >e desires, in the will he is now drawing up, to give them certain counsels to that end. Is he, then, making himself ready to die ? Not that exactly ! Death would be sweet to him indeed, and very welcome ; but even this benefit, he concludes, will be refused him for a time yet, by reason of his sins, which he must expiate by leading a miserable life. Is his mind wan­dering ? Not at all! For the advice he gives is excellent, full of the strongest and most luminous good sense, though still, it may be, marked by an excess of suspicion. Ivan is inclined to see enemies in every comer ; but when, while he warns his sons against the snares that will be set for them, he counsels them to inquire personally into every business, and never to depend on others with regard to anything, unless they wish those others to obtain the real power and leave them nothing but its shadow, it is a master in the art of government who speaks, and no madman ! (This will was published in the ‘ Historical Documents,’ Supplement, i. 222.)

And here is another and a still more conclusive proof of the complete lucidity, and, further, of the extraordinary versatility

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of mind, preserved by this man at a moment when the strongest of mental temperaments might very well have betrayed some symptoms, however fleeting, of weakness and confusion. On the very morrow of the Moscow executions, which had followed on those at Novgorod—hideous scenes, all of them, however exaggerated we must suppose the accounts of them to have been—we behold him accepting, even provoking, and prose­cuting, untiringly and without any visible difficulty, a theo­logical discussion such as might well have disconcerted a layman like himself at any time.

It was at this moment that his famous public conversation with John Rokita, a member of the Confraternity of the Bohe­mian and Moravian Brothers, took place.

At that time Protestants enjoyed a comparatively privi­leged position in Russia. They were looked on as allies against the Latinism every Russian loathed. Lutherans and Calvinists alike had obtained permission to build churches in the capital, and Ivan bestowed the most gracious welcome on the English and German representatives of the Reform who came to his Court either as visitors, or to enter his service. He was even fond of listening to Magnus’ chaplain, Christian Bockhorn, and went so far as to speak highly of his teachings. If, he said, Luther, when he attacked the Papacy, had not also attacked the ancient ecclesiastical hierarchy, and soiled his interpretation of Scripture by a shameful renunciation of the monastic rule and habit, his doctrine would have been exceedingly acceptable. And, indeed, Bockhorn and his co-religionists—all of them taken up with their careers and their trade—did not push the advan­tage they had thus acquired over far. Missenheim’s apostulute seems to have been quite an isolated instance, and one of the Danish missionary’s disciples, Gaspard Eberfeld, said to have made an attempt to convert the Tsar, would appear to be one and the same person with a certain Gaspard von Wittemberg who himself, if we arq to believe Oderborn, became a convert to the Orthodox faith, and the determined detractor of his former religion. In the provinces bordering on Sweden and Livonia a certain current of Protestant missionary feeling was tolerated for political reasons. Elsewhere, this tolerance was the mere outcome of the scornful indifference of the general mind.

Quite as an exception, Rokita, who had gone to Moscow with an embassy from the King of Poland, attempted to follow in the footsteps of Missenheim. This reformer, a Tchek by birth, was considered one of the most active members of the com­munity of Bohemian Brothers established in Sigismund’s dominions, and his correspondence goes to prove him to have been charged with a mission on which he and his party had

founded somewhat ambitious hopes. The embassy, which arrived in February, 1570, just at the tragic moment when Ivan was engaged in the manner we have been describing, was forced to wait the Tsar’s return, until the 4th of the following May. On the 7th, the envoys were given their audience, and three days later, Rokita had been invited to speak in public, and Ivan had himself undertaken to reply.

The controversy took place at the Kremlin, in the presence of a numerous audience, ecclesiastical and lay, and it then became evident that the only result of the Sovereign’s amicable conversations with Bockhom and other representatives of the Reform party had been to supply him with weapons against them. Ivan spoke first, and his vigorous attack on the funda­mental principles of the new doctrine and its application proved his knowledge of the subject to be deep, though his views, as usual in his case, were not unmixed with passion, and even with strong language. ‘ To judge by their actions, the disciples of the evangelical faith were nothing but pigs !’ After such a preamble, thp discussion might have been expected to take an unpleasant turn. Nothing of the kind occurred. Ivan, who had promised not to interrupt his adversary, kept his word. But in vain did Rokita, speaking in the Slav tongue, answer in the most moderate and supremely skilful fashion, deliber­ately confining his indictment to the weaknesses of the Roman Church. The Tsar heard him patiently, praised his eloquence, expressed a wish to see his speech written down, and announced his own intention of replying in the same way. A few weeks later, on taking leave of his foreign guest, he caused the said reply to be handed to him, richly bound, and there the matter ended.

A perusal of this reply—the original text has lately been discovered and published—was sufficient to convince Rokita he had been wasting his time. From the literary point of view, indeed, the rejoinder does the monarch no par­ticular honour. In the taste of that period, Ivan plays, point­lessly enough, on the word Luther, which he calls lioutyi (cruel, in Russian), just as Miintzer, in Germany, had called the Reformer luegncr (liar) ; and he does not shrink from applying other injurious titles to Rokita himself and his co-rcligionists. The document is not distinguished either by clearness of thought, solidity of reasoning, or logic. But to atone for this, the fulness of knowledge, sure memory, quickness of mind, and dialectic power therein displayed prove the Sovereign to have been in full possession of his well-known powers. His tricks of expression—we can hardly call them his style—are the same as in his altercation with Kourbski. ‘ You invoke the prophets ? Well, we will bring you face to face with

17—2

Moses.’ ... It is the production of a self-taught man and a strong one, who has received no systematic education, and does not possess a glimmer of artistic feeling; hut it is by no means devoid of intelligence and thinking power.

In the obscure history of the 0pritchnina another episode occurs—one less easily reconciled, apparently, with that cer­tainty as to Ivan’s mental health which may be deduced from the facts I have just been describing. This is the most enig­matic point in the drama, and we must pause to consider it. In 1574 or 1575—the date itself is not quite clear—while Ivan was still in life, Russia had a new Tsar.

III.—The Tsar Simeon.

The Sovereign had confidcd the headship of the Ziemchtchina to Mstislavski and Bielski. In 1571, the first-named nobleman acknowledged himself guilty cf a criminal understanding with the Tartars. He was pardoned, thanks to the intercession of the Metropolitan, Cyril; three prominent boiars went surety for him, and these again found 285 guarantors for the then enormous sum of 20,000 roubles. But within a few years Mstislavski was obliged to confess to another misdeed of the same nature, in which two of his sons were also involved. Once more he escaped death, but a number of executions, which took place in 1574, and as to which a chronicler reports that the victims’ heads were ordered to be ‘ thrown down in front of Mstislavski’s windows,’ seem to have been caused by this fresh act of treachery. Meanwhile, a Tsarevitch of Kazan, established as Tsar of Kassimov, under the name of Simeon Bekboulatovitch, was proclaimed ‘Tsar of all the Russias,’ while the real Tsar, putting off all his titles, and renouncing all the honours due to his rank, had himself called plain ‘ Ivan of Moscow,’ and took liis way, in the most modest style, ‘ on litters,’ like the humblest boi'ar in his Empire, to pay his court to the new Sovereign.

What was the meaning of this comedy ?

It was part of the practice of the Muscovite system of policy to assign the ancient Tartar Sovereigns new establishments and territories, within which they kept the title of Tsar, and over which they exercised a shadowy sovereignty. By this means Russia succeeded in attaching turbulent Princes to her own side, she avoided difficult dealings with the easily offended hierarchy of the ‘ men who serve,’ and the consideration thus shown to the Moslem world was a useful argument in her intercourse with the Crimean Khans. Another Tsarevitch of Kazan— Ka'iboul—was reigning on the same terms at Iouriev (I)erpt), and the former Tsar of Astrakan, Derbych-Ali, was at Zxeni-

gorod. Simeon Bekboulatovitch would probably have ended his days at Kassimov, if his conversion to Christianity and his marriage with this same Mstislavski’s daughter had not made his continuance in that tsarate a matter of impossibility. The majority of the population was Mahometan, and claimed that • its ruler should profess the same faith. But there was no room at Moscow for a Tartar Tsar, even a dethroned one. Ivan cut the difficulty short by giving up his throne and his title to Mstislavski’s son-in-law. How ? Why ? It is a mystery! The one thing we are quite sure of is the fact. From 1575 onward we possess a great number of documents in which Simeon Bek­boulatovitch officially assumes the title of ‘ Tsar of all the Russias,’ and others show us Ivan lavishing marks of the deepest respect on this counterpart of himself, addressing petitions to him, like any of his subjects, and leaving his own carriage when he approaches the precincts of the palace he has given up to the new master. Simeon would even appear to have been crowned, although Ivan, after having admitted the fact in one of his conversations with the English agent, Daniel Sylvester, attempted, later, to withdraw his acknowledgment.

‘ There was nothing final about that,’ he then remarked, and exhibited seven crowns and other insignia of sovereignty which he still preserved. None the less, one of his eight crowns had been set on Simeon’s head.

This comedy was carried on till 1576, and we need hardly say that never for one instant, during that space of time, did the son of Vassili contemplate ceding anything more than the semblance of sovereignty to his substitute. This period, as my readers will remember, was that of the negotiations as to the succession to the Polish throne ; in these negotiations Simeon Bekboulato­vitch was never mentioned. In 1576, when the Emperor’s envoys, Cobenzl and Printz von Buchau, arrived, Ivan behaved as if the new Tsar had not existed, and shortly afterwards he dismissed him, having enriched him with the Duchy of Tver, which, as my readers may know, had lately been laid waste, was now reduced to the two towns of Tver andTorjok, with their dependencies, and was only thankful to recover its autonomy to some extent. Here Simeon was very far from likening himself to an independent Sovereign, after the fashion of the old appanaged Dukes. His letters to Ivan are signed ‘ your slave ’ (kholof). He commanded an army corps during the Livonian campaigns and the Polish wars, cut rather a poor figure, and only outlived Ivan to experience cruel changes of fortune under his successors. Stripped of his duchy by Feodor, deprived of his sight by Boris Godounov, who looked on him as a possible rival, he ended his existence in 1611, at the monastery of Solovki, or.' according to other

witnesses, at Moscow, whither he had been recalled by Michael Feodorovitch in 1616.

But why was the farce played ?

Horsey has ascribed it to financial reasons. Ivan, he thinks, devised this expedient to bring about a sort of bankruptcy, by casting certain engagements he himself was unable to meet on Simeon. Fletcher has referred, in a similar sense, to a general confiscation of ecclesiastical properties to which Simeon is said to have proceeded, and after which Ivan, taking up the reins of power once more, hastened to reinstate the churches and monasteries in possession of their wealth, retaining a portion, however, and exacting a heavy sum of money in return for the favour of his restoration of the rest. But, according to the same authority, the Tsar’s object was to combat the existing evil opinion of his government by the substitution of something worse !

These are mere fanciful conjectures, partly contradicted by the facts. Simeon, indeed, never ruled Russia, either well or ill. He never ruled at all. He probably replaced Mstislavski and Bielski at the head of the Ziemchtchina, and Ivan, when he adorned him with the title of which he pretended to strip himself, may have endeavoured to make this selection more generally acceptable. But some other secret motives may also have existed, as, for instance, the idea of imparting a semblance of reality to the exile which, as he declared, his ‘ selfish boiars ’ had forced upon him, and of thus better justifying his own anger and the punishment he inflicted. And, further, let my readers think of Peter the Great, who withdrew to his little wooden house and left all the cares and show connected with his official position to Menschikov in his palace hard by, and who, the day after Poltava, handed in his ‘ colonel’s ’ report to Romodanovski, set upon a throne and dressed up to represent Caesar. The generally accepted opinion is that the great man desired thus to give his subjects a striking example of the obedience due to the universal law of service. Now, was not Ivan the first to impose this law ? And this fashion of enduing the Sovereign with two person­alities, in a way, by subjecting him to the general rule of dis­cipline, was not unexampled, even in Western countries. Look at Louis XV. on the eve of Fontenoy. Of course, the similarity between the young King who placed himself under the orders of his own General, and the improbable mas­querade in 'which it pleased Ivan to figure with his Tartar Prince, is not quite absolute, and in any other country such a game, carried to so extreme a point, would have been too risky, whatever the secret intention that inspired it. But the ancestor of Peter the Great seems to have been predestined to

take the measure of the absolute power, as it were, and try it on a people to whom years of tyranny, foreign and domestic, had taught an endless patience and a boundless resignation.

And this farce, as some persons have supposed, may have been connected with the negotiations Ivan was then carrying on with England. As I shall soon have to show, the Terrible, in his great desire for an alliance with Elizabeth, was ready to cross the seas if so he might insure it. At certain moments he seems to have thought of asking the Queen to grant him temporary shelter as well. For the interim government which would then have become a necessity, Simeon’s person­ality offered a valuable guarantee. Ivan would not have run any risk of finding his place permanently filled when he re­turned. The Tsar was a nobody : he had no connections, and nobody cared for him. In 1576, when Ivan’s hopes as to Elizabeth faded and the arrival of Maximilian’s envoys calmed his anxieties, he probably came to the conclusion that the farce had lasted long enough.

On the throne, Simeon had been nothing but a puppet. As the chief of an administration, he had no time to prove his capacity, and, indeed, the documents in which his name appears only refer to matters of quite secondary importance. Once he departed, things seem to have returned to their ordinary course, except that during the eight years of the reign sub­sequent to this episode there were only occasional repetitions, at more and more distant intervals, of the Tsar’s bloody chas­tisements. Did the Opritchnina outlive the farce ? We know not. The Terror had spoken its last word.

But the last word of history concerning the Opritchnina has not yet been spoken, and the duty of reviewing the testimonies and opinions connected with this confused and confusing chapter of a dim past still lies before me.

IV.—The Opritchnina at the Bar of History.

Though Soloviov adopted Karamzine’s general point of view, he made an attempt to discover some political meaning in the series of events which his fellow-historian had taken to be nothing but a succession of horrors and acts of insanity. In the closing pages of the sixth volume of his ‘ History of Russia,’ at all events, the leader of the Opritchnina appears under the guise of a reformer. Kaveline (‘ Works,’ i., ‘ Sketch of the Judicial Conditions of Ancient Russia’) made the same en­deavour. But Pogodine (‘ Fragmentary Studies, Historical and Critical,’ Moscow, 1846), George Samarine (‘ Works.’ v. 203), and even C. Akssakov himself (• Works,’ i.), though in more measured fashion, have followed Karamzine’s lead, and

represented the Opritchnina as the work of a capricious despot, the Neronian fancy of an artist in crime. When, at a more recent period, Bestoujev-Rioumine followed Soloviov’s lead in the second volume of his ‘ History of Russia,’ he fell under the bitter criticism of Kostomarov (Messager de VEurope, 1871, No. 10) and Ilovai'ski (‘ Russian Archives,’ i88g, p. 363), both of them strong supporters of Karamzine’s view. Even in Kourbski’s business, the last-named critic only perceived a consequence, not a cause, of Ivan’s sanguinary excesses, and far less an excuse for them.

These verdicts, pronounced at various times, and all of them too sweepingly severe, have evoked a reaction, which, being excessive, as most reactions are, has swept the authors affected by it into attempts at apology not less sweeping, and by no means easy to accept. Bielov, in a study published in the Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, (1886), has drawn his inspiration from an argument lately much in vogue among German theorists on political law. He has asserted that the Novgorod butcheries were justified, objectively, by a certain general excitement of men’s minds, and that Philip’s martyrdom was rendered legitimate by that prelate’s inter­ference in political matters. This road, once entered on, may lead the traveller far, and one of Kourbski’s biographers, Gorski (Kazan, 1858), has gone the length of supporting the pronouncing of sentence on Sylvester and Adachev without hearing the accused persons’ plea—‘ They certainly would hot have confessed their misdeeds !’ With regard to that Prince I’ronski whose execution I have already mentioned— he was drowned, according to Kourbski’s report, and cut in pieces, according to Taube and Kruse—Gorski draws the follow­ing conclusion : that he died in his bed ! Concerning Leonidas, Archbishop of Novgorod, he has to admit that he was thrown to the dogs after having been sewn up in a bearskin. But as he was guilty, Ivan only acted ‘ in conformity w'ith fair justice.’ These inversions of judgment and failures of moral conscious­ness are sad to witness. The Terrible’s apologists and his detractors would have spared them us, no doubt, if they had made a really objective study of the great subject, sub­mitted all its elements to a more exact process of analysis, and more thoroughly realized the historical conditions of the phenomenon under discussion.

They would have noted, in the first place, that even Ivan’s foreign contemporaries were far from regarding him indiscriminately as a monster of cruelty, or even as a merely cruel Prince. I do not. here refer to the friendly testimony brought by Forsten (‘The Baltic Question,’ i. 467) from Lubeck—accommodating witnesses, indeed, if such there ever

were—which lauds Ivan’s humanity and guarantees his good intentions as to the reunion of the two Churches! This was a mere matter of trade, and when Lippoman, who was Venetian envoy in 1775, converted Ivan into a righteous judge {Hist. Rtissice Monumenta,’ i. 271), he was probably inspired by similar considerations. B’it the Polish electors of 1572 and ^I575> ^wh° were so ready to welcome the Tsar’s candidature, furnish us with a far more valuable guarantee !

As a rule, the chroniclers and foreign historians of that period have drawn a terrifying and repulsive picture of the Opritchnina and its founder. But ought we to grant full belief to the stories of Taube and Kruse, who, describing the Novgorod massacres, which they claim to have wit­nessed, place that town on the banks of the Volga ? Hen­ning, a Livonian chronicler, tells us of a baby taken out of its cradle by the Opritchniki and carried by them to Ivan, who began by kissing and caressing it, and then cut its throat with his dagger and threw the little corpse out of the window! It is a hideous tale, but Henning had it from Magnus, and from the Palatine of Vilna, Radizwill, both of them very poor authorities. Oderbom (Jnannis Basilidis vita, Vitebsk, 1585, reproduced by Sartchevski, ii. 228) has accused the Terrible of yet more frightful acts of cruelty, with a tincture of the unnatural about them. He talks of women tom from their homes to gratify the passions of the Sovereign and his minions, then murdered, and their corpses brought back to their husbands’ houses, where, for whole weeks, they were hung over the dining-room tables, at which the widowers were forced to eat their food ; others, matrons and maids, met by chance in town or country, were first \iolated, and then stripped naked in the bitter cold and exposed on the snow to the eyes and insults of the passers by. Oderbom was a Protestant pastor whose work was composed and printed on Polish soil, at a moment when the reformed religion had lost the privileges it had once possessed in Russia, and when Poland, fitting every arrow to her bow, by no means scorned a well-informed and skilfully-handled Press as an instrument towards that con­quest of Muscovy for which she was preparing. The work of Guagnino, no less strong in its leanings, had figured, a few years previously, amongst Batory’s munitions of war.

But as to Oderbom’s book we have a criterion which may be applied to all such writings. The Pomeranian historian has devoted one of his most truculent pages to a description of the sacking and carnage which—either in 1578 or in 1580 - put an end to the prosperity of the German suburb of Moscow. Young girls, we are told, were violated and then put to death under the very eyes of the Tsar, who took his share in the

massacre, thrusting the victims through with his hunting- spear and throwing them into the river. The Sovereign’s two sons, summoned to witness the sight, were so sickened by it that the youngest braved his father’s wrath and took to flight. Not a detail is lacking. Some rich merchants offered a ransom for their children. When Ivan refused it they up­braided him, and the Tsar, mad with rage, inflicted the most hideous tortures on the unhappy German women. They were flogged till the blood came, their nails were torn out, and when, even in the midst of their tortures, they continued to pray and call on the name of Jesus, their tongues were torn out too. At last they were killed with lance-heads, heated white- hot and thrust into their bodies, and their corpses were burnt. Other narratives of this same episode have come down to us. That of Horsey may possibly apply to some other scene of the same sort, for at the date given by Oderbom (1578) the English writer was not in Russia. But it seems unlikely that the suburb can have been destroyed twice over, and a French author, Margeret, like the Englishman, gives the date of the incident as 1580. Now, as to the horror and odiousness of the details given, these two last versions do not approach that of Oderborn. Margeret only mentions the destruction of two Protestant churches and the pillage of the German dwell­ing-houses, while all their inhabitants, ‘ without respect for age or sex,’ and regardless of the winter season, were stripped ‘ as naked as children just out of their mothers’ wombs.’ Horsey speaks of women and young girls violated on the spot or carried off by the Opritchniki, some of whom sought refuge, after they had been stripped of their clothing, in the house of one of his fellow-countrymen. Margeret, indeed, does not dream of pitying the victims. ‘ They could not lay the blame of this on anyone but themselves, for, forgetting all their past sufferings, their behaviour had been so arrogant, their ways so haughty, and their dress so sumptuous, that they might all have been taken for princes and princesses.’ The inhabitants of the suburb drew their wealth from the sale of strong drinks; they had levied excessive profits in their trade, and thus abused their monopoly.

But the most authoritative witness of all has yet to be summoned. In a Latin pamphlet, entitled Psalmorum Dovidis Parodia Heroica, a native of Lubeck, bearing the name of Boch or Bochius, has inserted notes relative to a stay he made at Moscow in the year 1578. His presence there may have been connected with the negotiations then pending between Rome and Moscow. He was on the spot, in any case, when the events related by Oderborn took place; he bore his share in them, and, seeing he himself was a sufferer by them.

he cannot be accused of favouring Ivan. He had been hos­pitably received by a countryman of his own who lived in a house near the suburb. One day, when everybody was at dinner, the quarter was invaded by a troop of warriors, all dressed in black. They were headed by the Tsar, with his son and several important men. In a moment every house was being sacked and the inhabitants turned out oi doors, stripped of their clothing. Men, women, and children, all stark naked, fled to seek shelter from the bitter cold.

The order was that the houses were to be sacked, but that nobody was to be hurt, yet they were pursued and struck without mercy. Several men dealt BocL blows in the face with their lists, and he was whipped all over his body and quite disfigured. He had been stripped of his clothes like the rest, was dragged out of the hiding-place he had found, flogged several times over in the course of the night, and tormented in every kind of way, till, when the day broke, a Livonian nobleman interfered, took him out of his tor­turers' hands, and got a surgeon to attend to him.

The scene thus described is revolting enough, but my readers will perceive a difference. There are no violations of women, no massacres; all we have is a police operation rather roughly carried out, after the fashion of those times. Boch asserts it to have been caused by the Metropolitan, who had declared the foreigners were debauching the Tsar’s soldiery in their drinking-shops. Oderbom and Horsey have evidently embroidered on a web which stood in no need of any such over- omamentation, and taking them thus in the very act of in­venting their slanders, we attain a certainty as to the truth­fulness of other testimony of similar origin.

Summary and violent, excessive and extravagant, was the chastisement administered by Ivan the Terrible, and we can­not justify it. The Sinndik of the Monastery of St. Cyril alone enumerates 3,470 of the Tsar’s victims, and many names are followed by the words, which make one shiver : ‘ With his wife ‘ with his wife and children ’; ‘ with his daughters ’; ‘ with his sons.’ We find, too, such sentences as these : ‘ Kazarine Doubrovski and his two sons, with ten men who had come to his help ’; ‘ twenty men belonging to the village of Kolomenskoie ’; ‘ eighty belonging to Mat- vieiche. . . .’ And under the head of Novgorod we read : ‘ Remember, Lord, the souls of Thy servants, inhabitants of this town, to the number of fifteen hundred and five persons’! Thus did Louis XI. pray for his brother, the Due de Berry !

In other documents Ivan leaves the exact number of souls to the Divine knowledge, and simply recommends ‘ the dead,

men, women, and children, whose names are known to God,’ to His mercy. In the obituary lists at the monastery of Sviajsk we find the names of ‘ the Princess-nun Eudoxia, the nun Maria, and the nun Alexandra,’ all three of them drowned in the Cheksna, which flowed into the White Lake (Bielooziero). Princess Eudoxia was Ivan’s ‘ Welsh aunt,’ Alexandra had been betrothed to him, and Maria was one of Vladimir’s sisters. The Terrible did not spare his own kinsfolk, and if any caprice or calculation moved him to spare a particular individual, he struck at those nearest to him. ‘ Why should I wreak my vengeance on a monk ?’ he wrote, of Cheremetiev, to the abbot of the Monastery of St. Cyril. ‘ Have I not all his relations under my hand ?’

The Opritchnina was all this—or all this, at all events, was part of the Opritchnina. But according to one of the King of Poland’s agents (Schlichting, Scrifttores rer. poL, i. 145-147), Ivan could not have maintained himself upon the throne unless he had employed these terrorizing methods. When he struck Ivan Petrovitch Chouiski—with a dagger-thrust dealt, so Schlichting asserts, by his own hand—the Tsar had a docu­ment in his possession according to which this boiar, with many others, undertook to give his master’s person up to the K.ng of Poland as soon as that monarch had set his foot within the Muscovite borders. Some people have denied the exist­ence of any struggle between the Tsar and the defenders of the old system. But if the preparation of such attempts does not constitute a struggle, there is no meaning in words ! The struggle—a fierce and obstinate one—was carried to extremes by both parties : all feeling of duty and honour was forgotten on one side, all pity on the other.

Yet all the eagerness and violence of the fray did not eradi­cate that resignation to accomplished facts and submission to superior strength which are an unalterable feature in the national character. When Prince Sougorski, whom Ivan had despatched to the Emperor Maximilian, was stopped on his way by a serious illness, he bewailed himself : ‘ If only I was able to get up ! My life is nothing so long as the Tsar is well.. . .’ ‘ How can you show so much zeal for so great a tyrant ?’ inquired the Duke of Courland. And Sougorski answered : ■■ We Russians are devoted to our Sovereigns whether they are cruel or kind.’ And he added, to prove the fact, that a boiar who had been impaled by the Tsar’s orders some time previously, for some comparatively trifling fault, had endured his hideous torments for four and twenty hours, and never ceased talking to his wife and children, constantly repeating, ' Great God, protect the Tsar !’ This fact is chronicled by Karamzine (ix., chap. iv.).

Ivan’s foes aimed at his heart in front and struck at him from behind, and he did not always content himself with giving back blow for blow. Even in the popular poetry, which treats him with so much indulgence, the feeling that the Tsar, ‘ after he had punished for injustice and rewarded for justice,’ grew more cruel, and ceased to assign favour and chastisement in propor­tion to the faults and virtues with which he had to deal, becomes evident (Kirieievski, ‘ Collection of Songs,’ Moscow, 1860-1862, part vi., p. 2015). But Ivan, hovering like a spectre over a heap of corpses against a red background of aurora borealis, is no isolated phenomenon, either in his country or his century. In his own country, even as the renewer of the methods of Nineveh and Babylon, the brutal proscriber of whole popula­tions dragged from Novgorod to Moscow, or from Pskov to Riazan, he was only carrying on a tradition. Vassili, before him, had done the same thing with hundreds of families— taken them out of the same provinces, sent them into the in­terior of the country, and filled their places with others brought from the basin of the Volga. Thirty years before the Opritch- nina came into existence, Maximus the Greek speaks of imaginary crimes imputed to innocent persons, and visited on them. When the Tsar’s agents wanted a culprit they intro­duced a corpse or a stolen object into the house indicated, and the justice of the Sovereign took its course.

Ivan, in the course of his own century, had examples and imitators in a score of European countries, and the opinion of his time was his accomplice. Look at Italy. Read Chaplain Burckhard’s notes, written in cold blood as he sat between Alexander VI. and the Borgias ; or the ironic, easy-going despatches of Giustiniani, the Venetian Ambassador ; or the cynical memoirs of such a man as Cellini. Make your way to Ferrara, the most refined Court of the period: you may happen on CarcPnai Hyppolite d’Este, his own brother Giulio’s rival in a love affair, having that brother’s eyes tom out in his own presence. Look through the records of the giustizie of that time, and you will find the horrors of the Red Square equalled, if not surpassed—men burnt and hanged at the same moment, bleeding limbs crushed betwixt two pulleys. . . . All these things were done in broad daylight, and nobody was surprised, nobody was horrified, nobody rose up in indignation against them.

Now go to the other end of the continent—to Sweden. Eric XIV.—a great King till madness overtook him —awaits you there, with a Maliouta-Skouratov of his own, Persson, his favourite, both of them just out of the famous bath of blood of the year 1520—ninety-four bishops, senators, and patricians, all executed at Stockholm in one day. Next, John III. appears.

Persson has gone too far, wherefore, on the new King’s com­mand, he is first of all hung, but so as not to strangle him completely, then his arms and legs are broken, and, as lie still continues to breathe, his chest is riddled with knife-thrusts. You must not overlook the Low'Countries. The sacking of Liege, which I have already mentioned, took place a century earner, I know ; but was not Ivan taking lessons in civilization from Europe ? Even at that distance he may well have drawn his inspiration from the lord of Hagenbach, that Governor of Alsace after the style of Charles the Bold, whose exploits are already known to you. He may, perhaps, have heard the story of the celebrated entertainment at which, by the Governor’s order, each male guest was expected to recognise the person of his own wife, every lady having previously been stripped perfectly naked, except for the veil which hid her face. Those who made mistakes were thrown from the top of the staircase. But I might just as well have evoked the memory of the capitu­lation of lions, violated in 1572 by Alva’s lieutenant, Noir- carmes, and followed by eleven months of bloody excess, in the course of which the 20,000 citizens of Haarlem were all put to the sword by the Duke in person, while Philip II., in an official letter, offered a reward to anybody who would murder William of Orange ! And, seeing we are on Spanish ground, you will not forget the Inquisition and the forty Pro­testants burnt alive at Valladolid on March 12, 1559. Then, if you leave the hot cinders of the auto-da-fe and pass over into France, your foot will slip in the blood of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Cross the sea, and you come on Henry VIII., the dungeons of Charterhouse and Sion, the gibbets of Tyburn and Newgate ; the head of Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, rots in the pillory on London Bridge, and behold the gay sight presented by the King, all dressed in white silk, leading Jane Seymour to the altar on the very morrow of the day which has seen Anne Boleyn’s head frdl at his command !

On the scene of history whereon it thus performs, the spectre becomes a living body, and, due allowance being made for distances and for difference of culture, its flesh and blood do not appear far removed from those of the Christian, civilized, European world of the period.

I have spoken of a moral complicity. If Europe’s has been proved, that of Russia is 110 less certain. .Kourbski, who gave the tone to the Tsar’s detractors, was a party to this suit ; and he represented a refractory minority. The Russian masses expressed their feelings in their popular poetry, and the sense of that is already known to my readers. The Russian people not only submitted to Ivan—it admired, applauded, loved him. Of all the crowd of comrades about him, it has retained tw^ro

names and two faces only : one of these figures is that of a parvenu, the other that of an executioner—Nikita Romano- vitch Zakharine and Maliouta-Skouratov. Of the first-named history knows but little. He was the Tsarina Anastasia’s brother, and, like a certain witness of the French Terror in the eighteenth century, he was a man of breeding. The legend has turned him into a hero. It shows him refusing the Tsar’s favours, and content to beg new laws, ‘ more tender to the people,’ for the lands he already holds. But the popular pre­ference is given to Maliouta-Skouratov, the legendary bully of P-ince and bo'iar alike.

This democratic instinct, so strongly marked in every per­sonification of the popular idea, explains the secret of the Opritchnina and its original conception, and also of the com­parative facility with which Ivan was able to force it on certain persons, and induce a still larger number to accept it. The scenes evoked by the popular muse, which show us peasants and boiars set face to face, always assign the shabby part to the bolars. They are either rogues or fools. If the story concerns a riddle which the Sovereign has to guess, and on which his fate depends, it is a peasant who supplies the solution, after all the great lords called into council have failed to find it. One legend, indeed, asserts the Tsar to be descended from a humble stock, and attributes an equally modest origin to his power. A certain Tsar having died, his late subjects all betake them­selves to the river bank, bearing lighted torches, which they plunge into the water. The first who can relight his torch is to have the crown. ‘ Let us go to the river,’ says a barine to Ivan ; ‘ if I become Tsar, I’ll set thee free !’ ‘ Come, then,’ Ivan replies ; I if I am made Tsar, I’ll have thy head cut off!’ He wins the crown, and keeps his word.

Herein lies the whole philosophy of the populace. It seems to have forgotten all about Ivan’s wars, and all it remembers of the administrative reforms simultaneously effected is their levelling action.

‘All the masters and princes,

I will flay them alive. . . .’

sings the Tsar Groznyz, Ivan Vassilovitch.

Or, again :

‘ I will have you rooked, every one,

Bolars and princes, in a caldron

The Groznyiis a pious man, and the poets admire this quality of his, but,

‘As soon as he has heard Mass,

He’ll cut the;r little heads Off princes and boiars. . . .’

This is the essential part of the business. It may be, too, that what we see here is the unconscious expression of another feeling besides those of hatred and vengeance. If Ivan, when he fought against the bo'iars, was not defending the fundamental principles of Russian life—the absolute power, Orthodoxy, nationality—as some writers have asserted, he was certainly protecting the integrity of the common fatherland after a more general fashion. Kourbski, as we have seen, was no less orthodox and no less Russian than the most fanatical of his peasants, and devotion to the absolute power can hardly, at that period at all events, be taken to be a feature in the popular psychology of a country in which the memory of the ancient vietchie had not entirely died out. But when Kourbsk and his likes entered into secret intercourse with Poland they were betraying their Sovereign and their country. They were conspiring with the foreigner, and treason in every form, dogging Ivan’s steps, crushed twenty times over in its own blood, and perpetually raising its head afresh, is the leitmotiv of all the poems which take the Terrible for their hero.

As to the origin of this universal treason, which m itself justifies all the Groznyt’s violence, the legend gives an oddly suggestive hint, in connection with which the popular logic would seem to be at fault. This is an accident which not infrequently occurs. Ivan, who numbers all the Kings of the earth among his vassals, as the Tsar of a legend should, calls on them to send him the tribute they owe. They reply :

⁴ We will send thee the tribute, and we will add twelve hogs­heads of gold to it, if thou canst guess these three riddles.’ In such matters, as we have already seen, all the wisdom of the Sovereign’s ordinary counsellors, whether boiars or Princes, is of no avail. The man to help the Tsar out of his difficulty is a poor carpenter, who is promised one of the hogsheads of gold as his reward. But the Sovereign mixes the gold with sand, and the moujik, guessing the imposture as he has guessed the riddles, thus addresses him : ⁴ Thou shalt be punished even as thou hast sinned ; thou hast brought treachery into this land, and from treachery thou shalt suffer, more than any other man !’ (Rybnikov, ⁴ Collection of Popular Songs,’ ii. 232-236).

The populace is an enfant terrible ! One more witness must be quoted, and a weighty one. Chancellor, an English traveller who was a spectator of the sanguinary executions ordered by Ivan, is moved by them to the following reflection, which, from a purely practical point of view indeed, expresses the opinion of the enlightened and polished men of his period : ‘ Would to God our own stiff-necked rebels could be taught their duty to their Prince after the same fashion !’ (⁴ Hakluyt Collection,’ i. 240). •

So far, I have deliberately neglected Ivan’s relations with England. They would not have been intelligible until the facts contained in this chapter had been clearly set forth. But the place they occupy in the Tsar’s own life and in the history of his reign is an important one. I shall now turn to them.

CHAPTER III

THE ANGLOMANIA OF IVAN THE TERRIBLE: IVAN AND ELIZABETH

I. THE FIRST ENGLISHMEN IN RUSSIA. II.—PROJECTS OF ALLI­ANCE. III.—A PROJECTED MARRIAGE. IV.—MARY HASTINGS. V.—THE DUTCH COMPETITION AND THE RUPTURE.

I.—The First Englishmen in Russia.

J ust when Ivan was seeking to enter into contact with Europe by the. way of Livonia and the Baltic, other peoples, dwelling in other countries, were much disposed, as we have seen, to move forward and meet him. The epoch of the heroic voyages of discovery had not come to a close. From Spain and Por­tugal a great current of adventurous navigation was flowing round the Channel coasts, carrying the French to Brazil with Jean de Lery, to Canada with Joseph Cartier, and to Florida with the first Protestant colonists of that country, while a whole army of English sailors was following in the wake of Columbus, Cortez, and Gama. Eager to open England’s road to India, or increase her colonial dominions, such men as Cabot. Raleigh, Drake, Dawes, and Frobisher explored Labrador, discovered Louisiana, imitated Magellan’s wonderful journey round the world, and plunged into the snowbound plains of North America.

In all these bold enterprises England was more deeply engaged than any other country. Then, as now, the conquest of fresh outlets for her trammelled trade was a question of life and death. In the year 15.52, parleys were opened in London between a number of merchants on one side, and the famous Venetian navigator, Sebastian Cabot, on the other. They culminated, the following year, in a plan for an expedition to discover new territories in the North-East. The necessary funds, amounting to £6,000, were obtained by subscription, and on May 23, 1553, three ships sailed from Harwich—the Bona Esperanza, com­manded by Sir Hugh Willoughby; the Bona Fortuna, by Richard Chancellor ; and the Buna Confidentia, under Cornelius Durforth. Cabot was a distinguished cosmugrapher, and as

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the greatest dignitaries in the country—the Marquis of Win­chester, Lord Treasurer ; the Earl of Arundel, Comptroller of the Court; the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Privy Seal—had shares in the undertaking, it probably possessed a scientific as well as a commercial character. And probably, too, though chance was to play so great a part in the incidents of the voyage, a pretty clear idea of its object existed ; for when one of the vessels reached the shores of Russia, interpreters were all ready on board her.

Martens (‘ Collection of Treaties,’ ix. [x.], Introd., p. 6) mentions documents which go to prove that diplomatic rela­tions between Ivan and Edward VI. had subsisted previously. The object of these is quite unknown to us. They had not served to propagate conceptions as to the great northern Empire that even approached reason and probability. Herberstein was to speak of it, twenty years later, as a legendary country, and gravely reproduce absurd tales of a huge idol called the Zlatala Baba (an old woman modelled in gold), before which brazen trumpets stuck into the ground kept up a perpetual braying ; of tribes who habitually died in the autumn and returned to life the following spring ; and a great river in wl ich fish were caught ‘ which had the head, eyes, nose, mouth, hands, and feet of a man, but which could not talk, and were very good to eat. . .

Trials of a more tangible kind than any meeting with monsters such as these awaited Willoughby and his bold comrades. A storm dispersed the little squadron, and Chancellor, with the Bona Furtuna, lost sight of his two consorts. Vainly he waited for them at Vardohus, the port appointed for that purpose on the Norwegian coast, started forth again alone, and found himself, on August 28, in a bay, from which, on his arrival, several boats manned by fishermen took to flight. Pursued and brought back, these strangers informed the voyager that he had reached the shores of Muscovy. The authorities at Khnlmogory hastened to warn Ivan, who invited the foreigners to Moscow, but gave them leave to dispense with this journey, and trade freely with his subjects, if that was the object of their coming. Chancellor, without even waiting for the Tsar’s message, made his way to the capital, spent thirteen days there, saw the Tsar, and departed again to England, bearing the monarch’s friendly reply to the circular letter of introduction with which the leaders of the expedition had been provided.

I )uring the following winter, news reached Moscow that two ships laden with merchandise, and with the corpses of dead men on board, had been discovered on the shores of the White Sea. These were the Bona Espcranza and the Bona Confidcntia, with their crews—83 out of the T25 men who had sailed from

Harwich. The storm had carried them into the gulf formed bj* the mouth of the Arrina, and there Willoughby had seen his comrades die off, one by one, of cold and hunger. The notes his splendid courage enabled him to keep prove that he himself survived till January, 1554.

When Chancellor got back to England he found Edward VI. dead; but Philip and Mary, on the report he submitted to them, sent him back to Moscow as the representative of a new com­pany, the ‘ Fellowship of English Merchants for the Discovery of New Trades,’ which was to take the place of the old ‘ Society for the Discovery of Unknown Lands,’ which had organized the first expedition. For practical purposes, this company was always called the Russian or the Muscovite Company. Two special agents, Richard Grey and George Killingworth, were associated with the leader of the new mission, and pro­vided with instructions which betoken a marvellous insight as to the interests concerned. The agents were desired to study the character and habits of the Russian nation, and the taxes, coinage, weights and measures of the country. They were to take care that all their fellow-countrymen carefully obeyed the Russian laws; they were to open counting-houses and shops in Moscow and the other principal towns ; they were to notice the kinds and qualities of merchandise likely to find a good market, and they were to look out, at the same time, for the best means of making their way into the Far East, and more particularly into China. The instructions also enumerated those Russian products—wax, tallow, tar, hemp, flax, and furs —which it would be well to import into England ; and asked for samples of the minerals the company might undertake to bring to the surface in the Tsar’s dominions, and details as to the German or Polish woven stuffs which might be replaced, on the Russian markets, by others of English make. They contemplated the possibility of monopolizing certain branches of the external trade of Russia, and drew up a complete pro­gramme, in the execution ot which Chancellor, Grey, Killing- worth, and their successors were to prove fully equal to their task.

Chancellor re-embarked on the Bona Fortuna, reached Moscow without a hitch, opened negotiations with Viskovatyl, the Chancellor, and succeeded in obtaining a charter which granted his company the most precious favours—complete "reedom of trade, a special jurisdiction for all Englishmen settled in Russia, autonomy as regarded differences between English subjects, and the Tsar himself to decide all causes involving litigation between subjects of the two countries. At first the profits of the Company were enormous. According to one of its agents, a piece of cloth, which cost, transport

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included, no more than six pounds, was sold for seventeen roubles; equalling as many pounds in the reckoning of those days. But this prosperity was soon to attract formidable competition. Norwegian and possibly even Danish ships (see Monsieur Kordt’s preface to the papers published by him in the 116th volume of the ‘ Collections of the Imperial Society of Russian History,’ 1902, p. xviii) were already sailing in the wake of the English navigators. The monopoly these last thought they possessed was threatened. Disputes broke out, and thus Ivan was led to send a negotiator of his own to England, and charge him with the duty of bringing these complications to an end.

On July 21, 1556, Joseph Grigorievitch Nepieia, Namiestnik (lieutenant) of Vologda, sailed with a whole fleet of ships laden with merchandise, and commanded by Chancellor. The Bona Fortuna was one of these, and with her sailed Willoughby’s two vessels, which the Russians had returned to their owners, and the Philip and Mary, which had lately come from England. Alas ! within a year it became necessary to despatch an English expedition, led by Stephen Burrough, in search of three of these ships, which were never seen again (‘The Voyage of Mr. Stephen Burrough, An. 1557, from Cohnogro to Wardhouse, which was sent to seeke the Bona Esperanza, the Bona Confidentia and the Philip and Mary,’ Hakluyt, ‘ Travels,’ i. 328). After three months of stormy seas, the Bona Fortuna reached the end of her journey alone, only to be wrecked on the Scottish coast ! Chancellor, who, with Nepieia, was on board the vessel, was drowned, with his son and part of the crew, in an heroic attempt to save the Russian envoy’s life. Seven of his Russian com­panions likewise perished, and /7,000 worth of merchandise —the whole of Nepieia’s private fortune—was lost or pillaged by the natives of the coast, from whom, thanks to an inquiry ordered by Queen Mary, some few remnants were painfully recovered. The envoy escaped with his life, but, owing to the delay imposed by the above-mentioned inquiry, he did not reach the gates of the English capital till February, 1557. A splendid reception had been prepared him, as some sort of compensa­tion. A hundred and forty merchants, with all their serving- men, attended him. He was presented with a richly-capari­soned horse for his solemn entry, and the Lord Mayor came to meet him. When Philip returned from Flanders in the follow­ing March, he gave the envoy audience, and in May, Nepieia, a novice in diplomacy, flattered himself he had brought his mission to a happy conclusion, after all the horrors of the outset. He had obtained a certain reciprocity of privileges for his country—free trade with England, a special jurisdiction, that of the Chancellor himself, over Russian subjects sojourning

on British soil, arid leave to engage artisans, engineers, and physicians for the Tsar’s service. He had not settled the essential question of the commercial competition in Russia itself, but Philip and Mary relied, as to that matter, on the man in command of the English ship on which he was to sail from Gravesend—a man destined, indeed, to play a leading part in the agreement arranged between the two countries.

His name was Anthony Jenkinson, and he served the Russian company for a wage of £40 a year. He was worth more. Since 1546, he had travelled all round Europe, and all the coast of Asia and of Africa. He had landed on Russian soil in July, 1557. made a long stay, for purposes of study, at Kholmugory and Vologda, and had not reached Moscow till December in that year. Well received by Ivan, he soon proved himself so thoroughly ‘ the right man in the right place ’ that once the Sovereign knew this particular Englishman he refused to have any other about him. He seems to have been a finished speci­men of that race of business men to whom Great Britain owes her present position in the world—an extraordinary business mind, a broadness of view, a spirit of adventure, which no risk could alarm, a heart of steel, and an iron temperament. In April of the following year, we find him at Astrakan, after a whole winter season spent at Moscow. In August, first of all English sailors, he hoisted the red-crossed ensign on the waters of the Caspian. With only two of his fellow-countrymen to keep him company, he sailed away with a huge cargo of merchandise, enough to load a thousand camels, which he hoped shortly to hire from the Turkomans, and so make his way to Bokhara, across the steppes of Turkestan, and to more distant countries yet, if that might be. Why not to China ? But at Bokhara war was to overtake him ; the master of Samarkand was threat­ening the town. Jenkinson, as cautious as he was bold, beat a timely retreat, avoided the siege and the scenes of pillage that followed on it, and reappeared at Moscow in September, 1559, with a Bokharian embassy and five-and-twenty Russian prisoners rescued from the Turkomans. He offered the Tsar gifts, which the monarch graciously received—the tail of a white buffalo and a Tartar drum—and returned to England with a young Asiatic, the Sultana Aura, whom he proposed to present to the new Queen, Elizabeth. He also carried back the conviction that, from the commercial point of view, the Far Eastern countries through which he had just travelled were quite valueless. But he contemplated opening up relations with Persia, and, starting forth again in 1561, he received a friendly welcome at Kazbin, the capital of the Shah Tamas, and won the personal regard of Abdul-Khan, ruler of the Chirvan.

While he busied himself about acquiring these new markets

and ensuring in them the privileges already given to his own country in Moscow, he was fighting a stiff battle with his Italian and Flemish competitors. Raphael Barberini, an Italian agent, contrived to overreach Oueen Elizabeth, and induce her to give him a patent, which he used to spread a belief that the English were mere middlemen, bringing Dutch and French merchandise into the Russian markets. Jenkin- son’s rejoinder took the form of a new charter, granted to the Russian company by the Tsar, which confirmed it in all its monopolies, and extended them from the mouths of the Northern Dvina to the banks of the Ob, including Kholmogory, Kola, Mezen, Petchora, and Solovietsk ; gave it the sole right to a trading-house (dvor) at Moscow, and depots on the Dvina, at Vologda, Iaroslavl, Kostroma, Nijni-Novgorod, Pskov, Narva, and Iouriev, and granted free passage to all its mer­chandise sent to Bokhara and Samarkand.

These concessions—unhoped for, no doubt, and undeniably excessive, from the Muscovite point of view—were probably connected with overtures of a different order, which were being made to Jenkinson at this time, and which mark a new phase in Anglo-Russian relations.

II.—Projects of Alliance.

Ivan could not fail to be deeply impressed by all his English guests had shown him, or allowed him to guess, in the course of several years, concerning the genius and the grea tness of their nation. And the struggle in which the Sovereign was engaged, both within and without the borders of his own country, had inspired him with a painful sense of his own isolation. In his eager, masterful, and obstinate mind, this twofold impression naturally became a fixed idea, which he was to carry with him to his grave. Against his external foes, their armies, their fleets, and their treasuries, he .would make an alliance with a Power whose fleet, whose commerce, whose credit, were begin­ning to rule the whole world ; against his foes at home he would thus ensure himself a support, perchance a refuge, that nothing would be able to shake. A glorious dream ! Thanks to his imaginative powers, Ivan no doubt saw himself really driven into exile, and, backed by his formidable ally, able to return in triumph at his own time. Perhaps, indeed, but this point is less clear, he mingled a more romantic project with this plan. Elizabeth was fated to be the object of perpetual pro­posals of a more or less flattering nature, in which politics and gallantry both had their share. In spite of the fact that his youth had faded, in spite of his infirmities, which he exagger­ated, but which were genuine, of his unsociable nature, and his

four or five previous wives, living or dead, Ivan may possibly have thought of trying his own chance. On the other hand, as we know, Elizabeth w^ras a mistress, from an early age, in the art of evading matrimonial proposals without offending or dis­heartening her suitors, and the conduct of Jenkinson, himself a good diplomatist, may have been inspired, in this particular, by his knowledge of the ideas and habits of his royal mistress. The one undoubted fact is that, when he came back from England in 1567, he was the bearer of a secret message, the contents of which are unknown to us, but the subject of which must have been exceedingly puzzling, seeing that for a long time the answ'er tarried.

So long did it tarry, indeed, that English trade in Russia suffered by the delay. The opening of the port of Narva to foreigners in general, followed by the establishment at Antwerp, and even in England, of several rival associations, threatened the monopoly of the great company whose interests Jenkinson had so firmly established. In 1568, Elizabeth recognised the necessity of repairing the damage, and, as Jenkinson’s services were not available at that moment, she made up her mind to send an Ambassador of mark—Thomas Randolph, the head of her postal arrangements—in his stead. The instructions she gave him enlighten us—to some extent, at all events—as to Ivan’s secret proposals. Randolph, whose official mission was to * re-establish order in the English trade,’ was desired to evade these proposals as much as possible, but to assure the Tsar that, in case of any misfortune, the Queen would not refuse him her hospitality. Ivan was seriously thinking, then, of passing over into England ! But the difficulty was that he would only accept shelter on the basis of a reciprocal arrange­ment. His pride forbade him to receive more than he was able to offer, and he demanded that the Queen, who also had rebels to deal with and risks to run. should formally accept the Kremlin as a refuge officially placed at her disposal! My readers will imagine that Henry VIII.’s daughter could not very well agree to such a bargain.

Randolph reached Moscow in October, at an unpropitious season. It was just at that moment, as my readers will recollect, that the dispute between the Metropolitan Philip and Ivan was going on. The Tsar was out of temper. There is some reason to believe that the agents of the Russian com­pany, who, in the course of their disagreements with their rivals or with the monarch himself, had been guilty of a certain amount of rough dealing, made no effort to obtain a friendly welcome for a mission which rather disquieted them. Elizabeth’s long silence had ended by wounding and irritating the irascible Sovereign. The result was that in February, 1569, the Ambas­

sador, according to a method of diplomatic procedure not uncommon in the history of the Moscow of that period, found himself a prisoner in the house assigned as his residence, isolated there, and quite unable to perform his functions. When, after three months’ waiting, he at last succeeded in obtaining an audience, the usual honours were not paid him, and the Tsar omitted to invite him to his own table, which was the established custom. What transpired in the course of that first interview ? We know not; but it seems to have altered the monarch’s views, for some days afterwards Ivan invited Randolph to take his way to the palace once more, this time in the greatest mystery, at dead of night, and wearing a disguise. This conversation lasted three hours, and as to what may have passed at it we are reduced to conjecture. The next morning the Tsar departed for his Sloboda, and did not come back till the following April. But when he did return, a sudden and total alteration in his attitude became apparent. Not only did he agree to restore the Russian company to the enjoyment of its former privileges, but he granted it fresh and greater advantages—free trade with Persia, power to mine for iron at Vytchegda, and to recoin money for its own benefit at Moscow, Novgorod, and Pskov, and the closing of the port of Narva to the newly-formed English company, while the old one was authorized to drive away the ships of any other nation that ventured into the White Sea.

Randolph had evidently flattered the Sovereign with some new hope, the performance of which was to be claimed by another Russian embassy to London.

Nepi6ia’s successor bore the name of Savine. Alas ! all he brought back, after ten months spent on the banks of the Thames, was a letter from Elizabeth couched in somewhat vague and anything but satisfactory language. To a promise of help, on which it would not have been very easy to reckon, the Queen merely added a fresh assurance of the pleasure it would give her to welcome the Tsar, with all the honours due to his rank, whenever it suited him to become her guest, and to undertake all the charges connected with his entertainment. Instead of the coveted alliance, she offered him alms !

Ivan’s behaviour, indeed, proved he had been wakened out of a beautiful dream, and when disturbed he was habitually br.d-tempeml. As usual, he lost all self-control, and sent Elizabeth an answer quite in the style of the epistles with which he was obliging the King of Sweden just at that time. He would not admit that the Queen herself would have treated a Sovereign who traced his descent from the Caesars in so cavalier a fashion, and wrote to her as follows : ‘ I had thought thee mistress in thine own house, and free to follow thine own. will.

I see now that thou art ruled by men. And what men Mere moujiks! Thyself thou art nothing but a vulgar wench (pochlaia dievitsa), and thou behavest like one ! I give up all intercourse with thee. Moscow can do without the English moujiks.'

The abuse was a mere nothing ; it was a change from the madrigals usually served up to Elizabeth, and was only calcu­lated to make her laugh. But before there had been time for the Tsar’s message to get to London, news reached the capital that he had stripped the Russian company of all its privileges, old and new, confiscated its merchandise, and forbidden its tradirg operations. This was far more serious. The openings obtained by dint of so much effort were lost ! The hope of snatching the Eastern markets from the Venetians and Portu­guese had faded ! The disaster must be remedied, and but one man in the world seemed capable of doing that. Elizabeth, when she confided the leadership of her solemn embassy to Robert Best, associated Jenkinson with him in the business.

But the bold explorer, who was to act as the head of an independent mission, was to begin by himself suffering cruelly from the altered circumstances. He landed in July, 1571, on an island in St. Nicholas’ Bay, called ¹ Rose Island ’ by the British sailors, because of the wild roses they had found growing there, and sent a former interpreter of Savine’s, Daniel Sylvester, to announce his arrival at Moscow. Sylvester-could neither get there liLnself nor send back news, because of the plague, which had been laying the country' waste ever since the Tartar invasion, and which had necessitated quarantines and barriers on every road. Another messenger, who tried to force his way through, barely escaped being burnt alive. Besides this, Ivan was campaigning against the Swedes, and the Russian authori­ties declared nobody must think of approaching him. They further asserted that Jenkinson would have risked his own life by so doing, for the Tsar held him responsible for the failure of his proposals, and had declared he would cut off his head if he showed his face in his dominions.

Quite unmoved — though the Governor of Kholmogory, influenced by existing circumstances, refused him shelter, food, or protection, and left him exposed to the hostility of the townsfolk—the Englishman waited on wearily in the inhospitable town till January, 1572, and then, putting on a bold face, contrived to force his way through, and ventured to beard the monarch in his den at Alexandrov. He had managed, no doubt, to justify himself in the meantime, for the Sovereign gave him a most gracious reception. Ivan hurried through the necessary ceremonial of the public audi­ence, and eagerly broached a private conversation, at which

he only allowed two of his most intimate associates to be present. After his usual custom, he mixed up a dozen other subjects with the one business he really cared for. He talked long and loud about certain English merchants on whose persons injurious letters concerning himself and his Govern­ment had been found, and, after endless circumlocutions, came to the real fact: what about the ‘ secret business ’ of which he had spoken to Jenkinson, and in regard to which Randolph had given a positive undertaking ? This was Jenkinson’s reply : ‘ I informed Her Majesty, word for word* of the proposals addressed to her through me, and Her Majesty, having accepted them, commanded Randolph to treat con­cerning them, but Randolph denies having given any under­taking about them. There must have been a misunderstanding, attributable, no doubt, to some interpreter’s blunder.’ In support of his assertion the envoy produced a letter from Elizabeth.

Ivan was agreeably surprised, no doubt, to find it contained no reply to his own insolent remarks. The Queen contented herself with saying, in very dignified fashion, that her own subjects gave her no reason for such displeasure or alarm as would lead her to seek refuge in any foreign country what­ever. But for all that, she continued to have the most friendly feelings for the Tsar, and, provided he would consent to forget his legitimate complaints against the British merchants, and restore them their privileges, she declared herself ready to afford him the most convincing proofs of her regard. Thanks to Jenkinson’s cleverness, doubtless, Ivan took what was really a proof of scorn for a mark of deference; as Elizabeth’s reply contained no strong language, he considered his honour satisfied, and was mollified. After hesitating for awhile, he gave Jenkinson another audience at Staritsa, and appeared inclined to restore the company and its principal member, William Garret, to unconditional favour. He would give up all idea of a secret understanding for the time being, and when Jenkinson asked for the names of the British subjects of whom he had had reason to complain, he replied, with a dignity that equalled Elizabeth’s, ‘ What matter ? If I pardon them, it is not so that you may have them punished by their Queen !’

What secret thought he had in his mind at this moment we cannot tell, but Jenkinson’s success was certainly as fleeting as it had been personal. In July, 1572, the gifted diplomatist quitted the shores of Russia for the last time, and in the following year Sylvester, sent back by the Russian company, bore evil tidings to London. Ivan, on the score of relations with the Polish Kmg, of which the English merchants were accused, had imposed fines on them in the shape of taxes—

not half as heavy, indeed, as those other foreigners had to pay, but an infringement, none the less, of the privileges granted to them. And the ci-devant interpreter was con­vinced that this recrudescence of hostility arose from the Tsar’s disappointment concerning the alliance he had planned. Elizabeth then made up her mind to entrust a fresh mission to Sylvester himself. She agreed to treat with Ivan as secretly as the Russian Sovereign desired; but she could not allow her subjects to think she was in any danger among them without placing herself in a really perilous position. Sylvester must try to make the Tsar understand this fact.

He found him, in November, 1575, in the new dwelling he had built for himself in the Kremlin, and which he claimed to inhabit as a private individual, having given up the Kremlin itself and the throne to Simeon. ‘ You see,’ said he to the English envoy, ‘ I was right when I appealed to your mistress, and she did not act wisely when she refused my proposals !’ Sylvester was still pondering over the meaning of this new state of things, which had not been foreseen in London, and con­sidering how he could best accommodate himself to it, when Ivan, leaving him to his own reflections, quitted his capital to meet the Ambassadors of the Emperor, then ^;ust about to arrive. When the Sovereign returned, his language had completely altered. ‘ If Elizabeth did not give him full and complete satisfaction, the whole commerce of his Empire should b3 made over to the Venetians and the Germans.’

The envoy was fain to carry this ultimatum back to London. We know nothing of the reply Elizabeth charged him to deliver, for he was killed by lightning at Kholmogory on his return journey, and all his papers were burnt in the house in which he had been living. Did Elizabeth yield ? The fact is admitted by the Russian historian who has devoted the most profound study to this chapter of history (Tolstoi, ‘ The Relations between England and Russia,’ p. 31). Yet such a fact seems very improbable, for during the three following years, diplomatic intercourse between the two countries appears to have been entirely broken off. Before it could be renewed, Ivan was to allow himself to be bewitched by another chimera, inspired, as it would seem, by one of the foreigners who had formed part of the Tsar’s personal circle since the period of Savine’s mission to England.

III.—A Projected Marriage.

His name was Elysius Bomel or Bomelius. Bom at Wesel, in Westphalia, he had studied medicine at Cambridge, but his chief interest was in astrology, and his reputation as to this

particular science had earned him a prison cell, in which he was lying, at the time of Savine’s arrival in London, by the Bishop of London’s orders. As the only terms on which he could obtain his liberty were an undertaking to leave England, he made up his mind to follow the fortunes of the Muscovite envoy, and take service with the Tsar. At Moscow he promptly amassed a large fortune and a very evil reputation, and was believed to be the person employed in the preparation of the poisons used by the Tsar upon his victims. He was also accused of corrupting Ivan’s mi^d by his offensive remarks about religion, and by advising him to seek refuge in a foreign country.

The Tsar, as we have seen, had not waited the arrival of this adventurer before he turned his mind to England, and, it may be, even to Elizabeth. But we possess various indica­tions of the fact that Bomel endeavoured to direct the current of his ambitions into a new channel. He was not himself destined, indeed, to play any part in the development of the intrigue he had thus prepared. Implicated in a plot discovered in 1579, the hatred and jealousy of which he was the object no doubt contributed to ensure a recognition of his guilt, and his life ended under frightful tortures. His wife, an English­woman of the name of Anne Richards, remained in Russia, and was only sent back, with a few of her fellow-countrymen— a physician named Richard Elmes and an apothecary named Richard Frensham—after Ivan was dead, and at a moment when all foreigners in Russia were proscribed.

It was more as a German than as an Englishman that Bomel had been hated and denounced, and though Ivan ordered the unhappy astrologer to be executed, he proved himself very ready to reopen intercourse with England.

In 1580, Jeremy Horsey, one of the Russian company’s agents, was commissioned by the Tsar to induce Elizabeth to send him a certain supply of military stores—lead, copper, saltpetre, sulphur, and gunpowder. Ivan was then engaged in measuring his strength against Batory’s. But Horsey’s instructions, which were hidden in a flask of brandy, were not confined to this request. The Tsar, influenced by Bomel, was more than ever set on seeking something else in England. If Elizabeth persisted in refusing her own hand to all her suitors, she had kinswomen of a marriageable age.

I11 the spring of 1581, Horsey brought back thirteen ships laden with the supplies for which the Tsar had asked, together with a party of surgeons and apothecaries, and, to fill Bomel’s place, a physician, whom Elizabeth declared she valued highly —so highly that she made a sacrifice n sending him to the Tsar. This practitioner, better known in Russia under the

name of Roman Elizariev, but who was really called James Roberts, had undertaken to make up Ivan’s mind for him by pointing out the kinswoman of the Queen on whom he would do well to fix his choice.

In the course of that same year, a Muscovite Ambassador, Feodor Ivanovitch Pissemski, set sail for England, charged with the official conclusion of a treaty of alliance, and with the unofficial duty of opening negotiations for a marriage between his master and one of the Queen’s nieces—the daughter of ' Prince Titounski ’ (sic). The lady in question was Mary Hastings, daughter of Lord Huntingdon. Her grandmother had been Elizabeth’s first cousin.

IV.—Mary Hastings.

Ivan had then just married for the sixth time. His bride was Maria Nagaia, the daughter of one of his Court councillors (doumnyi dvorianine). But that was a matter of little con­sequence—so little, indeed, that the lady’s own father, Atha­nasius Nagoi', had been one of the members of the Commission which had questioned Roberts concerning this other pro­spective bride. Previous to Pissemski’s departure, in July, 1581, a representative of the English merchants trading with Russia landed at Arkhangel. He was the bearer of a letter from Elizabeth, dated from Westminster on January 23, 1581, which contained complaints about the Kiug ot Den­mark, who was putting obstacles in the. way of British trade. As Sovereign of Norway and Iceland, he claimed the right of collecting dues on all ships plying between the two countries. The Ambassador was therefore deputed to carry the Tsar’s reply on this special point. Ivan suggested that the Queen should have all vessels carrying merchandise to Russian ports under the British flag convoyed by ships of war. But above all other things, Pissemski was to obtain the Queen’s leave to see ‘ the Princess Titounski.’ He was to look at her most care­fully, to note her face, her complexion, her figure, her pro­portions ; he was to collect information as to her age and her family relations, and he was to try to bring back her picture, as well as exact measurements of her person, set down on paper.’ If any objection was taken to the Sovereign’s recent marriage, he was to reply that as the lady in that case was a mere boiar’s daughter, the union possessed no importance whatever. It would not prevent the new bride from assuming the position of Tsarina. As to the children bom of the pro­jected marriage, the throne was reserved for Feodor, the Tsarevitch, but they would be given suitable appanages. Of course, the future Tsarina, like all persons in attendance on

her whom she desired to retain about her person, would be expected to change her religion. And, to conclude, the be­trothal must be preceded by the conclusion of an alliance, well made and duly signed. Ivan asked no favours: he offered his own person in exchange for a political advantage. If Mary Hastings was to have the happiness of becoming the rival of Maria Nagai'a, England must send her armies and her fleets to help the Tsar against Baton,’.

As to the outstanding commercial questions, one of the Russian company’s agents, Egidius Crew, was associated with Pissemski, who was also accompanied, as his interpreter, by Roberts the physician. He was charged with a special mission of his own. to inform Elizabeth of the Tsar’s intention of proceeding secretly to England. Ivan, as my readers will perceive, was planning a regular assault, which, he felt sure, would this time turn his stubborn dream into a reality.

Pissemski reached England in September, 1582, and did not have his first audience at Windsor till the 11th of the following December. At that moment, apparently, the object of one portion of his mission no longer existed. Vanquished in his struggle with Batory, Ivan had made peace. The Muscovite Ambassador made as though he had been unaware of this event. Probably he had received fresh instructions, according to which he was to carry the. projected alliance to a conclusion, and thus pave the way to a recommencement of hostilities against the victorious Poles. But this he would not admit, and his position was rendered all the more difficult by the fact that an envoy from Batory had reached London, and was not wasting his time there. Both the Polish and the English archives are dumb on this subject—unless, indeed, they have never been searched in connection with it—and all we have to go on is the attitude of the English Cabinet with regard to the Muscovite Ambassador. This seems to indicate that by the time he arrived Elizabeth had already made up her mind, or was on the point of making it up. as to diplomatic arrangements, and that Poland was victorious once again. When Pissemski showed himself eager to enter on his business, the opening of negotiations was put off from week to week, and on various pretexts. First of all on account of Court festivities, then because of the plague. ‘ The plague doesn’t prevent you from treating with the Poles,’grumbled the Russian. But he had to wait till the Poles had departed, and even then, if he had been more experienced, he would have perceived the Government was doing its best to get rid of him civilly. Solemnly introduced into the Queen’s presence by the Earl of Leicester, Lord Howard, Sir Christopher Hatton, and the Earl of Huntingdon himself, he handed Elizabeth the presents sent

by the Tsar, his own gifts, and those of his principal associate, who bore an unlucky name—Nieoudatcha (meaning ‘ failure ’). These presents consisted, as usual, of dozens of sable furs. Elizabeth, according to the Ambassador’s report, was very gracious. ‘ She began to be gay/ inquired after the Tsar, saying she loved him like a brother, and that she would be rejoiced to see him and make an alliance with him. But, the audience once over, there was less talk than ever of the negotia­tions. All Pissemski had attained by the end of the month was an invitation to a stag hunt. Rather roughly, he replied that he had no time to waste over such amusements, and, further, that he and his comrades never ate game at that season—it was in Lent. Having consented at last, with a very bad grace, to take his share in the proposed entertain­ment, he heard, on December 13, that the Earl of Leicester, Lord Hunsdon, Sir Christopher Hatton, and Secretary Francis Walsingham, had been appointed to treat with him. The conferences were to take place at Greenwich, and the repre­sentatives of the Russian merchants who had interests in Muscovy were to be present at them.

There was a disagreement from the very outset as to the basis of the negotiations. Pissemski offered England com­plete freedom from taxation on all the Russian merchandise she exported, and demanded, in return, her alliance against the King of Poland, ‘ who was being assisted by the Pope, the Emperor, and other Sovereigns.’ ‘ But,’ replied the English, ‘ your master has just been reconciled with Poland by the good offices of the Pope.’ The Russian clung obstinately to his clumsy pretence. ‘ The Pope can say what he likes behind people’s backs! In the Tsar’s letter to the Queen he calls Batory his enemy, so that must be.’ Under such conditions there was scant hope of any understanding. Elizabeth’s great object, for the moment, was to save her trade in the White Sea from Danish interference. To this end she consented, in January, 1583, to humour the Tsar and his Ambassador by giving Pissemski a secret audience. Pissemski, on his side, was anxious to open the question of the marriage. But the Russian, reaching Richmond at the appointed hour, was not a little astonished to find the palace in full festivity, music and dancing going on. The same thing happened every day, he was assured, and the Queen, indeed, forsook the merry throng to receive the Ambassador apart, without any witness save Roberts, the indispensable interpreter. Nieoudatcha was not summoned for another hour, and Elizabeth, excusing her­self, told him she had ‘ been carried away by the conversation.’

This conversation, we may conclude, was principally con­cerned with Mary Hastings. When Pissemski pressed his

request to be allowed to see the young lady and have her portrait painted, the Queen seemed very much put out. She would have been heartily glad to enter into family relations with the Tsar, but she had heard he cared very much for beauty, and Mary Hastings was not a beautiful woman. Besides, she had only just got over the small-pox, and the idea of having her picture painted at the present moment was riot to be dreamt of. Nevertheless, the wily Sovereign pretended to discuss the conditions for the marriage. She expressed special anxiety about any daughters her niece might have.

‘ Our Sovereigns,’ answered Pissemski proudly, ‘ always marry their daughters to foreign potentates !’ And he quoted the case—unique, indeed, in the course of several centuries—of the Princess Helena, married in 1495 to Alexander of Poland. But before any marriage could be settled, the alliance must be arranged. The Ambassador had handed in a memorandum on this subject, and was waiting for his answer. Elizabeth promised to hasten it, and that was all.

Thus two more months slipped by, and when the envoy, whose patience was very nearly worn out, received his answer, what disappointment was his ! The Queen agreed to make an alliance with the Tsar, and give him armed help against all his enemies, but in return she demanded a monopoly of all the external trade of Russia for England ! Pissemski proved his simplicity once more, for he did not realize that Elizabeth was making a mock of his master and himself. He quibbled and argued over the terms of the document, as if its substance did not suffice to make it utterly unacceptable. It described his overtures as ‘ requests,’ and called the Tsar the Queen’s ‘ nephew.’ The English negotiators offered to alter the terms of the agreement, but they refused to change their conditions. In April they invited the Ambassador to a banquet, to which seventeen great dignitaries of the State—Edward Clinton, Earl of Lincoln ; George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury ; Thomas Radclyffe, Earl of Sussex ; Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick ; Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford ; and others—sat down with him, and at which the Queen drank to the Tsar’s health. When the feast was over they informed the importunate dip­lomatist that the Oueen was about to give him his farewell audience. For as he assured them he had no instructions to accept the English counter proposals, would not his best course be to go back to his own country, and there obtain fresh powers ?

Loudly the poor fellow objected, ^! But what about the marriage ?’ In reply, the Englishmen showed him gazettes, which announced that Maria Nagaia had borne the Tsar a son. Once more Pissemski feigned ignorance, and the ignorance of the man who has no desire to be enlightened. ‘ Wicked

people were putting about stories to prevent a good under­standing between his master and the Queen.’ So angry was he, and such a coil did he raise, that Elizabeth, after due reflection, made up her mind to lend herself to a farce—for a farce it certainly was—well calculated, indeed, to deceive the envoy and keep Ivan’s illusions alive. On May 17, Pissemski was invited to proceed, with no attendant save Roberts, to a country house belonging to the Chancellor, Lord Bromley. The Chancellor, having ceremoniously received him at the entrance of his dwelling, conducted him to the garden, where refreshments were prepared. Very soon a party of ladies appeared in one of the garden alleys. At the head of the group, between Lady Bromley and Ladv Huntingdon, walked the person the envoy already delighted to call ‘ the Tsar’s betrothed.’ The gentlemen saluted from a distance, and the Chancellor told Pissemski the Queen had given orders that he was to be shown her niece—‘ not in a chamber, but in broad daylight, so that he might see her better.’ The Russian stared with all his might. A turn in the park was suggested, and arranged so that he might meet the object of his curiosity several times over. After this, Bromley said to him, ‘ Have you looked at her well ?’ ‘ I have obeyed my instructions,’ was the reply; and in his report Pissemski wrote : ' The Princess of Ilountinsk, Mary Hantis (sic), is tall, slight, and white­skinned ; she has blue eyes, fair hair, a straight nose, and her fingers are long and taper.’

Horsey has left us his own account of this scene, which may very well have been touched up a little in Pissemski’s narrative, the essential features of which I have iust reproduced. The English chronicler declares that when he saw the ‘ betrothed ’ the envoy was so overcome with emotion that he retired back­wards, saying he must be content with a single glance at the angel he believed destined to become his Sovereign’s wife. But Horsey was not present, and the angel had very nearly reached her thirtieth year !

Elizabeth was determined to give herself the amusement of carrying on the farce to the very end. Once more she sent for Pissemski, told him how much she regretted her niece was not sufficiently beautiful to please the Tsar’s taste, and said, ‘ I think you did not think her very fair yourself !’ But the Russian held his ground.

‘ I think her fair : the rest is in God’s hands.’ And he pressed the Queen to make her intentions on the subject clear. But Elizabeth had already invented a new means of delay. She would send a confidential man of her own to Russia with Pissemski, and this Ambassador should receive all her instructions and be invested with all the necessary powers.

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The farewell audience soon took place. Pissemski was the recipient of another volley of compliments and empty protesta­tions of friendship, and was assured the Oueen would give free ' passage through her territories to all the Tsar’s envoys to any foreign Power, the Pope alone excepted. ‘ Your master must not betray me to the Pope !’ Elizabeth is reported to have said. Here, again, we may suppose, Roberts proved himself a faithless interpreter. By the middle of June, Mary Hastings’ portrait was finished, and after witnessing a review of the British fleet —eighty ships of seventy or eighty guns, and crews of a thousand men or more apiece—Pissemski and Nieoudatcha embarked with Jeremy Bowes, Her Majesty’s chosen Am­bassador. Her choice, though it had fallen on a professional diplomat, was not a happy one.

V.—The Dutch Competition and the Rupture.

Bowes had a difficult task before him. He was to talk of trade, and of nothing but trade, to a man who did not want to listen to anything but projected alliances, political and matri­monial. And these same commercial relations were passing through a very trying crisis. The English merchants, whose privileges were nominally maintained—they only had to pay half other people’s taxes, at all events—found themselves forced to pay extra ‘inposts, arbitrarily demanded and per­petually increased. These were the result of the hostile operations the Tsar dreamt of reopening with England’s help, and which had already reduced his resources to a most exhausted condition. Meanwhile, other foreign competitors were gaining ground. The Russian Treasury, hard pressed for money, was selling fresh privileges to the highest bidder, and the liberal gifts cunningly distributed by the Dutch were bribing precious support among the persons nearest to the Sovereign. Three of Ivan’s chief councillors—Nikita Romanovitch Zakharine, the incorruptible hero of the popular legend, Bogdan Bielski, and Andrew Chtchelkalov—had been completely bought over. The Tsar probably recognised the competition to be a means of forcing Elizabeth’s hand, and rendering her more obedient to his desires. Since the year

1575, as a matter of fact, Antwerp ships had been making regular voyages to the White Sea, and Captain Carlile, who- reckoned the money sunk by the English Company in the monopolies now endangered at £80,000, had presented his Queen with a memorandum in which he proposed to turn efforts apparently likely to be wasted, for the future, in Russia, to the continent of America (‘ A Briefe and Summary Discourse upon the Intended Voyage to the Hithermost Parts

of America,’ April, 1583, Hakluyt, ‘Collection of Early Voyages, iii. 228).

Bowes was not the least like Jenkinson. Haughty and abrupt in his address, brusque and unmannerly, he was a fair sample of the worst side of that national character of which his pre­decessor had exemplified the best aspect. He began with a tolerably ill-natured dispute about a horse offered him for his entry into the capital, and which did not measure a sufficient number of hands to please him. The instructions with which he was provided did not help him to w^ripe out the memory of this bad beginning. Elizabeth not only maintained her de­mand for an exclusive monopoly, but claimed to impart a somewhat peculiar form to the alliance which was to depend on this sine qua non. She would not proceed to assist Ivan actively against his enemies until she had exhausted every attempt at reconciliation between him and them. This was as much as to say to the Tsar, ‘ You desire my help to enable you to take vengeance on Batory—very good ! But I shall begin by warning the King of your intention !’

We have two sources of information as to the negotiations thus begun—Bowes’ own report (Hakluyt, i. 458, etc.) and the records of the Muscovite Chancery. These documents constantly contradict each other. The British envoy, while admitting certain misunderstandings and unavoidable annoy­ances, flatters himself he has won all along the line. Ivan, according to his testimony, is disposed to give the Queen’s subjects back all their privileges, and even to increase them. At the same time, his desire for an English wife—some other relative of the Queen’s, if Mary Hastings was not inclined to accept his suit—w^ras stronger than ever, and he was ready to go to London for this purpose. He even went so far as to ask the ‘ preacher ’ of the English Embassy to furnish him with a memorandum as to the chief points of the Protestant faith, had it read aloud before a numerous audience, and liberally re­warded its author. He inflicted severe punishment on those of his councillors who betrayed any hostility to Bowes, and advised them to alter their "behaviour. And the fruit of all these successes, couched in writing, and duly signed and sealed, was on the point of being delivered to the envoy, when the Tsar’s sudden death destroyed the work so successfully per­formed, transformed triumph into disaster, and cast the victory into the hands of the hostile party.

The Russian version is very different. Ivan’s reply to the British ultimatum is said to have been embodied ir. the follow­ing counter-propositions : As the King of Poland, in con­travention of all treaties, had taken Polotsk and Livonia from the Tsar, the Queen must invite him to restore the conquered

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territories and pay an indemnity, or, in the event of his refusal, she must join hands with the Tsar and make him do it by force. In exchange, she was to receive the monopoly of certain ports •—the Flemish and French merchants had standing rights in certain others. The King of France had just sent several ships to the port of Kola. He was desirous of the Tsar’s friendship, and had begged Ivan to send him an Ambassador. This was simply a way of telling Bowes, ‘ We are by no means bereft of powerful friends.’

All the Englishman could do was to take refuge behind his instructions. But then the Russian delegates, Zakharine, Bielski, Chtchelkalov, and Frolov, approached the matter of the ‘ secret business.’ ‘ Could not Bowes tell them anything about that ?’ Yes ; but it was for the Tsar’s ear alone. They promised a private audience, and went on splitting hairs about the projected alliance. When Elizabeth had granted the Tsar’s Ambassadors free passage through her dominions, she had claimed her right to exclude the repre­sentatives of hostile Powers. There must be seme under­standing as to this. As far as Rome was concerned, there was no question of a difference. ‘ The Tsar would not betray the Queen to the Pope.’ And he also included the Kings of Poland, Sweden, and Denmark among his enemies. Now it was Bowes’ turn to specify, and a disagreement at once arose. ‘ The Emperor,’ said the British envoy, ‘ is the Queen’s enemy, and the King of Spain such a friend as anyone might buy for a dienga.’ But Elizabeth had just sent the King of Denmark the Order of the Garter, which marked him in the front rank of her friends, and as much might be said of the King of Sweden. The negotiators fell back on the monopolies question. As a final concession, Russia granted England five ports on the White Sea, not including Kola, which was to be left to the French, and Poudojersk, at the mouth of the Northern Dvina, at which place a Nimeguen merchant named Johann von Valle, known in Russia as Bielobrod (White-beard) had set up his trading establishments.

Bowes protested. What was to become of the solemn charters previously bestowed on the Russian Company ? The reply given him was that ‘ the English merchants, Thomas Glover and Rudolph Ritter, have misused the Tsar’s favour, plotted with his enemies, and acted as their spies.’ To which Bowes answered : ‘ Glover is a rogue, but England is a free country, in which every man can hire himself out to serve whatever master he chooses. And neither your Frenchmen nor your Flemings give you first-rate merchandise, as we do. . . .’ Then the Russians raised a clamour. The English cloths were just what they did complain of. They brought patterns. ‘ I

know nothing about cloths,’ quoth Bowes, with an air of offended dignity.

I have summed up the pith of a score of meetings, the result of which was nil.

The private audience took place on December 13, 1583. Bowes had to present himself unarmed and unattended, for the Tsar was going to receive him tete-a-tete to discuss the ‘ secret business ’—in other words, the marriage. This tete-a- tete did not exclude the presence of a dozen persons, amongst whom was the reigning favourite, Boris Godounov, shortly to be Tsar himself. In presence of this company the whole of the farce arranged by Elizabeth was played again. Ivan desired to be informed of the Queen’s intentions as to Mary Hastings, and Bowes declared the Queen had sent him to find out the Tsar’s. But the envoy, now he had his back against the wall, entangled himself in a series of miserable shifts and excuses. ' The Queen’s niece was ill—very ill indeed; and besides, he did not think she could agree to change her religion. . . . And, further, she was one of Her Majesty’s most distant relations. There were a dozen other ladies whom the Tsar might very well prefer . . . .’ Ivan broke in sharply :

‘ Who are these ladies ? Are they the daughters of appan­aged Princes or subjects of the Queen ? . . . Speak ! Ex­plain thyself ! . . .’

‘ I have no instructions.’

This time the Tsar could not control his rage. According to his usual tactics, he executed a flank movement, so as to have his opponent more completely in his hands. Several times Bowes had fallen out with the Russian negotiators, and in the course of their altercations he had dropped various offensive expressions. With these Ivan now taxed him, and when the envoy denied them., he flew into a rage, as was his wont. The Russian record omits this episode, but Bowes gives a full account of it. Certain persons have objected to the dialogues I have introduced into my narratives of a less remote past, believing they may be an alteration of the original texts on which my story is based. If my critics will be good enough to consult the documents of which the sense is here re­produced, they will acknowledge that if I have been guilty of any alteration at all, it has been in my avoidance of the conver­sational form, infinitely more frequent in documents of this kind than they will imagine. In Bowes’ report he gives the. dialogue as follows :

The Tsar (to Bowes) : ‘ ... You have assumed airs of superiority over my plenipotentiaries which cannot be en­dured ; for I know Sovereigns among my own equals who take precedence of your mistress !’

Bowes : ‘ My mistress is as great a Princess as any in Christendom, equal to those who think themselves the greatest, and able to make head against them all!’

The Tsar : ‘ You mean the Kings of France and Spiin ?’ Bowes : ‘ Certainly. I believe my Queen is worthy to be their peer. . . .’

The Tsar : ‘ And the Emperor’s ? . . .’

Bowes : ‘ When the King, my mistress’s father, was warring against France, he once had the Emperor in his pay. . .

These words, if we may believe the Ambassador, put Ivan into such a fury that he went so far as to threaten to throw his guest out of the window, to which menace Bowes replied that the Tsar could do as he chose, but that the Queen of England knew how to avenge, insults laid on her representatives. Whereupon Ivan hastily dismissed his bold opponent, and spoke of him, once his back was turned, in terms of praise, saying he would himself be thankful to have such men to serve him.

As to all this episode the Russian authorities are dumb. According to them there was a dispute about the insolence, which Bowes denied and the Russian delegates asserted, to which the Tsar put an end by making a long speech on the origin of the British trade in Russia, the causes of the partial abolition of the excessive privileges primarily granted, and the reasons which forbade their restitution. The Queen's subjects were very far from supplying the Russian markets in any sufficient or satisfactory manner. Drawing a ring off his linger, Ivan declared Von Valle had only made him pay 60 roubles for it, and 1,000 for the big emerald in his cap. The English merchants brought no gems at all, and charged exorbitant prices for all the merchandise they did bring. The ring was worth 300 roubles, and the emerald 40,000, if not more ; Bowes was obliged to admit the fact. Further, the Tsar had asked, through Pissemski, for cloths, silks of good quality, and laces. He was still waiting for the laces, and the cloths, like the silks, were very highly priced, and worth nothing at all. Those sent from Poland looked much better. At a sign from the Sovereign various stuffs were brought in, and while he fingered them and made comparisons, to which Bowes replied by a fresh assertion of his own incompetence in such matters, Ivan continued to hold forth. What was the mean­ing of this friendship the Queen offered him, if it was to be confined to his custom, and to an alliance which had no exist­ence save a verbal one ?

All the Ambassador could do was to appeal to his instruc­tions, and the result of another and still more confidential interview, which took place five days later, on December 18,

and at which the only members of the council present were Troubetskoi, Zakharine, Bielski, Chtchelkalov, and Frolov—and even these were sent off to the other end of the room, ‘ close to the stove ’—was not any more satisfactory. Meanwhile Ivan had heard, through James Roberts, who probably interpreted at all these meetings, that Bowes was desirous of seeing him quite alone. The envoy denied the fact. All he had said was that when he had been on other missions, to the King of France and other Sovereigns, he had never been expected to deal with a third party with regard to important negotiations.

‘ The Court of France is no rule for ours,’ grumbled Ivan. ‘ Tell me what thou hast to say about our marriage.’

‘ I know from the Queen, my mistress, that she desired your friendship above that of all other Sovereigns, and I have on other personal desire, save that of pleasing and serving you.’

‘ Give me the list of all the nieces of the Queen of whom you speak, with their names and titles. I will send an Ambassador to England with you, and he shall look at them all, and send me their portraits.’

‘ I offer you my own services for that purpose.’

All this I quote from the Russian version. According to it, Bowes now retracted his former assertions, and denied he had ever been heard to mention any other female relatives of Elizabeth’s whom the Tsar might have preferred to Mary Hastings. When he stood convicted as a liar, he once more took refuge behind his instructions, or gave it to be understood, with a mysterious air, that he would shortly be in a position to give the monarch satisfaction, ‘ but his time was not yet come.’ He asked leave to send a courier overland to England to bring him back fuller powers ; raised trivial questions about the quantity and quality of the supplies sent him, demanding as much as 10 pouds (320 pounds) of butter a day ; requested the Tsar to administer severe chastisement, manu propria, to Chtchelkalov, whom the envoy held responsible for the griev­ances of which he complained, but got nothing for his pains except a discourse from the Sovereign, under five heads, which wound up in the following fashion : ‘You are an ignorant man, and you have no idea of how an envoy ought to behave !’

After that one would have fancied there was no more to be said. But Ivan was too much set on his own idea. With the obstinacy of a lunatic, he strove to lay his hand on the dream which perpetually eluded his grasp. He summoned Bowes to more private interviews, and over and over again he re­peated his same monotonous argument: ‘ Thou hast told us of a score or two of young girls of thy country amongst

whom we might choose a wife, and thou wilt not give us their names. Yet how can we take any steps on such vague information as this ? It appears there are more than a thousand marriageable girls ^;n England, several of them kitchen wenches ; would you have us pay our addresses to them all ?’

These interviews, which constantly recurred during the two first months of the year 1584, culminated, on February 14, according to the Russian records, in another and most violent altercation. Bowes, after having undertaken to give the Tsar’s Ambassador to the King of France a passage on board his ship, backed out of his promise, saying the Queen had ordered him to go back to England overland.

‘ So as to sell me to my enemies !’ cried Ivan, beside himself with rage. ‘ I’ll not permit it !’

Since Russia had lost Livonia, the overland route ran through Poland. Recovering his self-control, though still furious, Ivan continued : ‘ As thou didst not come here to treat seriously, thou hast my leave to go, and take away all thou broughtest in with thee ! This very hour we will dismiss thee !’

Bowes was well accustomed to such angry outbreaks, and this one, as the Russian records admit, by no means over­whelmed him. He was not dismissed, and three days later the envoy was summoned to listen to the reading of a suggested treaty, in which the Tsar had caused the minimum of his wishes and demands to be embodied. All our knowledge of the sense of this document is gathered from the objections made to it by Bowes. Substantially, what Ivan demanded was an offensive alliance for the reconquest of Livonia. As always, the Ambassador- gave prevaricating answers. His mistress, a very pious lady, had a horror of conquests. The Low Countries had vainly besought her to take them under her protection, and even France would have been thankful to pass under her rule. . . .

‘ But this is not a matter of conquest,’ replied the Tsar ; ‘ Livonia is our ancient patrimony !’

‘ Are you quite sure of that ?’ '

Ivan was furious.

‘ We do not ask your Queen to judge between us and Poland !’ And this.time the farewell audience was fixed for Feb­ruary 20. It was put off on account of the monarch’s illness, and on March 18, Chtchelkalov had Bowes informed that ‘ his English Tsar was dead.’ Like Randolph, in former days, the envoy was kept a prisoner in his own house, and ex­posed to every kind of ill-treatment, until the month of May, when Ivan’s son sent him back to Elizabeth with a letter which

contained no reference to an alliance nor any special favours to be granted to the British merchants.

According to Horsey’s report, ChtchelkiJov and the Ambas­sador’s other foes went so far as to plot his death, and it was only his fellow-countryman’s intervention that averted this catastrophe. But this was probably a mere boast on Horsey’s part. Boris Godounov was the real master at that moment, and we know—though he did it secretly, indeed—that he sent Bowes a present, and coupled his gift with assurances of his de­votion. But, in spite of all Bowes’ blustering talk, a town was rising up and a port was being dug on a site chosen by the Dutch, hard by an ancient monastery, 011 the right bank of the Dvina. This they had promised to make into a second Narva for Russia, and with their help, and no other, in the beginning, it was to become the centre of the maritime trade of the Empire, snatched, once and for all, from the hands of the British monopolists. This town was Arkhangel, where the English were only to put in an appearance at a much later date, and in quite a secondary position. In this apparently unequal struggle the victory remained with Holland, and its effects are manifest in the history of Peter the Great.

In 1838, Count Wielhorski, happening to visit Italy to collect antique works for ? museum then in process of forma­tion in Russia, believed himself to have discovered a well- executed and well-preserved portrait of Ivan, said to have been sent to London in 1570 (‘ Russian Archives,’ 1888, i. 123). This canvas, a unique specimen of the Russian art of the sixteenth century, was then in the possession of the Russian Consul at Genoa, Monsieur Smirnov, who had bought it from a London curiosity dealer. To my great regret, I have failed in my endeavour to discover the present whereabouts of this picture, which, if authentic, would be of priceless value, both as to the history of artistic development in Russia and as to that of the curious diplomatic episode which I have just related to my readers. No authority, whether Russian or English, mentions any picture of the Tsar as having been despatched to England.

Ivan, as my readers have seen, was led to seek the English alliance, and desire it with a passionate longing, in the first place by the pressure of the internal crisis, and in the second, by that of the external one which was affecting and imperilling both his fortunes and his policy. I now pass on to the history of that closing phase of his reign.

CHAPTER I THE POLISH INVASION : BATORY

I.—BATORY. II.—THE STRUGGLE. III.—THE POLISH ARMY. IV. —THE RUSSIAN ARilY. V.—THE CAPTURE OF POLOTSK. VI. THE POLES IN MUSCOVY. VII.—THE DIPLOMATIC INTER­LUDE. VIII.—THE SIEGE OF PSKOV.

I.—Batory.

After the year 1572, when the election to the Polish monarchy became genuine instead of fictitious, as it had hitherto been, the electoral meetings on the field of Wola developed into what was neither more nor less than a gambling hell. The whole continent of Europe played there, and once only in the course of two centuries did the players cut a King. He was an unknown man. A pure-blooded Hungarian, through his father, Stephen Batory of Somlyo, and his mother, Katherine Telegda, he was of a good family, and nothing more, had seen honourable service with the Imperial armies, and manoeuvred in still more successful fashion behind the diplomatic scenes at Vienna and Constantinople—so successfully, indeed, that, thanks to the united goodwill of the Sultan and the Emperor, he found him­self Voievode of Transylvania in 1571, when he was only thirty- eight. In Poland this foreigner was very httle known. He was reported to have ruled a small territory exceedingly well, and was said, at a later period, to have studied at the Academy of Padua, at which place, in 1789, the last of his successors on the throne ft the J agellons was to erect a second-rate work by Carlo or Ferrari as a monument to his memory. He learnt no Polish there. When he was elected King, he either talked Latin to his new subjects or held his tongue—the best plan in a

country where everybody talked too much. At the election of ^I575> he was the Sultan’s candidate, in opposition to the Emperor’s ; for Ivan, as we have seen, had retired, and Maxi­milian’s son based his claim on the Austrian alliance against the Turks. Whether to make war against the Turks, backed by Austria, or to make war against the Muscovites, backed by the neutrality, at all events, if not the assistance, of the Porte— there lay the dilemma ! But the Polish- electors, wrapped up in their own concerns, were moved and divided by other considerations. The aristocracy leant towards Maximilian, because he offered it titles and money ; the lesser nobles went over in a body to the Hungarian, because they were convinced so modest a personage would be their King and their slave too, and that either he would govern through them or they would govern without him, against the oligarchy of the great lords.

The stranger, as it turned out, wanted to be everybody’s King, and he knew how to get what he wanted. He began by outstripping his rival at Warsaw. That was easy enough, for haste, on Maximilian’s part, meant considerable risk—the Turk had his eye upon him. The Emperor’s death, which took place in October, 1576, left Batory alone. All he had to do now was to unravel the difficulties of a position in which Henry of Valois had not even tried to see his way. The ex-voievode proved himself the possessor of an unexpectedly clear insight, and an unrivalled knowledge of the art of government. Physic­ally, as we see him in a portrait painted in 1583 by an unknown artist, and now preserved in the Church of the Missionary Fathers at Cracow, he was a typical Magyar—short and thick­set, with prominent cheek-bones, a long nose, and a low fore­head. The countenance is massive, energetic, rugged. We see no regard for effect, no elegance ; he looks fierce and uncouth. The new King, who, both from necessity and because it suited his tastes, had lived in a most simple way, never dreamt for a moment of changing his habits, nor imagined he had been given a crown so that he might lead an easy life. It was noticed that he never wore gloves, and the story goes that, though he was shod with Polish boots, he scorned the stockings then coming into general use. His health was anything but good. He had been suffering, for a considerable time, from a mysterious complaint which seems to have hastened his end. He had an open sore on his left leg, and a belief grew up, when this trouble grew worse, that, in spite of all his appearance of strength, he had suffered, during his residence at the Em­peror’s Court, from attacks of epilepsy or apoplexy. The doctors of that period were not over clear-sighted. But the new King showed no sign of anything of this sort when he arrived in Poland. He worked his secretaries to death, spent

whole days on horseback, and, whenever he had a moment’s leisure, proved himself the boldest of sportsmen.

Mentally he was a curious mixture of stiffness and pliability, of masterfulness and liberalism, of violence and gentleness. When one of the deputies to the Diet raised his voice, he clapped his hand upon his sword, and shouted ‘ Tace nebulo /’ When the King of Sweden pu* forward claims that displeased him, he repeated the same gesture, and grumbled the words, ‘ Docebo istum rcgulum !' Contrary to all precedent, he had a turbulent nobleman belonging to one of the most powerful families in the country condemned and executed. Supplications and threats were all equally vain. ‘ Canis mortuus non mordet P was his imperturbable reply. Plectatur !

He treated the rebellious Cossacks after the Tsar’s own fashion, had them put to death by dozens, and, so some people asserted, caused their bodies to be cut into pieces. And when, in the course of an audience he was giving a foreigner, a dog ran in and disturbed him, he sent the beast flying to the other end of the room with a blow from his spurred boot.' But he knew how to employ more gentle methods with the turbaned suzerain of his former days. In Transylvania he had been half a Protestant, but he was a zealous Catholic once he was in Poland. At the Diet of Election he had been represented by an Arian, Blandrata ; his election once ensured, his counsellors were Jesuits.

He intended to be master in his own kingdom, but in the sixteenth century he refused to make a difference between a starost and a Jew. He thought of reducing forced service, and substituting fines for flogging. More than once, on the battlefield, he turned peasants into noblemen ; and, hard as he was to others and to himself, this same man was tender­hearted—nay, sentimental—to such a point that his grief for the loss of a friend brought on a serious illness.

At a Court which the last J agellons had Italianized, and in a country into which the intellectual currents of the day had penetrated freely, he was at first looked on as a peasant. But hardly had be been brought into contact with his hew sur­roundings, before — though he repudiated refinements un­suitable to his character and temperament—he placed him­self in the forefront of the most enlightened Princes of his time. He founded the Academy of Wilna ; he was the partisan and initiator of the reform of the calendar, the organizer of the postal and financial administrations, the creator of a new judicial system. . . .

And, above all, he governed. He brought the machine, which was beginning to go astray, back into order, and thus, though a foreigner by birth, habits, and language, he was a fine

representative of the living forces of the Poland of the sixteenth century, which was, and still remains—I believe I may say it without offence—the highest historical expression of the Slav race the world has ever seen, a country already sapped by anarchy, but capable, materially speaking, as he was to prove, of a mighty and formidable effort, and prepared, morally speaking, for the noblest conquests of the modem intellect; a land of sublime warriors and inspired poets, of fluent political writers and orators, whose eloquence, sacred or pro­fane, reaches the very heights ; where Frycz Modrzewski, with his programme of social reform, claiming universal rights for all, outstripped all the writers of his day, where Kochanowski’s grace and feeling made him Ronsard’s worthy compeer, and where Skarga was the forerunner of Bossuet.

Foreign and uncouth as were his extraction and appearance, Batory brought all this about by the grace of his own genius. And this being so, he prepared the struggle with Moscow—for Livonia, in the first place, and after that for the very existence of Poland. He saw, ^;n fact, that Poland as he realized her, civilized, well governed, liberal, turbulent, Catholic, must either absorb her great neighbour, and impose her own culture and political system on her, or be herself absorbed and brought into subjection by her.

The coexistence of these two great Slav States, each moving in its own orbit and developing after its own independent, if not contrary', fashion, might not have been so utterly impos­sible, indeed. But to that end the Poland of the Piasts and the Jagellons should have moved in the direction naturally indicated by her own origin—that is to say, westward—and drawn the Slavs of the west and south after her. Whereas, driven backward by the German Drang nach Osten, Poland had been forced eastward, and had founded a great State, half Polish, half Russian or Rutheman, half Catholic and half Orthodox, at once a republic and a monarchy, a compound of civilization and barbarism.

There was but one orbit, and a planet too many—two Sovereigns of all the Russias, and only one empire for them to rule.

No sooner had Batory seated himstlf firmly on his throne than he had to put down a revolt at Dantzig. Though he had had some experience of siege-work, his success on this occasion -vvas not conspicuous. His Poles were not well in hand as yet. And, indeed, his right to be numbered among the great military leaders of his epoch has been disputed. Those who have taken him to be the inventor of the red-hot bullets, which, as a matter •of fact, produced little or no effect at the Siege of Dantzig, are certainly mistaken. The use of these engines, according to

Meinert (Geschichte des Kriegwesens, i. 370), dates from the beginning of the fifteenth century, at least. It may be, as one of the King’s biographers—Albertrandi—asserts, that the Polish army owed him improvements in heavy ordnance, and in its cavalry armament and equipment. More certain titles to fame are the remodelling of the Cossack military system, undertaken during his reign, the raising of a Royal Guard in

1576, and the embodiment, in 1578, of a regular infantry, recruited on the King’s own lands. To these local forces Batory added a strong contingent of foreign troops—Hun­garian infantry and German cavalry—and thus effected, in the land of his adoption, the revolution ■which had already modified the bases of military power and the very art of war in Western countries. He endowed Poland with a standing army, equipped and drilled after the European model. And specialists consider the three campaigns, in the course of which he penetrated into the very heart of Muscovy, both well con­ceived and skilfully carried through, in spite of some failures and weaknesses of detail. Those who have endeavoured to minimize his personal share in them have not been particularly successful. He may not have proved himself a commander of overwhelming talents, and the tactics Ivan adopted may not have given him any opportunity of proving himself one. His real merit lies in the fact that he was a man who knew how to lead, who had the gift, the instinct, the genius of command ; and the method he employed to ensure himself every possible advantage in the duel he foresaw to be inevitable between Poland and her Muscovite neighbour may be considered a masterpiece.

II.—The Struggle.

’ Both opponents showed equal resolution in the combat. Up till the moment of Maximilian’s death, Ivan clung obstinately to the plan sketched out at Moja'isk, and sent courier after courier to Vienna. When that event took place, the Tsar dis­missed the two Ambassadors Batory had despatched to his Court, one after the other, in his endeavour to gain time, cut short all negotiations by putting forward impossible demands, claimed Kiev, after he had asked for Vitebsk, and would shortly have claimed Warsaw, and turned his mind exclusively to the pursuit of the advantages he had already gained in Livonia.

In March, 1578, he agreed to another three years’ truce ; but this suspension of hostilities did not extend, of course, to territories on which either party was at home, and both be­lieved themselves to be at home in Livonia. Further, Ivan arbitrarily inserted a clause forbidding the Poles to interfere in Livonian affairs, into the Russian text of the treaty.

The result was a fight, in the spring of that same year, for the possession of Wen den. Ivan had sent out an army of 18,000 men—more than enough, he had reason to think, to make head against the troops commanded by Chodkiewicz and Sapieha, which were not nearly so numerous, and had hitherto, as we know, been destitute of every- kind of necessary. Batory despatched a fresh embassy, and the Tsar told it to wait; ‘ there would soon be news from Livonia !’ The news came, and Ivan learnt that matters at Warsaw had quite altered.

At the very beginning of his reign, Batory had sent the castellan of Sanok, John Herburt, to Stockholm, whence he had returned with a treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, for the recovery of Livonia. The course of the Narova was to mark the dividing-line between the possessions acquired, or to be acquired, by the two allies. N ow, the Poles, under Andrew Sapieha, had joined forces with the Swedes, under Boe, had forced the Russians to fight in the open, and had once more proved their own superiority in conflicts of this kind. Four voievodes had been killed, four more taken prisoners, 6,000 men slaughtered in the Russian camp, Ivan’s gunners had strangled themselves across their own guns—this was the news the Tsar received. His Tartar cavalry alone had escaped the disaster, with his Commander-in-Chief Galitzine, who, according to the Polish authorities, hastened the Russian defeat by taking to flight, and carrying several of his more prominent comrades with him—a seasoned warrior, the okolnytchyi Feodor Cheremetiev, and one of the Sovereign's most trusted men, Bowes’ enemy, the diak Chtchelkalov.

This put a stop to all thought of truces and negotiations. Ivan dismissed Haraburda, the Polish envoy, but not until he had taken a characteristic revenge. Ever since Batory’s accession he had refused to call the King of Poland his ‘brother.’ ‘ Did you not try to elect John Kostka ?’ he said to the Poles. ‘ Would you have me call him my brother, too ?’ Kostka was a private nobleman. ‘ And what is this Transylvanian Prince of yours ?’ he went on. ‘ Nobody ever heard of that principality till now !’ Haraburda was obliged to listen to a good deal of talk of this kind. But the Tsar’s two Ambassadors, Karpov and Golovine, were still at Warsaw, and Batory treated them accordingly. When he received them on December 3, 1578, he did not rise to his feet, as the protocol demanded, to inquire after their master. So the envoys at once declared themselves unable to discharge their mission. And. indeed, the whole country about them was in a ferment. The Diet, which had been called together on January 19, 1578, had voted an extra war subsidy for the next two years. This was reckoned at 800,000, or even at 1,200,000, florins—no very large sum, indeed,

for the annual expenses of keeping up the Spanish army in the Low Countries at that time reached 7,000,000 florins ! (Philipp- son, loc. cit., p. 240). Yet the Republic had never made such an effort before, and if the money paid in had reached the amount calculated on, it would have been amply sufficient. But it was far from doing that. Nevertheless, Batory, who had bent the Diet to his will, managed to find money. He had no per­sonal expenses, and was thus able to pass all the income from his own lands into his war-chest. He obtained credit abroad, and once he had the money, he was able to get the men.

III.—The Polish Army.

The Polish nobles provided him with a splendid body of cavalry, which had lately proved its prowess at Wenden. But the Muscovites seemed more than likely to profit by their late experience, and await the Polish attack under the shelter of their fortress walls. The historian Dlugosz gives us reason to conclude that Poland had possessed infantry troops as early as in the beginning of the fifteenth century, but this body of men —a small one, numbering not more than 2,000—was only armed with pikes. Batory provided a more modem armament— muskets, swords, and battle-axes—and trebled the strength of his infantry by calling out the peasants on the crown lands. Those who enlisted of their own freewill were forgiven all they owed. The volunteers were many, and distinguished them­selves by their bravery : some of them performed prodigies of valour. Besides these men, the King had a body of Hungarian infantry, some 5,000 strong, another of Polish infantry equipped in the Hungarian style, and consisting of the serving-men attached to the army, and a third recruited among the nobility. These he reinforced by divers bodies of auxiliaries belonging to the same arm of the service—Germans, who formed themselves into huge squares, Scotsmen, and Cossacks. Into his cavalry he introduced German and Polish arquebus-men.

The total number of troops, including the Lithuanian con­tingent, does not seem to have exceeded 20,000 men. It is worth remarking that in this war, certain separatist tendencies notwithstanding, Lithuania, or at all events the nobility of the country, which was st'il half Russian and half Orthodox, was heart and soul with Batory. This fact is acknowledged by the Russian historians themselves (Lappo. ‘ The Grand Duchy of Lithuania,’ 1569-1586, St. Petersburg, 1901. p. 179). The sister nation gave all she could—a few thousand horsemen, who proved most invaluable, during the winter season especially, when, better able to endure the terrible climate and less distant from their own homes, they made up, to some extent, for the

dispersal of the main army. This consisted of a mere handful of men, but it was the first, as to composition and quality, in any Slav country. The proportion of foreigners it contained was very large, but in the sixteenth century this was by no means an exceptional case. At the Battle of Dreux (Decem­ber 19, 1562) Guise had over 12,000 Germans, Swiss, and Spaniards in his army, as against 6,000 Frenchmen, and in his enemy’s camp the state of things was similar.

The Poles’ weak point, in this and all the succeeding cam­paigns, was to be their enemy’s strong one—artillery. In vain did Batory engage cannon-founders in Germany and even in Italy, and beg the Elector of Saxony to send him siege-guns and ammunition ; he never could get enough ordnance to­gether, and his artillerymen, of whom he only had seventy-three in 1580, shrank, in the following year, to twenty.

Taking it altogether, the King must have been a very brave man to face the struggle before him with the resources at his command. For this was no matter of righting the Battle of Wenden over again, and carrying on deceptive hostilities within the borders of Livonia. In that country, worn out by fifteen years of incessant warfare, the ground crumbled beneath the feet of those who fought for it. It was a struggle between phantom armies for shadowy conquests. There w^Tas no possi­bility of winning any definite future advantage, nor even, in the long-r un, of keeping up any campaign at all, in a desert sprinkled with ruins. As early as in 1562, Sigismund-Augustus had arrived at the conclusion that the key of the province must be sought elsewhere, and would only be found by attacking the chief competitor on his own hearthstone at Moscow. He had not succeeded in finding means to enable him to take these bold, offensive measures, but Batory had made up his mind to attempt them ; and what he meditated was an invasion, a decisive struggle, a desperate game, in which the stakes were far to exceed the original object of the quarrel. This fight for Livonia was really a battle for the empire of the north-west, in which the hegemony of the Slav nations was to be lost or won.

Now for this enterprise, Poland could only reckon on her own efforts. Sweden had allied herself with her, but solely as far as Livonia was concerned, and within Livonian borders. All Sweden saw in Batory’s new plan of campaign was an excuse for keeping herself free. She appealed to the letter of her treaty, and claimed to act independently. When Denmark was sounded, she declined ; her relations with Ivan w^rere growing pacific. The Khan offered his support, promised to have his Tartars on the move by the month of August, 1578, and ended by doing nothing at all. And when Batory con-

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fided his plans to the Grand Vizier, Mehemet-Sokolli, that illustrious warrior gave him a discouraging reply : ‘The Tsar was a formidable foe, and nobody in the whole world, except the Sultan, was fit to measure swords with him.’ For the Sultan, too, proposed to observe a strict neutrality. But the King, we may be sure, had foreseen all these disappointments, and made his calculations accordingly.

The point of attack had yet to be selected. The Lithuanians wanted to march on Pskov. Once there, the only road that connected the Russia of those days with the Baltic coast was cut. The way was barred, northward, by a series of lakes, and south­ward by marshes, rivers, and pathless forests. But before the army could get to Pskov it must either march right through Livonia, and thus deal the final blow to a country it had better spare, or make its way through Russian territory, leaving a ring of fortified places in its rear, and Lithuania without any protection at all. Batory decided to strike first at Polotsk. This town, on the banks of the Dvina, commanded, to some extent, the roads into Livonia and Lithuania. The place had been quite lately snatched from Poland, and thus might fairly lay cla'.m to the King’s first attention. He could go on to Pskov afterwards.

This point once settled, the great Hungarian worked wonders, as will be proved by the choice of Svir as his starting-point, which enabled him to conceal the object of his expedition till the very last moment ; by his skilful division of his forces on the roads leading to this trysti”g-place; by his equally skilful flank movement from Svir to Disna, while continuing to screen Wilna and the parks of artillery with the main army; and his ingenious utilization of rivers and boat bridges for his heavy transport. Specialists have objected that this method of acting 011 the enemy’s lines of communication was not known in Europe till towards the close of the seventeenth century. That may be. But inventors of methods are frequently fore­stalled by men of action.

Yet Batory was not able to carry out his plan according to his original idea. The tryst at Svir had been fixed for May 4,

1579. But, in spite of all the King’s energy, there were delays— money, supplies, troops, all fell short. And for this reason, too, the Russian envoys, who had been dragged from town to town and from one audience to another, were not dismissed till June, and not till then did a Polish courier carry the formal declaration of war to Moscow. A few days later Batory had opened his campaign. The army which crossed the Disna with him, on a bridge of boats put together in the space of three hours, numbered, as to the Polish contingent, 6,517 horsemen, 1,338 of whom were Germans or Hungarians ; 4,830

foot soldiers, 3,431 of these also being Germans or Hungarians ; and 4,000 Lithuanian cavalry, or thereabouts. Among the foreign officers was one George Farensbach, formerly a Colonel in the Danish service, and more recently a General in the Tsar’s. His advice was probably most valuable. No more than 15,000 men in all, without reckoning for garrisons and reserves, proposed to invade the huge Empire of Muscovy and make it sue for mercy !

In the Polish camp the opening of the campaign partook of all the peculiarities of the European habits of that day. Before any powder was burnt, a very great deal of ink—even printers’ ink—was spilt. Batory’s declaration of war was preceded by a long historical exposition, crammed with dates, diplomatic texts, and epigrams. It did not forget Prous, the famous brother of Caesar-Augustus, from whom Ivan claimed descent.

A pamphlet published at Nuremberg in 1580, and of which very few copies now exist, contains, together with a very in­correct reproduction of this document, a vignette which shows Venceslas Lopacinski,- the bearer of the message, in the act of performing his mission. The nobleman, a naked sword at his side, holds out the letter to the Tsar with a gesture of defiance. This picture is as unreliable as the letterpress accompanying it, which has lately been corrected by the Abbe Polkowsla (Acta Historica, Cracow, 1887, xi. 162). Ivan never admitted Lopacinski to his presence, and Batory chiefly reckoned for the effect to be produced by his declaration on the publicity he ensured by having it printed in Polish, Hungarian, and German, in the presses he carried about with him during the whole course of his campaign. At Svir, where he arrived on July 15, 1579, the King issued another manifesto, no doubt intended, in his mind, to justify his undertaking, and conciliate public opinion both within and without the borders of the country.

Never, indeed, in any document of the kind, had the leader of an army given proof of such generous feeling. Batory promised to respect the persons, property, and privileges of non-belligerents ; he undertook to forbid and put down, as far as he b**nself was concerned, violence of every kind; nothing was lacking to the formula now grown so commonplace—as commonplace, alas ! as it is deceptive. At this period it was a novelty, one of which the Poland of the sixteenth century may well be proud. Never did the leader of an expedition betray greater eagerness to keep himself in mental touch with a sensitive and easily offended public. All future incidents of the campaign were to become the subjects of similar publica­tions. The bibliography of that period contains a mass of ¹ pamphlets and printed matter, official or semi-official, dilating

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or commenting on the most insignificant episodes in the struggle. These literary efforts, which were sent into Poland and Germany, and even as far as Rome, where the King’s envoy, Peter Dunin Wolski, Bishop of Polotsk, had them re­printed, were not remarkable for any very scrupulous adherence to historical accuracy. But it was essential to make head some­how or other against the German press, which was exceedingly eager to provide information for a public that was excessively greedy of news. One broadsheet (Zeitung), containing a report of one of Batory’s victories, soon ran into four editions. To the paper warfare he so largely employed, the King added, after 1580, all the severities of a rigorous censure, and a German historian (Hausmann, Studien zur Geschichte des Konig’i Stephan, Derpt, 1880, p. 34, etc.) has admitted that an edict then issued pronounced sentence of death on the authors and publishers of hostile works. This may well be, for even in 1576 the publication of a pamphlet at Cracow had been punished in this fashion, and in Germany the laws of the period were no more merciful.

I note these details because they seem to me indispensable to any faithful picture of the struggle under our consideration. It involved a conflict between two peoples which, though of the same race, nevertheless represented two different worlds set in opposition to each other, and the vari-coloured horde of soldiers from many lands, with its scribes and printers in attend­ance on it, was, in good sooth, the Latin West, working back­wards, under the Slav banner, along the path of the great Oriental invasions. This victorious war may be looked on as Poland’s last will and testament, and the story of :t, for that reason, must present a certain interest.

In the present day the manifestoes of invading armies do not impose on our credulity. Batory was to be faithful to his. ‘ Never was any war conducted with greater moderation and more humanity as to labouring men and peaceful citizen*. This testimony in the King’s favour is borne by the Russian historian Karamzine (' History of Russia,’ ix., chap. v.). It is further proved by two other documents : by a circular addressed by Batory on May 4, 1580, to the nobility of the territory of Polotsk ; and, more especially, by the military regulations in force during the campaign. The circular amounted to a charter, ensuring the most precious immunity to the persons affected by it; the regulations forbade the killing of children, old men, and Churchmen, the violating of women, and any destruction of, or damage to, crops, even for the purpose of feeding horses !

In spite of Russian excesses and of provocations acknow­ledged by Russian authorities, these regulations were faithfully

observed. Karamzine speaks of a number of Polish prisoners who were put to death during the early days of the siege of Polotsk by the defenders of that town, and whose bodies were sent floating down the Dvina under the besiegers’ very eyes ; but the Polish army set the world an example which might well have been a lesson to the most civilized nations of that period, and hardly ever indulged in reprisals. Provost-Marshals, endowed with far-reaching powers, kept up severe discipline in every rank. The King himself did not spare his own person, and set the. best of examples in every way. He forbade all dissipation and all unnecessary luxury, frequently slept on a heap of dry leaves, ate his meals on a wooden trestle ‘ without a cloth,’ and showed no mercy to marauders. At the same time, he strove to raise and keep up moral feeling among his men by appealing to the religious sentiment which was so strong in most of them. Even the passwords he gave them served this purpose. One day it would be ‘ Lord, forgive us our sins !’ and another, ‘ God punishes the evil-doer !’

All this did not put a stop to certain practices usual, and con­sidered indispensable, in those days, such as that of torturing prisoners to extract information from them. The extreme ardour of the Polish warriors, gentlemen and peasants alike, resulted, especially at the beginning of the war, :n some ex­cesses which nobody was able to prevent. Private troopers, riding their horses full gallop, would smash their lances against the walls of a besieged town. Such madmen were not ; Iways easy to restrain. The Hungarian infantry, skilled as it was in all siege work, and always first, not only on the breach, but when a chance of pillage offered, was often insubordinate. And between one battle and the next, the turbulent spirit of the szlachta often claimed its rights, and the army discussed the scope of the advantages already gained, and the conditions of the fresh effort demanded of it. But, on the whole, and con­sidering the inherent cruelty of such sanguinary’ sports as these, at every period and in every country, the war, on the Polish side, was a noble war, and the annals of the sixteenth century have not registered its like in any other country.

Though the courage of the opposing forces was quite as great, the other features apparent in the hostile camp were very different.

IV.—The Russian Army.

If Batory’s attempt to get help for his campaign from Sweden had failed, Ivan’s at Vienna had met with no better success. Vainly had Kvachnine, whom he had despatched to Rudolph in 1578, striven to obtain the conclusion of the alliance

previously suggested to Maximilian. As a preliminary con­dition, the Emperor insisted on the acknowledgment of his own suzerainty over Livonia ! A similar failure awaited the Tsar at the Court of the Khan, who demanded Astrakan and a great deal of money into the bargain. At one moment Ivan had reason to fear he was really going to have the Tartars on his hands, as Batory would have desired. One of the King of Poland’s envoys, John Drohojowski, did his utmost, indeed, to negotiate an alliance, in which the Khan would have been in­cluded, at Constantinople, but the Porte needed the Tartars to keep the Persians down, and the Tsar and the King were left face to face at last, alone and unallied. Still Ivan had not to beg subsidies from a recalcitrant Diet, or appeal to the good­will of his subjects to recruit his army. His Empire was his own, with every soul and all the wealth within its borders. When he heard the Poles had marched against him, he threw garrisons into eighty towns on the Oka, the Volga, the Don, and the Dnieper, and ordered the bulk of his forces to concen­trate at Novgorod and Pskov.

As to the strength of these forces, the information at our dis­posal is contradictory in the extreme. Karamzine’s reckoning, notoriously exaggerated as to the Polish troops, concerning which we are better informed, would appear to be equally unreliable as to the strength of the Russians. With reference to these, Fletcher, who is generally well posted, has accepted a total of 300,000 men. But some writers, and amongst them Bielaiev, have raised this figure to a million, and Karamzine’s view, according to which Ivan might have drowned the Polish army at a word under the wave of Russians, loosed in resistless flood upon Vilna and Warsaw, has thus acquired a new lease of authority. Students of a later date, however, have shed light on the great historian’s blunder. According to the cal­culations of Monsieur Pavloff-Silvanski (‘ The. Men who Served,’ p. X17, etc.), after the garrisons already mentioned had been deducted, something like 10,000 warriors out of the 23,000 boiars, boi'ars’ sons, and men belonging to the Court, on whom he could originally reckon, remained at Ivan’s disposal. Each of these gentlemen was attended, on an average, by two armed men on horseback, making 30,000 horsemen in all—or 31,596, to give the author’s exact figure; and there were 15,119 strieltsy and Cossacks, horse and foot, 6,461 Tartars, and 4,513 men of various arms, comprising a certain number of foreigners —Dutchmen, Scots, Danes, and Greeks—57,689 men out of the total of 110,000 which represented the whole fighting force of the Empire. Forced labour, recruited in varying quantities according to the necessities of each campaign, swelled the ranks of the army very considerably. But these men were only avail­

able for camp and fortress duty, or tor digging earthworks, and the Polish army was likewise attended by a very numerous train of similar auxiliaries. The proportion between the two sides, to sum it up, was as four to one, or very near it.

This left Ivan with a numerical superiority large enough to impart an appearance of recklessness to Batory’s undertaking. But it was an appearance and nothing more. Some historians, swayed by Kourbski’s assertions, have supposed the Tsar to have suffered painfully, at this juncture, from the lack of the better military leaders, of whom the Opritchnina had deprived him. The consequences of the great political, social, and economic crisis through which the country had just passed are clearly recognisable in the incidents and the issue of this de­cisive struggle, but this particular interpretation of them cannot be accepted. The best leader Ivan had employed since his accession was Peter Chouiski, and he did not make a very brilliant show under the walls of Orcha. The country, worn out and sore, was to prove itself incapable of any prolonged effort, but as far as the preliminaries of a campaign were con­cerned, the Opritchnina left the machinery of war intact. Yet here we see, save for the artillery and a few hundreds of foreign soldiers and officers, face to face with Batory’s European army the ancient fighting-machine of Muscovy, the insufficiency of which Ivan had already proved against the Swedes, and against the Poles themselves, indeed—an agglomeration of armed men whose personal valour, and powers of endurance and of heroic devotion, in officers and men alike, could not make up for its interior equipment, its want of discipline—or of drill, at all events—and the shortcomings of its leaders.

Ivan’s very clear realization of the causes of this weakness influenced his decision at this critical moment as much as his own natural temperament. I have already shown that he was no soldier. Whatever the condition of affairs, the idea of checking the invasion by facing Batory at the head of his boiars cannot have occurred to him. Such a thing had never been seen in Muscovy since the far-distant and legendary days of Dmitri Donsko'i; and when another horde of Tartars had threatened the capital, the son of the national hero himself had fled to Kostroma. This was the traditional line of conduct, and on this particular occasion especially, the Tsar was bound to follow it faithfully ; the Opritchnina had not robbed him of his army, but if he led out that army to meet Batory and his Poles and Hungarians in the open, he might make up his mind beforehand to a beating.

And, further, Ivan was completely taken in, at first, as to his adversary’s plans ; he thought his blow would be struck, as in past days, at Livonia. Thus, when he reached Novgorod in

July, 1579, he detached a few thousand of his Asiatic cavalry, with orders to receive the¹ enemy’s first attack, and these troops, encountering no resistance whatsoever, contented themselves with a repetition of Schah-Ali’s exploits; while Batory, leaving the wretched province to its fate, and contenting himself with some mere precautionary measures for the protection of his army on that side, marched straight on Polotsk. By the time the real state of affairs was known in the Russian camp it was too late to provide for the defence of the town. As for barring the Poles’ onward progress, such a notion never entered Ivan’s head at all. In the most deliberate manner he dispersed his forces, sent one army corps to fight the Swedes under Fellin, another under the walls of Ostrov, ordered Princes Lykov and Paletski to succour Polotsk—though he foresaw they would have to content themselves with harrying the enemy and intercepting food convoys—and made up his mind to a system of flabby defence, interspersed with attempts at diplo­macy. And to this system he was to adhere. He hoped, no doubt, to wear the Poles down by a war of sieges, in which Russian obstinacy and the Russian artillery were both likely to serve him well.

And it was a war of sieges, indeed, that Batory had to face, as he had foreseen. But his genius and his luck were to bring the Tsar’s strategy and diplomacy to nought.

V.—The Capture of Polotsk.

The siege of Polotsk began early in August, 1579. The garrison behaved with great bravery ; the artillery, 107 guns, kept the Poles at bay for a considerable time. But after three weeks, when no succour came, the town was forced to surrender. The Bishop, Cyprian, refused to acknowledge the capitulation, shut himself up, with a certain number of boiars, in the Church of St. Sophia, and it became necessary to reduce them by force. This incident proves how desperate the resistance was. The booty found in this church, believed to be full of treasure, and all over the town, fell far short of the victors’ hopes and expectations. The most precious thing they found was a library containing great numbers of chronicles and Slav translations of the Fathers of the Church, and this was burnt. Nevertheless, the capture of the place was a great success for the Poles, and Batory at once proceeded further on his way. He took Sokol, where a terrible massacre occurred, and occupied several forts in the neighbourhood, while Prince Constantine Ostrogski ravaged the province of Sievieia right up to Starodoub, and Kmita, Starost of Orcha, treated the province of Smolensk in similar fashion. Ivan left them to do their will.

The Tsar took to flight. Hastily leaving Novgorod, he betook himself to Pskov, and trom that place, like a true Oriental, to save his own face, and decoy the opposite side into negotiating, he opened a correspondence with the chief Lithuanian nobles —Radziwill, Palatine of Vilna, and Wolowicz, Chancellor of Lithuania. He had been prevented, he said, from sending succour to Polotsk, and was still prevented from retaking the town by force of arms, by the entreaties of his bolars, who were bent on putting a stop to the effusion of Christian blood ; wherefore he trusted Radziwill and Wolowicz, inspired by the same feelings, would use their best endeavours to have peace restored.

The reception these overtures obtained may be easily imagined. But the year was drawing to a close, and Batory was not disinclined to accept the semblance of a diplomatic interlude, until the opening of the next campaign, for which he had to make fresh preparations. Lopacinski, the bearer of his declaration of war, had been detained at Moscow ; the King demanded his liberation, and Ivan received the victor’s mes­senger, a mere courier, with the greatest civility, and rnvited him to his own table. Lopacinski was set free, of course ; but the Tsar, who did not quite relinquish all his pretensions, expressed a wish to receive a Polish embassy to discuss conditions of peace. The nature of Batory’s reply may be easily conceived. He was not the person, now, who could be expected to send ambassadors.

Disconcerted, Ivan fell back on Vienna, whither he sent Athanasius Rezanov with a fresh and more pressing appeal. But he did not show any touch of humility, as yet, in that quarter ; for his envoy was told that if the Emperor invited him to his own table he was to refuse any place except the foremost, even if he found himself in the company of the re­presentatives of the French King or the Sultan ! And if any­body asked him how the King of Poland had been able to take Polotsk, he was to reply, ‘ By a surprise, and by violating a three years’ truce which he had signed.’ Rezanov reached his destination in March, 1580, and was dismissed, as all his predecessors had been. Batory’ was so well able to stir up revolution in Hungary that the Emperor did not care to dis­oblige him. And, besides, he swayed Vienna through Rome, and Rome through the Jesuits. After the capture of Polotsk, the Pope had sent the King a sword and lance, which he had solemnly blessed at Mass on Christmas Day, and which were to be ceremoniously presented to him. All Rezanov could get was civil talk. The Viennese authorities thought Batory’s money would soon begin to fail. ‘ He won’t be able to feed his soldiers with his Hungarian lice !’ said Count Kinski scornfully.

Ivan realized he must lower his tone to Poland. He sent one courier after another to Warsaw, and appeared disposed, at last, to take the initiative, in order to prevent a second campaign, if Batory really intended to undertake another. His couriers were actually told they need not remonstrate if the King did not stand up when he inquired after the Tsar’s health! Batory gave the messengers of peace a friendly reception, but con­tinued to hurry forward his preparations. When June came, he gave the Tsar five weeks in which to send him an embassy ; otherwise, he said, ‘ he would mount his horse and Ivan,

‘ noting his neighbour’s condescension in satisfying his de­mands,’ as he put it in his instructions, despatched the embassy forthwith. Before it had got halfway, with its huge suite of 500 persons, its leaders learnt there was nothing more for them to do at Warsaw. The King of Poland had ‘mounted his horse,’ and, followed by his troops, had just started forth from Vilna.

VI.—The Poles in Muscovy.

The capture of Polotsk had made no real breach in the Mus­covite Empire. That was a mere taking back of what had once been a Polish possession. It was only now that Batory and his army were really to plunge into the heart of the enemy’s country. In the Polish camp opinion was divided, as it had been at the opening of the previous campaign. Some wanted to march from Czasniki, the new point of concentration, half­way between Smolensk and Vielikie-Louki, straight on Smol­ensk, while others desired to move on Pskov. Batory decided to strike at Vielikie-Louki, a fortress standing in the midst of a rich and populous country, used by the Russians as a store­house for their war material, and the usual base of their opera­tions against Lithuania.

The invading army, reinforced by the infantry recruited on the royal properties, the organization of which had been some­what delayed, was a little stronger, numerically speaking, than it had been in the previous year. Its effective strength now amounted to about 17,500 men, 8,321 of whom were Polish or Hungarian infantry, and a Lithuanian contingent which may be reckoned at about 10,000 men. The march to Vielikie- Louki was a severe one. To avoid crossing the Dvina under the guns of Vielije, another fortress in the same region, the Poles cut their way through thick forests, and split up their forces to such an extent that one corps of 6,000 men completely lost contact with the main body of the troops. The foolhardi­ness of this operation has been criticised, but its boldness would seem justified by the remoteness of the Muscovite

forces, which were concentrated at Novgorod, Pskov, and Smolensk, far from the theatre of war, while the body of troops which adventured itself alone was commanded by the new leader of the Polish contingent, in whose person Batory had unexpectedly discovered the best of all his lieutenants. This leader’s name was John Zamoyski, and he had succeeded a man of the old school, Nicholas Mielegki, who, during the previous campaign, had been more distinguished by his bravery than by his military talent. Zamoyski, who was more of the statesman than the warrior, and a former warden of Padua, did not at first appear destined to eclipse him. His conduct was a revelation. While the King carried Ousviat, as he marched along, Zamoy­ski, by a skilful manoeuvre, turned the defences of Vielije, took possession of that town, and joined the main army close to Viflikie-Louki.

Here the Poles found a surprise awaiting them. The Musco­vite embassy had arrived. For awhile, Ivan had hesitated as to the course he should pursue. To send it marching after the invading army was a cruel humiliation. After the fall of Vielije, the Tsar summoned one of those assemblies, the story of which I have already told (p. 133, etc.); and as it decided in favour of a desperate resistance, he commanded his Ambas­sadors, Prince Ivan Sitski, Roman Mikhailovitch Pivov, and Thomas Palentielev, to retrace their steps. But very soon the emissaries sent out to reconnoitre brought back alarming news. ‘ The Poles were as thick as plant-lice.’ And again Ivan made up his mind to treat, though he gave his envoys fresh instruc­tions, which proved him more ready to defend himself on the field of diplomacy than on the battlefield. He offered Batory Courland, which had never belonged to Russia, and sixty-five Livonian towns, skilfully chosen, thirty-five others to remain in his own hands. Sitski and Pivov began by de­manding that the siege of Vielikie-Louki should be instantly raised, and they themselves received on Polish ground : for no Tsar had ever consented to treat on his own territory. They received a rather rough reply, and consented to enter on their business without further preliminary. But Batory demanded the whole of Livonia, with Vielikie-Louki and Smolensk as well. The negotiations hung fire, and while the Russian envoys were referring back to the Tsar, Zamoyski was pressing the town hard. Its ramparts, like those of most Muscovite fortresses, were only built of wood—a double range of heavy boards, filled in with soil, which resisted the red-hot balls. And the Polish artillery, weak and badly handled, was quite unable to silence the heavy fire kept up by the besieged. But one fine day a Mazovian peasant set fire to one of the towers at the risk of his own life, and the garrison offered to

capitulate. Conditions were actually under discussion, but the Hungarians could not wait. They and their leader, Gaspard Bekiesz, an old political rival of Batory’s, always showed an impetuosity as exaggerated as their want of dis­cipline was excessive. Fancying the booty on which they had been reckoning was about to slip through their fingers, or that the lion’s share would go to the Poles, they threw themselves upon the town, and in the wild melee that ensued nothing was spared. Eve® monks carrying crosses and ikons in procession were murdered, though Zamoyski vainly strove to restore order. He only succeeded in saving two voievodes.

As a consequence, the whole, of that country lay at the victor’s mercy. Prince Khilkov, who had been holding it with a strong detachment of troops, was beaten by the Polish, Hungarian, and German cavalry, under Prince Zbaraski. The town of Nevel was set on fire, and capitulated, and the Poles did not prove over-scrupulous in their observation of the conditions they themselves had granted. In the European warfare of that period this was a pretty general rule. On most occasions, pretexts for neglecting engagements were discovered. Ozierichtche fell almost without a struggle. Zavolotche, better protected by the fact that the waters of the Lake of Podsoch very nearly transformed it into a fortified island, withstood the first assault. A bridge broke down under the besiegers’ feet, and the szlachta had a¹ ready begun to talk of beating a retreat, for its members wanted to get home for Christmas. But Zamoyski, proving himself as cunning a diplomatist as he was a capable leader of troops, induced his Poles and Hungarians to vie with each other on the two bridges he built to replace the broken one. Religious feeling entered into this. Volunteers who had just received the Holy Com­munion and listened to an appropriate sermon, offered their services to lead the attack, and on October 23, 1580, the town was taken. According to a Polish chronicler, the Muscovite voievodes, who had been obstinately determined to hold out, were forced into capitulation by a mutiny amongst the garrison.

A single success achieved by one of the Tsar’s lieutenants, Ivan Mikha'ilovitch Boutourline, did not compensate for all these disasters. This Muscovite leader surprised the titular Khan of Smolensk, Filon Kmita, on the Lithuanian frontier, surrounded him with a superior force, killed 700 of his men, and took all his artillery—ten guns. But, notwithstanding this, the whole of one large province of Russia was in the hands of the Poles, and when these returned to their winter quarters the Lithuanians carried on the campaign, seized Kholm, burnt Stara'fa-Roussa, and even forced their way into Livonia, where they took possession of the castle of Smilten, and, with Magnus’

help, ravaged the province of Derpt right up to the Muscovite frontier.

The Swedes, on their side, did not stand idle. In November,

1580, Pontus dt la Gardie had made a raid into Carelia, and taken Kexholm, at which place, so the Livonian chroniclers declare, 2,000 Russians met their death. Another body of Swedish troops besieged Padis, some six leagues from Revel, and after tliirteen weeks of the most desperate resistance, in the course of which the besieged, commanded by their voievode Tchikhatchev, devoured hides, straw, and even, as it has been believed, human flesh, the town was carried by assault. Then came the turn of Livonia, where Pontus de la Gardie suddenly appeared in the spring of 15S1, and shortly captured Wesem- berg. Thus was a third robber making himself ready to snatch the conquest which had already brought his foes halfway on their victorious road to his capital, from the Tsar’s grasp.

And meanwhile Batory, to whom, in February, 1581, the Diet had granted fresh subsidies for another two years, was pre­paring for his third campaign. With the prestige he had now acquired, with the experience he had gained, and his seasoned army, hot with the glory of so many triumphs—whither would he not go ? And on his heels another army followed : the Jesuits, who were carrying on a religious campaign, of which the effects were already felt in the Russo-Lithuanian countries, and even in Livonia. Since 1576, Batory, who favoured these efforts, had been hoping, thus aided, to break the links that bound these countries to Orthodox Russia or Protestant Germany, and at Vilna the Fathers had been able to celebrate the conversion of eighty Lutherans and fifty catechumens of the Greek rite (Lubkovitch, ‘ Contributions to the History of the Jesuits in the Russo-Lithuanian Countries,’ Warsaw, 1888 ; in Russian).

The aims of this endeavour were far distant, and its nature was most wide-embracing. The triumphant current of Catholi­cism was to flow across Livonia and so reach Sweden, where, thanks to Catherine Jagellon. Rome had once more gained a footing. When the ground lost there had been recovered, the Reformation was to be shut up and stilled within a hostile circle, and Muscovy, once vanquished, was to undergo recapture by victorious Rome. And thus, under the hero she had chosen to be her leader, and by the victories which contemporary nations already took to be a sign from God, the foremost of the Slav races of that day was to solve the twofold problem, political and religious, on which the future of the North-West of Europe hung, and there was to be an end of the ‘ third Rome ’ and all the ambitious hopes therewith connected.

Ivan must have felt all this, no doubt, and must have felt

also how powerless he was to avert the danger by force of arms. The ring of fortresses within which he had fancied himself safe was broken. Slowly but surely the tide of invasion was- advancing. After Viclikie-Louki, Novgorod and Pskov would open their gates. And the Tsar was less than ever able to think of pitting his ill-equipped, badly-drilled, armed bands, so utterly deficient in cohesion, against these formidable troops, before whom even fortresses could make no stand. The only refuge left him was diplomacy.

VII.—The Diplomatic Interlude.

By the month of September, 1580, without even waiting for Rezanov’s return, Ivan made up his mind to appeal from Vienna to Rome. His new envoy, Istoma Chevriguine, was ordered to solicit the Pope’s intervention, and to represent ‘ Batoura ' —Ivan, a little out of ignorance and a little out of scorn, con­tinued to deform the King’s name after this fashion—as being the Sultan’s ally. But this effort could not take effect as- rapidly as the necessity of the case demanded ; wherefore the Tsar’s Ambassadors, multiplying their concessions and swallow­ing the most painful insults in the process, continued to allow the victor to drag them in his train. They had been ordered, in January, 1581, to Warsaw, where, having added a fresh list of Livonian towns to those they had already offered Poland, they flattered themselves they were about to obtain a truce and the preliminaries of a peace. But the answer they were given was, ‘ The whole of Livonia, or war !’ In their report they note the fact of their having been forced by threats and abuse to kiss the hand of the King, who, this time again, when the Tsar’s name was pronounced in his presence, had not risen to his feet, nor even desired them to greet the Sovereign in his name, and they had been obliged to depart empty- handed.

Ivan realized that he must give in. He was to bow before Fate, and to bend his back lower and lower. He wrote a mighty humble letter to ‘ Batoura,’ in which—and for the first time—he addressed the King as ‘ brother,’ and announced the departure of another embassy. The envoys, Evstafii Mikhaiilo- vitch Pouchkine, Feodor Andreievitch Pissemski, and Andrew Trofinov, were ordered to endure every kind of ill-treatment, and even blows, without complaint. The Tsar had come to that! And he now offered Poland the whole of I^: vonia, except four towns. He would even give up his title ; but he could not refrain from mingling some bitter with all this sweet, and seasoning his imul concession with an epigram. The Ambas­sadors were further to say that, in spite of all, their

Sovereign was ‘ not a Sovereign of yesterday.’ If they were asked what they meant, they were to reply, ‘ The Sovereign who is that knows himself !’

Ivan’s cleverness was one of the most dangerous factors in his character, and he was quite capable of sacrificing a province to a sally, and then patching up the damage by some fresh sacrifice of his dignity, which he always fancied himself to be protecting after this fashion.

So eagerly did he hum' forward his envoys’ departure that they reached Vilna, where Batory had desired them to meet him, long before the appointed date. In spite of all apparent probabilities, the Tsar still hoped to prevent any resumption of hostilities. But, in the King of Poland’s mind, Vilna was but one stage on the road of the new conquests he was medi­tating. When he readied that town, in May, the Russian Ambassadors heard him demand, not Livonia only, but Nov­gorod, Pskov, Smolensk, the whole of Sievieria, and a war indemnity of 400,000 ducats! When Pouchkine and his comrades sent a messenger to Moscow to ask for orders, Batory had him accompanied by a courier ot his own, Dzier- zek by name, who conveyed an ultimatum which reduced his claims to some extent, but still insisted on Livonia and the indemnity, though he limited his further demands to the razing of certain frontier fortresses. And the Polish King would only wait for his answer till June 4.

At that moment Chevriguirte’s mission was already producing some preliminary effect. I shall show, a little further on, how the Pope had yielded to the charm of the idea of a mediation, which, even if completely successful, could not have made up, from the Catholic point of view, for the advantages likely to accrue from Poland’s decisive triumph. The appointed mediator, a Jesuit named Possevino, was actually at Vilna, and the fact of his presence there was infinitely useful to Ivan. Roma locuta crat. If the Holy See pronounced against the continuance of the war, Poland’s onward progress would be checked, and stopped outright, if she persevered, by the thunders of the Vatican. The Tsar fancied so, at all events, and, recovering himself at once, he treated Dzierzek much as Batory had treated his own Ambassadors, and sent his courier back with a letter for the King beginning thus : ‘ We, Ivan Vassilevitch, the humble, Tsar and Grand-Duke of Russia ... by the grace of God, and not by the turbulent will of man. . . .’ This opening phrase will enable my readers to guess the rest for themselves. In Kojalowkz’s edition the document covers three-and-twenty printed pages. After para­phrasing the Psalms of David after a fashion of his own, call­ing Batory an Amalek, a Sennacherib, a Maxentius, greedy of

bloodshed, and declaring that unless peace was made forthwith he would send no Ambassador into Poland, nur receive any from that country, for the next thirty or forty years, Ivan rejected the ultimatum in every particular. And more : he retracted his previous concessions, and refused to be satisfied with only four Livonian towns. He must keep six-and-thirty—Narva and Derpt among the number—and would only give up Vielikie-Louki and twenty-four small fortified places in the neighbourhood. This was his ‘ final calculation.’

He was labouring under some illusion as to Possevino’s power. When his letter, and the instructions he sent with it, arrived at Vilna, Batory was not there. The King had already reached Polotsk, and was preparing to march out his army. The Jesuit and the Muscovite envoys followed him, and the Papal envoy did his best to mediate. But Pouchkine and Pissemski were as intractable now as they had lately been docile and conciliatory. When Possevino inquired why the Tsar had altered his proposals, ‘ The New Testament wipes out the Old,’ was Pouchkine’s scornful answer; ‘ the King of Poland had refused the Tsar’s first offers, and the Tsar was now making others, and would add nothing more—not that!’ he added, and twisted a bit of straw in his fingers as he spoke. Batory, on his side, was in no humour for more negotiations. He must, no doubt, show some consideration for the Papal mediation ; so he undertook to tell Possevino he would give up the indemnity and the destruction of the strong places. But he certainly never expected the Russians to take him at his word. As a matter of fact, Ivan’s Ambassadors turned a deaf ear, and the King, hurrying forward the date of their fare­well audience, told them he was going to set forth without more delay, and make war—‘ not to take Livonia, but every­thing their master owned.’ The Jesuit perceived he would gain. nothing here by insistence. He announced his intention of proceeding to the Tsar’s Court, ift the hope of bringing him back to a better state of mind, and Batory wished him a pleasant journey. But the Polish army was already on its march.

Batory would even have left Ivan’s last letter unanswered altogether, but the King’s counsellors did not wish the German and Polish gazettes to remain under the impression produced by the insults it had contained. The effusion of ink and blood had been simultaneous up to this, and the same course must be pursued. The royal Chancery was set desperately to work, and evolved an epistle numbering forty pages—so that the insulter might have full measure—which reminded him that his mother had been the daughter of a mere Lithuanian deserter, and attacked his own public and private life,

denouncing both his debauchery and his bloodshed. The Tsar had reproached the King with seeking to ally himself with the Sultan. To this Batory triumphantly opposed Ivan’s marriage with a Moslem wom;m —the Temrioukovna Tsarina— and the customs of his ancestors, ‘ who licked the mares’ milk off the Tartar horses’ manes.’ His reluctance to making any personal appearance on the battlefield was not forgotten, and that was a fair hit. ‘ A hen defends her chicks against the hawk and the eagle, but thou, a two-headed eagle, hidest thy head !’ This last apostrophe was followed by a challenge to single combat, which my readers may think ridiculous ; but such a proposal is quite within the precedents of that period. In 1561, Erik XIV. sent a similar challenge to Dudley, whom he regarded as hi* rival with Queen Elizabeth. And nobody expected the Tsar to take up the glove.

He never thought of it for an instant, and was more than ever driven to ‘ hide himsell.’ His treasury’ was empty, his country worn out, his boiars demoralized, and all his resources exhausted. At one moment, so the chroniclers assure us, there were not more than 300 men with him at Staritsa. Yet, convinced that Batory’s next blow would be struck at Pskov, he contrived to throw' a strong garrison, the flower of his troops, into that town. It was well provisioned and supplied with powerful artillery. The Tsar could rely on its keeping back the Poles for a considerable time, *nd under the w'alls of the town, even if no relieving army was there to confront him, Batory would meet Moscow’s most formidable ally in every one of her wars of defence: winter was close at hand. Possevino had not been in time to stop the King’s departure, but the King’s campaign had been begun too late.

VIII.—The Siege of Pskov.

He had been obliged to spend the whole spring parleying with his Diet. ‘ The King has given all he can out of his own pocket,’ cried Zamoyski to the deputies. ‘ What more do you ■expect of him ? Would you have him flay himsell alive ? He would do it readily enough, if any alchemist had discovered the secret of making gold out of human skin !’ When he had contrived to squeeze out subsidies for another year, and that only on condition that the w’ar was brought to an end, the •collection of the taxes voted w^Tas very much delayed. The King pawned the crown jewels, got 50,000 crowns from the Duke of Anspach, and as much from the Elector of Branden­burg, and started. But at Disna a fresh hitch occurred. The troops were as slow about coming in as the taxes had been.

21

And meanwhile the King was informed that a body of Russian troops which had been collected at Moja'isk had made a raid into Lithuania towards Smolensk, burnt two thousand villages, laid a whole province waste from Orcha to Mohylev, and carried away the entire population, peasants and nobles alike, to the further bank of the Dnieper. It was not till July 15, and then by travelling sixteen leagues a day, that Batory reached Polotsk, where he reviewed his army ; and on the 29th he arrived at Zavolotche, and there held a council. So far was the season advanced that it was difficult to know what course should be pursued. There had been an idea of attacking Novgorod. But, as Ivan had foreseen, the choice fell on Pskov, which was nearer. And even so, it was clear the town would not surrender before the cold weather came. Batory’s corre­spondence proves him to have resolutely accepted the con­tingency of a winter campaign, in the course of which either Pskov would be taken or Ivan forced to make peace. To retain possession of Pskov, the Tsar would give up Livonia, and, owing to the intervention of Rome and the attitude taken up by the Diet, the King was fain to ask no more, and go no further, for the present.

On August 25 the Poles, who had carried the town of Ostrov as they marched along, arrived under the walls of Pskov. They were struck by the. size of the town and its imposing appearance. ‘ It is like another Paris,’ wrote the Secretary of the King's Chancery, Piotrowski. in his diary, which has come down to us. This observation is repeated, word for word, in the ‘ Memoirs ’ of Muller, another eye-witness. Pskov, which had been in a state of defence, and kept constantly forti­fied, for hundreds of years, on account of the proximity of the Germans, possessed stone ramparts, to which a strong sur­rounding palisade had recently been added. Within the walls- two Princes of the Chou'iski family, Vassili Feodorovitch and Ivan Petrovitch—the last-named a grandson of the Regent, with whom we made acquaintance during Ivan’s minority— both of them brave and experienced men, commanded 30,000 troops, according to Russian author ities, or 40,000, according to the Poles. Both calculations are certainly excessive as regards the effective force available, and properly so-called, and as certainly below the mark, if we reckon the ‘ eaters of bread.’ as Rodolfini, a Venetian who served as a Colonel in the Polish army, denominated the serving-men and labourers who fol­lowed in its train, and some of whom, at all events, were capable of using firearms in a moment of need. He reckoned, the total of these at 170,000 men. A considerable number of these must also have, been attached to the garrison of Pskov, but the information we possess as to that period is quite devoid

of the accuracy of our modem statistics. As to the Polish army, more exact data can be had from the Treasury accounts, which I have already consulted. They give us 21,102 men, about half of them infantry—or only 18,940, according to another calculation—as having been under Batory’s orders, together with some 10,000 Lithuanians.

It was a small army to undertake the siege of a town ‘ like Paris.’ Heidenstein, the official historian or the campaign (on the Polish side) does mention the 24,000 splendid horses that defiled before the astonished eyes of the natives of the town. But he must have seen double, just as Ivan saw triple, and more, when he complained that * Bn.toura ’ had armed ‘ all Italy against him.’ At the date mentioned by Heidenstein there were only 6,469 Polish and 674 Hungarian cavalry in Batory’s camp, and all Italy had sent him was a few engineers, just as France had sent him one or two officers, like that Captain Garon of whom Piotrowski tells us, ‘ a little man, a good musician, and very brave,’ who went, ‘ dear frog!’ and measured the town ditches with his sword. A Gascon this, no doubt—a valiant soldier, we may be sure !

But he could not suffice to capture a first-class fortress which seemed resolved on a desperate resistance. We may even doubt, considering the means Batory had at his disposal, whether he really proposed to lay a regular siege. His artillery did not reach a total of more than twenty guns, and his supply of powder was to fail after the very first week. The King probably reckoned on his cavalry to enable him to cut the town off, and so reduce it by hunger. But he himself was no better prepared for a winter before the walls of Pskov. He had been obliged to spare the nerves of his army, which would have taken fright at the sight of the necessary supplies, the tents and the provisions. And lack ot money had combined with the lateness of the date on which he had begun his cam­paign to upset his plans and throw his calculations out. The game in which he had risked his stake was a most dangerous one, indeed. But his own genius and the forward impulse imparted by his previous successes were strong chances in his favour, and were destined, in fact, to decide the issue of the straggle.

It is not easy to reconstitute the history of this struggle, even, and perhaps especially, from that mural point of view in which its chief interest resides. The Russian and Polish authorities, though they agree as to its details, are in perpetual disagree­ment as to its essence, as to the attitude of the combatant parties, and the general features of their battles. Wlxile one side declares a most important part was played by the sorties made by the besieged, the other asserts that the garrison was

not nearly so enterprising, and always hung nervously back under the cover of its own guns. On the other hand, Polish documents lay stress on the constant and effectual work performed by small detachments of Russian troops, which scoured the whole country, worried the besiegers, and inter­fered with their convoy service. On the Russian side, we are told the population of Pskov was as enthusiastic as its de­fenders were brave, that it backed them up in all their en­deavours, and agreed with them that the town must resist to the bitter end. Another version comes to us from Polish authorities. Nothing but the energy displayed by the Chouiski prevented the tckern (common people) from bringing about a comparatively early capitulation.

As to this last point, we have what would appear decisive testimony from a Russian source. When the two Chouiski were appointed to their joint command, the Tsar made them accompany him to the Church of the Assumption, and there take an oath to defend the town to the last extremity. Several times over they were obliged to make the inhabitants of Pskov take the same oath. This proves the population was not of itself very strongly inclined to hold out. It must be added that the most important Polish document dealing with this episode in our possession, the Abbe Piotrowski’s journal is the production of a malcontent, embittered by the length of the war and the weariness of a winter campaign. Even at Polotsk he had thought Batory was asking too much, and that the war ought to have ended then, without further parley. ‘ Everybody was tired of it.’ At Pskov, naturally, everything was wrong, in his eyes, and as the siege dragged on he grew more and mort inclined to exaggerate the suffering on both sides.

The undoubted fact is that the Poles’ first attack, on Sep­tember 8, 1581, was valiantly repulsed by the Russians, who inflicted cruel loss upon their adversaries. Gabriel Bekiesz, brother of the intrepid leader of the Hungarian cavalry, who had himself succumbed to the fatigue endured in the course of the previous campaign, lost his life on this occasion. And it was long before the attempt could be renewed. The Poles’ supply of ammunition was already insufficient, and now a powder magazine at Susza exploded. More powder had to be fetched from Riga, and Batory had ample time to study the art of war as expounded in the book by Count Reinhardt von Solms, sent him by the grandson of Charles V.’s illustrious Marshal, While the besieged rained insults on the besiegers: ‘ Why don’t you shoot ? There is no common-sense in trying to take a town when you can’t make your guns talk ! You’ll gain nothing if you sit looking at our ramparts for the next two years !’

When the end of October came, cold and fever were deci­mating the ranks of the Polish army. There were not more than :orty horses in any squadron, so Piotrowski tells us, and the Lithuanians wore beginning to talk of taking their depar­ture. Batory had to call their leaders together and harangue them. Things grew worse when the Xing thought it his duty to proceed to Warsaw to persuade the Diet to make another effort. A fresh assault, delivered on November 3, after the expected convoy from Riga had arrived, was no more successful then the first; the guns were dismounted from the batteries, and peace awaited more confidently than ever. The chief command was now in the hands of Zamoyski, and the most recent Polish historians have delighted to exalt his merits to the detriment of the ‘ Maygar King.’ But would he have succeeded in keeping his army together, and inducing it to face the cruel trials oi this siege, if he had not been backed by a Sovereign whose temperament and grp were known to all ? It is more than doubtful. Without Davout and Lannes, Massena and Ney, Napoleon would probably have failed to win most of his batries, and it was when he was left with Grouchy that the end came at Waterloo. And all Zamoyski did was to carry out a plan which nobody ascribes to anyone but Batory, and which, in the long-run, was to r-ove the best possible under the circumstances. The men of Pskov were to be convinced, at last, that a town may be taken ‘ by looking at it ’! The Poles did not fire their guns, but they kept their lines intact, and stopped all communication between the fortress and the outer world, and the supply of provisions Ivan had brought together was not inexhaustible. ¹ " i J

Meanwhile, in Livonia, into which country Ivan was now powerless to send a single man, the Swedes were pursuing their victorious career. Poland had now more reason to fear these too independent allies of hers than to hope much from their help. Yet they struck hard blows at the common foe. In the course of the summer Horn and Pontus, at first acting inde­pendently, and then in unison, carried Lode, Fickel, and Hapsal, and in September they laid siege to Narva. The German town capitulated, after a siege which, according to the Livonian chroniclers, cost 7.000 lives, and the Russian town was surrendered by Athanasius Bielski. By the end of Novem­ber all the coasts of the Gulf of Finland were in the hands of the Swedes, who succeeded in capturing the English ships that were bringing war supplies to Ivan. De la Gardie threatened Pemau, Derpt, and Fellin, and was on the point of taking possession of the last ramparts of the Muscovite conquest in that country. 3x3

These triumphs produced their natural effect at Pskov, by

strengthening the pacific inclinations to which both sides were beginning to lean. At the close of November the besiegers’ courage was warmed by an intercepted message from Chouiski to the Tsar. According to its tenor, the town, which was starving, could not hold out much longer unless help was sent. A few days later, indeed, two bo'iars of the garrison, who had been captured by the Poles, told quite a different tale. The besieged, they said, had plenty of bread and of everything else, except meat. But at that moment Batory’s plenipoten­tiaries were actually starting to meet Ivan’s envoys at Iam- Zapolski, and there, under Possevino’s mediation, to treat for peace.

The part played by the Pope’s Legate in this business has been viewed in various ways. To shed light on the contro­versy, I must go back to the origin of a mission which, from a more general point of view, marks an epoch in the diplomatic relations between Rome and Moscow.

CHAPTER II

THE LOSS OF LIVONIA—ROME AND MOSCOW

I. Ch£.VRIGUINE*S MISSION. II.—THE PAPAL MEDIATION. III.

—THE TRUCE OF IAM-ZAPOLSKI. IV.—POSSEVINO AT MOSCOW.

V.—THE DAY AFTFR THE TRUCE.

I.—Chevriguine’s Mission.

Thk despatch of Chevriguine to Rome was an unprecedented event. Advances, up to that time, had always come from the Papal Court, and Poland had always interposed, and brought every attempt to nought, while Venice, to whose interest it was that commercial relations with Muscovy should be opened, vainly strove against the opposition of a watchful and suspicious diplomatic system. Batory’s predecessor had stopped Pius IV.’s emissaries—Canobio, Giraldi, and Boni- faccio—on their way.

In 1570, Pope Pius V.’s Nuncio in Poland, Vincenzo del Portico, had endeavoured to mediate between Ivan and Sigismund-Augustus, with a view to forming a league against the Turks. But Ivan's envoy at Constantinople was at that very moment representing his master as exceedingly well disposed towards the Sultan. This fact became known at Rome, and the perusal of a memorandum drawn up by Albert Schlichting, a soldier of Prussian origin, who had escaped

from a Moscow prison after a detention lasting seven years, still further contributed to chill the Sovereign Pontiff’s ardour. In 1576 a fresh attempt was made. The Pope’s Nuncio, Laureo, driven out of Poland by the double election of Batory and Maximilian, conferred on (ierman soil with the two Russian envoys, Sougorski and Artsybachev. The new Legate at the Emperor’s Court. Cardinal Morone, had a hand in this negotia­tion, and, duly authorized by Gregory XIII., chose Rudolph Clenke, a man of learning, gifted with a strong constitution and an adventurous spirit, to bring about the long-wished-for agreement. But Poland was on the watch, and at the very last moment Maximilian objected to the departure of the chosen representative. In 1575. too, during Batory’s first campaign, Laureo’s successor, Caligari, renewed Portico’s attempt, but with no better success.

Now it was the Tsar who took the first step. He deputed Leonti Istoma Chevriguine, known to foreigners as Thomas Severingen, to propose that very league against the Turks on which the Roman calculations, half political, half religious, were all based, and to set forth the preliminary condition he demanded. This condition was that the King of Poland should be advised, and if necessary’ forced, to make peace. On his way through Prague, w'here the Emperor gave him a somewhat chilly reception, Chevriguine entered into relations with the Papal Nuncio and the Venetian envoy. Doubt has been expressed as to whether he had any mission to the Re­public at all. He certainly was not even acquainted with the Doge’s titles, and believed Venice to be part of the Papal States. But on his way to Prague he had taken him two companions—a Livonian German, named Wilhelm Popler, and a Milanese Italian, Francese Pallavicini. These tw'O men were better informed than he, and possessed a lively imagination as well. Attended by these acolytes, he proceeded to Venice, and presented the Doge with a letter from the Tsar, forged by himself, as Father Pierling believes (‘ Russia and the Holy See,’ ii. 14, etc.), to constitute a claim on the liberality of the Signory, or fabricated at Rome, as Monsieur Ouspienski sup­poses (‘ Relations of Rome with Moscow,’ Journal of the Min. of Public Instruction, August, 1885), so as to ensure the association of the Republic with the missionary undertaking the Roman authorities were now hoping to initiate.

This improvised Ambassador does not seem to have made any very great effort, diplomatically speaking. He enjoyed the civilities heaped upon him, spoke in a general way of commercial relations which might be established, with a some­what vague reference to the route by the Caspian and the

Volga ; talked too freely, and so revealed the difficulties of his master’s position ; and hurried off to Rome, where he arrived on February 24, 1581.

He was made welcome at first, and better treated than his rank—that of a mere courier (goniets)—warranted. But the perusal of the letter— genuine this time—he had brought from his master cast a chill over things. It expressed the Tsar’s wish that the Pope should order Batory to ‘ renounce the Moslem alliance and the war he was mo king against the Christians.’ But as to the religious question his message breathed never a word. Ivan was asking a great deal, and offering nothing at all, and the Roman authorities w^rere well informed as to the extent of the Porte’s share in the war that was being carried on. Yet the temptation to open inter­course by hook or by crook was too great, and the Pope decided to send an emissary to Moscow, charged with the duty of presenting the terms of the problem in their proper order : the religious union first of all, and after that the political understanding. Polish influences may, as some have supposed, have had something to do with the adoption of this plan. In any case, and from every point of view, it was the wisest.

But once the emissary had been chosen, matters, under his personal influence, went further still. Possevino was a dip­lomat by profession. He had been employed, twice over, in 1578 and 1580, on a somewhat similar mission to the Court of Sweden. He had been appuinted Vicar Apostolic for all the North of Europe, had acquired a certain reputation for cleverness, and betrayed a strong inclination to suppress the spiritual in favour of the temporal side of his mission, and even to sacrifice the former to the latter. At Stockholm, where he had appeared dressed as a nobleman, sword on hip and bonnet in hand, he had not achieved any union with Rome, but he had been an active agent in the negotiations between Sweden and Poland for that alliance against Moscow which had turned out so ill. In 1579, he waited on Batorv at Vi’na, and with the same object. So well did he now play his cards that the Court of Rome, swayed by his influence, allowed itself to be led, unconsciously, to set politics before religion.

The idea of a league against Islam was a chimera. Portugal, Philip’s new conquest, gave him too much trouble, and Venice had too many new-found interests in the Levantine seaports. But at Rome, as at Moscow, this same league—perpetu­ally put forward, though Rome knew right well there was nothing and nobody behind it—was a sort of decorative facade, which concealed other and more practical arrange­

ments. The Papacy, even if its attempt to induce the European Powers to arm for a fresh crusade resulted in failure, perceived a means, if so much as a mutual concert could be organized under its own auspices for such a purpose, of re­covering some portion, at all events, of its ancient supremacy. At several points, already, Protestantism seemed to be shrink­ing backwards. Alexander Famese was gaining ground in the Low Countries. The Guises were lifting their heads in France. In Sweden, the Queen, whose husband had already been secretly won over, was bringing up her son a fervent Catholic. In Poland the dissidents had no existence save as a political party ; and Livonia, once lost to Germany, would be lost, likewise, to the Reformers. Very soon, according to the Roman view, the Reform would have nothing left save England, a portion of the Empire, and little Denmark. If, Muscovy and Poland once reconciled, it became possible, under pretext of common action against the Turks, to induce the House of Hapsburg and Venice to form a coalition of which Rome would be the natural president, she might yet rule the whole world once more !

The Papacy was approaching that phase of mind in which, realities being non-existent, appearances themselves become very precious things.

The Pope’s brief to Ivan, in response to his letter, was inspired by all these considerations. His Holiness accepted the League, and the condition on which the Tsar made it contingent. He. would intervene between the Tsar and the King of Poland. But on his side he burdened his mediation with conditions. Peace must be ensured by a bond—a bond only to be found in the bosom of the true Church. It was a bold move, b-it in Possevino’s secret instructions, which he himself had helped to draw up, the sense of this reply was greatly attenuated. According to these, the union of the two Churches continued to be the higher end to which the J esuit’s mission was to tend ; but his duties were reduced, practically speaking, to the attainment of two essentially secular objects —the establishment of commercial relations with Venice, and the re-establishment of peace between Poland and the Tsar. For the rest, His Holiness would be content with a minimum result. If Ivan should refuse to consent to the building of a church, or to allowing the Jesuits to settle in his capital, Possevino was to be content, for the present, with opening up regular intercourse with him.

Taking it all in all, Chevriguine had succeeded far better than his master could have expected. This barbarian, whom Rome could not dazzle, either with her works of art or her ecclesiastical pomp, and who, though he did show more

interest in the Pope’s presents—a magnificent Agnus Dei, a gold chain, and a purse of 600 ducats—would not say he was satisfied with them—this boor had not only succeeded in bringing about the reconciliation which Poland had so labori­ously opposed—he had done it in spite of her. For while Batory had been going from triumph to triumph, and from conquest to conquest, Rome and Moscow had agreed to snatch the fruits of his victory out of his hands. And that although the Tsar’s envoy had in no wise flattered the hopes of the Papal Court as to the religious advantages it might ultimately attain. This is proved by the correspondence of the Cardinal of Como, who drew up the greater part of the instructions Possevino took with him. Writing to Caligari, he expresses, in the clearest language, his conviction that Ivan’s step had been dictated, not by any good intentions such as might give Rome reason to rejoice, but by the hard knocks which had been dealt him : ‘ Non nasce de buone intezione, ma solo delle buone battiture.’

Chevriguine left Rome on March 27, 1581, carrying a living testimony to his success with him ; Possevino was his fellow-traveller. Together, on the road Ivan’s envoy had already trodden at Venice and the Imperial Court, they were to carry out their preconcerted plan. The Pope’s Legate expounded the common proposals before the Council of Ten. The Signory divided them up at once, and without any hesitation, in the manner most convenient to itself. Enter into commercial relations with Moscow ? Good ; that was a long-wished-for event. Reconcile the Tsar with the King of Poland ? Good again ; peace was indispensable to trade. As to the rest, they left it all to Rome. The Doge, Nicola da Ponte, expressly asserted, in the course of a confi­dential conversation with Possevino, that since Lepanto his faith in leagues was utterly broken. Both at Vienna and at Prague the idea of the League was entirely put aside The Emperor, indeed, would not show himself at all, and the Legate only saw the Archduke Ernest, who, having been a candidate for the Polish Crown, viewed Muscovite affairs solely from that particular point of view. The Austrian diplomats probably found it easy to see through the quibble on which this new understanding betweeh Moscow and Rome, the expenses of which were to be borne bv Poland, was based. ‘ The King of Poland’s whip,’ wrote Possevino to the Cardinal of Como, ‘ is, perhaps, our best means of introducing the catechism into Muscovy.’ Ch6vriguine, emboldened by the advantages he had gained, flattered himself he would be able, when he returned from Vienna, to carry his master the title of Emperor of the East. All he got for himself was a

purse of 100 florins, and then the comrades parted—the Russian proceeding to Lubeck, while the Jesuit took his way to Vilna, there to begin his duties as a mediator.

II.—The Papal Mediation.

The Papal Xuncic, Caligari, had already informed the King of Poland of the Legate’s approaching arrival, and requested passports for him. His reception had been cool in the ex­treme. The Rector of the College of Wilna, Skarga, himself a Jesuit, considered the mission most inopportune. Batory, in addition to the general reasons which made him share this opinion, had others of a more private nature, which led him to suspect the present policy of the Holy See. For some time the Pope had been holding him out hopes of a conquest of Wallachia, then just about to change masters, and it was a well-known fact at Warsaw that Gregory XIII. was secretly assisting the candidature of Peter Czerczel, who was supported by the French. Advices from Rome also made it evident that Cardinal Mudrucci, a former Papal Nuncio in Germany, had been present at the Congregation which had decided on the appointment of Possevino, and the conferences between the Legate and the Archduke Ernest could not fail to stir sus­picion in the King of Poland’s mind.

The passports were granted, nevertheless, and Possevino found Batory in a more friendly frame of mind. The delay about opening his campaign had something to do with tliis, we may be sure. In the Sovereign’s immediate circle there was open talk of putting an end to the business by a peace of some sort or kind. When, towards the close of July, 1581, the Pope’s envoy started for Ivan’s residence, and the King marched away to Pskov, the best wishes of many Poles at­tended the Jesuit’s progress. On August 20, after some misadventures, one at Smolensk especially, when, believing he was going to a dinner (obied), he very nearly attended an obiednia (Orthodox Mass), Possevino reached Staritsa, and was permitted to ‘ contemplate the calm eyes of the Tsar.’

Nothing that could have ensured the Roman representative a favourable reception hud been overlooked by the Papal Court. To his brief for the Tsar the Pope had added a letter addressed to the Tsarina Anastasia, whom the Pontiff, un­aware that she had been dead for years, and her place filled several times over, addressed as his ‘ well-beloved daughter.’ The Sovereign Pontiff’s gifts—a crucifix carved in rock crystal, enriched with gold ; a copy, in the Greek language, of the records of the Council of Florence, splendidly bound; a rosary of precious stones mounted in gold ; and a crystal

cup, also gold-mounted—were rendered more precious by the addition of a morsel of the Tme Cross, enclosed in the crucifix, and Ivan declared them worthy of the giver. At the very last moment Possevino decided to withdraw a picture of the Holy Family, in which a perfectly nude figure of St. John the Baptist might have offended eyes accustomed to a more modest style of art.

The Jesuit employed tactics which had already served him well elsewhere, m the most skilful manner, and made the great object of a common faith the foundation of his speech, though he still • contrived to keep it in the background. He was supple and insinuating, eloquent and crafty, all at once, and proved himself worthy of his mission. But his task was a hard one. The answer to the pacific overtures of the Roman envoy is a curious monument of Muscovite diplomacy. Six men of the Court were deputed to reply to the Legate, and given special instructions, so that each might treat one par­ticular point of the whole problem —the League against the Turks, the state of the negotiations already entered into with Batory, the relations with Rome, etc. But when this first work was accomplished, the Tsar’s Chancery began it all over again, in a fresh series of inquiries, superadded to the first; and which were followed by several more. In the end there was a total of six-and-thirty documents, which Possevino had to peruse. At the head of each was inscribed an invocation of the Holy Trinity, and a complete list of the Sovereign’s titles, and this whole collection was only to serve as the basis of a controversy destined to drag on for weeks and weeks, diversified with personal discussions, exchanges of notes, per­petual interventions on the part of the Tsar himself, and mis­understandings as to meanings, such as arise between people who do not speak the same language—a Tower of Babel in a Labyrinth.

From the very outset, besides, it was clear that the two parties were not agreed as to the starting-point of the negotia­tions. The Legate represented Batory as having been led by the Papal influence to consent to large concessions, and requested Ivan to take some similar step on his side. Now, the very fact of the Pope’s intervention made the Tsar ex­ceedingly grasping. Instead of coming forward, he went backward, withdrew what he had previously offered, and demanded that the siege of Pskov should be raised at once, and a Polish embassy sent to him. Was it not for that he had applied to the Pope ? Batory’s letter challenging him to fight a duel was not calculated to inspire him with more conciliatory feelings. At first he affected to speak of it more in sorrow than in anger, and when Possevino asked to be

allowed to see the document, the Tsar decided he should only be given a summary containing the political matter, and leaving out the abuse. But very soon after this he was unable to refrain from drawing up arid exhibiting a reply, in which, to facilitate his retorts, he reproduced, one after the other, the most offensive passages in the letter, and employed the most unexpected arguments. If, as Batory asserted, he had not flown to the assistance of the besieged towns, it was because he felt himself prevented from so doing by the truce he had made with his adversaries. And how could the King deny the Roman descent of the reigning house of Moscow ? If Prous had never existed, where did the name Prussia come from ?

At the end of a whole month, in fact, the mediator was no further advanced than on the day of his arrival. As to the religious question, he had gained something—no churches, indeed, and no establishment for the Jesuits, but the Tsar was most willing to keep up constant intercourse with Rome, and offered free passage through his dominions to any envoys the Pope might desire to send into Persia. This was a be­ginning, and the civilities in which every refusal was en­wrapped, the understandings coupled with every concession, gave the Pope’s representative reason to hope for still better things once peace was established. The Jesuit was always being brought back to that primordial postulate, though what the Tsar calk'd his ‘ final calculation ’—which Batory had already refused—was steadily maintained. Possevino had hoped to kill two birds with one stone by reconciling Russia with his former clients, the Swedes, likewise. Out of respect for the Pope, the Tsar agreed to depart from the rule accord­ing to which negotiations with Sweden must take place at Novgorod, and consented to receive King John’s Ambassadors at the Kremlin. But the Swedish King, instead of despatch­ing an embassy, was carrying his career of personal conquest along the Baltic coast, and it was quite clear that Ivan was resolved to make him pay for them dearly, once he himself was clear of Batory, and likewise that, for getting rid of Batory, he relied on the winter season and the Pope. Very skilfully, pitting his own tactics against his adversary’s, he applied himself to keeping the Legate in good humour, by pointing him to a far-distant mirage of religious union, while Bogdan Bielski, who, with Nicholas Zakharine, was employed to direct the negotiations, ventured an attempt—an unsuc­cessful one indeed—at corruption of a more brutal kind.

By the middle of September the Jesuit had realized he was losing his time in this quarter, and made up his mind to fall back on the Polish camp. This was just what suited

Ivan best. ‘ Go to King Stephen,’ he said, when he dismissed the Legate, ‘ salute him in our name, and when thou hast arranged peace according to the Pope’s orders come back to us, for thy presence will always be welcome here, because of the Court which sends thee, and because of thine own faithfulness in our affairs !’ He was taking the Jesuit into his service, and would gladly have paid him wages. And as the Pope had ordered peace should be made, according to the Tsar’s desire, t must be made to suit the Muscovite Sovereign’s convenience. Ivan would not hear of anything else. This is the one clear impression produced by this dip­lomatic episode.

Possevino arrived at the camp before Pskov in the early days of October, and this *ime played the part of the honest broker in most conscientious fashion. He informed the Poles as to the opinions he had arrived at during his stay at Staritsa, and endeavoured to combat those they had formed from the pamphlets written by Guagnino and Kruse. In his letters to Moscow he applied himself to representing military matters in the sense most favourable to the besiegers. The Poles, he said, were making great preparations. Supplies were coming in from Riga. Reinforcements were expected. Pskov was in a very bad way. The campaign would certainly be carried on all through the winter, and once the spring-time came there would be no possibility of stopping Batory.

All this was true enough at bottom, and proof of it may be found in those very reports, drawn up on the spot, which have produced such a contrary impression on the minds of the Polish historians. I have already quoted the Abb6 Piotrowski’s testimony as to the effective strength of the Polish cavalry, which he represents as having been reduced almost to nothing, even by the month of October. Further on, the same witness refers to a review held on December 4, in which 7.000 horses figured. And ‘ the horses are good.’ Losses cannot have been so great, then, or the Poles had been able to make them good, at all events. Possevino’s own narrative falls into another mistake. The Jesuit mentions the enthusiastic welcome which greeted him in the Polish camp. This trait, if we take it to be correct at all, can only be ascribed to the turbulent and unruly element, the exist­ence of which I have already noted, in Batory’s army—an element which both he and Zamoyski knew how to control and bend to the necessities of war. Into this the interven­tion of the Papal Legate certainly introduced an additional ferment, and incited some minds to a cowardly abandonment of duty. But as far as the chief command was concerned, the Abbe Piotrowski is the first to strike a very different note.

‘ The great General ’—he refers to Zamoyski—‘ has never met a more odious man ’—the epithet is applied to Possevino— ‘ and he means to drive him out with a stick as soon as peace is made.’ Will my readers kindly imagine the appearance as a mediator, under the walls of Paris, while the Germans were besieging that city, of the representative of any of the European Powers ? Possevino, being the Pope’s emissary, seemed the natural ally of the Polish cause, the triumph of which, even in Livonia, involved the victory of Catholicism and of the Papacy. Yet the very essence of all mediation is that it should be used against the strongest, and the strongest in this case was most incontestably Poland. As a matter of fact, the siege of Pskov was destined to last till January 15, 1582, and by that time the most difficult period would be past, the terrible trials of the winter safely faced, the besiegers over the Christmas and New Year festivals without having yielded to the tempting summons of their own hearths, and the ap­proach of spring would be bringing all the chances of success over to their side. Surrender was inevitable, and with that, Ivan’s submission to the victor’s demands. Even if Possevino hastened the issue of the conflict, all he could do was to make it rather less disadvantageous to the weakest side.

Ivan did not need the Jesuit to inform him as to the state of things at Pskov, and the condition of the Polish army, but no doubt the Legate’s letters, which confirmed his other information, convinced him he had reckoned too surely on the result of his intervention. And very soon he changed his tone, and, ‘ recognising the power of Batory and his Swedish ally,’ bowed his head once more. He was ready, now, to send Ambassadors to treat directly for peace, and he reduced his pretensions. On the twofold condition that the valley of the Vielikala and a point of territory running up to Louki should remain Russian, and that Sweden should not be included in the treaty with him. he w^Tas willing to give up the whole of Livonia. Part of this country was already in the hands of the Swedes, and, he thought, might ultimately become the object of victorious reprisals on his part, while the valley of the Vielikala would ensure him a sufficient line of defence on the north-west frontier, in rear of which he might lay the foundations of a not far distant revenge. A fresh etfort in the direction of the sea-coast would be attended by more favourable circumstances.

Well conceived as this retreat was from the strategical point of view, a retreat it was, nevertheless. Some Russian historians, in their anxiety to spare the national pride, have gone so far as to take it to be quite the contrary. According to them, the Polish army, which was almost entirely destroyed

by this time, was obliged to accept peace. The Russia of the present day can very well dispense with these travesties of the realities of history, the last and most pitiable refuge of the vanquished. In a war the result of which hangs on a siege, negotiations begun under the guns of the besieging army are simply capitulation in another form. There is only one way in which the besieged can bring the struggle to a victorious conclusion—that employed by Peter the Great under the walls of Poltava ; and the valley of the Vielika'fa notwithstanding, the abandonment of Livonia threw the political, military, and social development of Russia back more than a hundred years.

Once Ivan gave up Livonia, the object of Batory’s cam­paign was attained. The King, though he, too, might make reservations as to the future, could not refuse to treat, nor could he, Possevino being present, decline a mediator accepted by the Tsar. His opinion of this mediation is evidenced by the following fact. The Jesuit, on his own showing, had to deliver a regular assault before he could induce his Polish clients to inform liim as to their intentions with regard to the peace in connection with which he himself was to act as arbiter.

Towards the middle of November, Iam-Zapolski, on the road to Novgorod, between Zavolotche and Porkhov, was unanimously chosen as the meeting-place for the plenipoten­tiaries. Prince Eletski—who, as Zamoyski remarked, lacked nothing save a principality to make him a Prince—Roman Olferiev Verechtchaguiie, and Sviazev, a secretary, were the somewhat shabby representatives of the Tsar of all the Russias. In the persons of Prince Zbaraski, Palatine of Braclaw, Prince Albert Radziwill, Marshal of the Court, and Secretary Hara- burda, the King of Poland brought a more capable set of dip­lomatists into action. Batory’s envoys were the bearers of carefully-prepared instructions. What did these embody ? Possevino, who arrived at the same time, knew nothing about them, and wherefore, a message sent him by the King, just at this time, pretty plainly shows us. Distrust rings in every line of it. The Sovereign, not without bitterness, contrasts the devotion of Poland to the Holy See, which had stood firm for hundreds of years, with the Papal Legate’s sudden zeal for the interests of a third party, which had no evident claim to such a favour.

The quibble which lay at the foundation of the Jesuit’s mission inevitably doomed him to this disgrace. Thinks to it, even when he disappointed the hopes of one party, he was suspected by the other, and to the very end the part he played suffered from this fact. All through the Iam-Zapolski negotia­

tions, which lasted from December 13, 1581, to January 15,

1582, while the Russians were accusing him of making common cause with the Poles, Zamoyski was to call him a sycophant and a traitor, cast doubt even on the sincerity of his religious zeal, and declare him ‘ more interested in political arrange­ments than in the hierarchy of heaven.’

III.—The Truce of Iam-Zapoiski.

I will spare my readers the details of these negotiations, and refer them to Father Pierling’s deep and learned study (‘ Russia and the Holy See,’ ii., 115, etc.), in which I shall only have to notice a few errors of judgment quite explicable in the case of that eminent historian. Iam-Zapolski. an almost mined village in a country which had been laid waste, could scarcely provide sufficient accommodation for the Polish envoys and their numerous suite. The Russians therefore sought shelter close by—at Kiverova-Gora—and as the mediator also established himself in a smoky cabin at the same place, the sittings of the Congress were practi­cally removed to that locality. Under this humble roof, between a temporary altar and a brascro, the smoke of which, there bung no other exit for it, had to iind its way out of the windows, so that by the end of each sitting the negotiators looked like so many chimney-sweeps, the fate of two great Empires was discussed and settled.

Both sides, according to the tradition, which had grown Into a sort of protocol between the two countries, began by formulating the most extravagant demands. This deceived Possevino at first, and for some considerable time. When he sounded the Muscovites, he became convinced that the surrender of certain Livonian towns by Poland was a sine qua non if peace was to be established. He at once concen­trated all his endeavours on this point, and thus played for one party, while he fancied he was serving the other. As a matter of fact, neither side gave him their full confidence, and he was really playing a game of blindman’s-buff. It was not till the second half ot December had been reached, Indeed, that the Poles, after the inevitable preliminary hesita­tions and gropings, resolved on what their last word should be, and spoke it. Father Pierling is certainly wrong when he accuses Zamoyski of duplicity in this particular, as also when he concludes there w^Tas a disagreement between the King of Poland and his Chancellor, or between the Chancellor and the Polish plenipotentiaries. The learned historian seems to have depended, in this particular, on the Russian summary, frequently very incorrect, of the Polish documents published

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by Kojalowicz. Zamoyski was the King’s own man, and from his twofold position as General-in-Chief and Chancellor we may argue that the persons he selected to treat were personally devoted to him. By the middle of December, a letter from Zamoyski, which embodied an absolute refusal to give up anything, of any sort, in Livonia, had reached Pos- sevino’s hands. A few days later, the Chancellor sent a courier to the Polish plenipotentiaries, authorizing them to give up three Livonian towns, which the Russians had pre­viously claimed. The Jesuit was much astonished and sorely puzzled. But the incident was natural enough. Between the first date and the second, Zamoyski had changed his mind. His letter to Possevino was written on December 13, 1581, and he wrote to the King the same day and in the same sense —no concessions to be made in Livonia. But on December 16 bad news arrived. The Swedes were making steady progress in Livonia, and the arrival of a much-desired supply of powder had been delayed. The next morning the Chancellor decided to modify his last instructions; he suggested three fresh bases of agreement to his plenipotentiaries, and one of the three included the concession to which we have just referred. The trifling importance of the towns mentioned permitted the making of the sacrifice, to which Batory had agreed. Zamoyski adverts to the fart in his letter to the King, dated December 26, 1581. As regards this matter, therefore, there was no disagreement at all. As for the objections, and even reproaches, Father Pierling has imagined on the part of the Polish plenipotentiaries, the modern historian has suffered from the misunderstanding to which the mediator of the year 1581 likewise fell a victim. The Chancellor certainly ought to have kept Possevino informed, but the general watchword among the Poles was to keep the arbiter, whom they endured out of respect for the Pope, but whom they would far rather have done without, at a distance. Further, Zbaraski and Radziwill thought it wise to make more difficulties than their superior had made. They considered his concessions too liberal, declared they would not act on his letter until they had fresh orders, and wrote him—the letter, dated December 21, is still in existence—that ‘ it was only to deceive the Legate.’ The proceeding was not altogether correct, but the three Livonian towns were not to be given up except in the very last resort, and only if the two other schemes utterly failed. Thus the whole thing was a diplomatic secret, and to have c onfided it to Possevino would, in the eyes of the Polish nego­tiators, have been to make it over to the Muscovites. This was Zamoyski’s own view of_: the matter, for, in a letter dated December 27, he expressed his approbation of his subordinates’

conduct; and though his correspondence with Batory con­tains most uncomplimentary references to ‘ the good shepherd of the Muscovites, who is striving to turn wolves into sheep,’ he had no need to advise the King, as Father Pierling has imagined him to have done, not to let the Legate into the secrets of the negotiations then being carried on —such advice would have been quite superfluous (Kojalowicz’s ‘ Collections,’ 1867, p. jy6. etc.).

But the negotiations still threatened to drag on. The Russian plenipotentiaries were in no hurry at all. They found their rustic accommodation less trying than the Poles did ; they knew better how to obtain the necessary supplies, and, with the ingeniousness of their race, they turned the position to account, transformed their camp into a fair-ground, and carried on a profitable trade in the intervals of the sittings. They still hoped, too, that the severity of the winter season would make their opponents more tractable. Zamoyski set about undeceiv­ing them, and Polish swords were ^:n the end to do more to over­come the final resistance than Possevino’s eloquent tongue.

The General-in-Chief, who exhausted every means in his endeavour to worst the heroic defenders of Pskov, hit on some rather blameworthy devices. The story of a certain infernal machine introduced into the town is a somewhat obscure one. Zamoyski is said to have permitted the construction of a box filled with powder and projectiles, which a Russian prisoner undertook to deliver to Chouiski. In connection with this incident the Polish historians mention a violation of the law of nations, by which the besieged had fired on a flag of truce, and also to a trap into which Chouiski tempted Zamoyski by challenging him to single combat. The excuse is insuffi­cient, and the provocation alluded to seems to have been given at a period subsequent to that at which the infernal machine, which indeed did no damage whatever, was sent into the town. The General-in-Chief, whose idea on this occasion was certainly a very bad one, was better inspired shortly afterwards. He resorted, on January 4, 1582, to a more legitimate trick, pretended to relax his guard, succeeded in tempting the garrison into a general sortie, and gave it a most terrible receptiun. In vain did he write the Polish plenipotentiaries, soon afterwards, that his ormv could not hold out for more than another week, and that they must make a speedy end of the business. He had just given clear proof to the contrary, and the Muscovite plenipotentiaries were not deceived. When Ivan heard the news, he sent them instructions of the most conciliatory nature, which n.eluded the total cession ot Livonia, and any further difficulties they made solely concerned questions of detail.

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Possevino raised one by his obstinate endeavour to have Sweden, which desired neither mediation nor peace, brought into the treaty. He was obliged to relinquish all hope of satisfaction on this point, but the Swedish conquests in Livonia were another source of complication. The Musco­vites pointed out, not unfairly, that they could not be asked to give up places which had passed out of their possession. After a great deal of further discussion, the Poles agreed to reserve their rights with regard to the third belligerent party, and it was settled that a detailed list of the places given up by the Russians should be prepared. On the north-western frontier of the country a system of partition was resorted to —Vielije, which stood on the left bank of the Dvina, and be­longed to the group of towns that w^Tere to pass under Polish rule, was handed over to that country ; but Siebieje, the out­post of the Muscovite provinces at the entrance to the valley of the Vielikaia, was restored to its former owners. The question of titles remained. Ivan was not satisfied with being described in the text of the treaty as Tsar ; he was anxious to continue the nominal Sovereign of Livonia, at all events. There is no sense in giving with one hand and taking back with the other, said the Poles, and what did this new title of Tsar mean ? Tsar, after the fashion of the ancient Tartar Sovereigns- of Kazan and Astrakan, was too small a thing for the master of Moscow, and if the word Tsar was to be translated into Ccesar, it was too much. The real Caesar, the only one recognised by modem Europe, the Emperor, might fairly object. This last quarrel was an old one, as we know, and Zamoyski attached no importance to it. He spoke, indeed, in this connection, of a facetious nobleman of Warsaw, who had dubbed himself ‘ King of Zakharansk,’ without raising anything beyond a laugh. The two parties could always tall back 011 the expedient, already so frequently employed, of drawing up double copies of the same treaty. There was no real difficulty in the matter, but Possevino, in his ignorance of precedents, made a mountain out of the mole­hill. Setting himself to rectify the historical facts on which the Russian plenipotentiaries based their claim, he strove to convince them that the Emperors Arcadius and Honorius, who had both died five centuries previously, could not have conferred the Imperial title on the great Kniaz Vladimir, took good care to hint that Rome was the fountain-head of all such honours, and reminded them that Charlemagne had been crowned by one of Gregory XIII.’s predecessors. A great deal of time was lost before the usual compromise was arrived at. And even then the Jesuit himself raised a fresh and final subject of debate.

Though the Poles had nothing to do with it—Father Pier- ling has certainly been completely misled, probably by a mistranslation, as to this matter—the Legate claimed that his signature should be appended to the treaty, or at all events that it should contain some mention ot his share in it. The Russian envoys, who had received no instructions to this effect, absolutely refused to agree to his request. The Jesuit’s patience was exhausted, and he lost his temper thoroughly. To conceal the real cause of his wrath, he fell back on a trick in the drawing up of the treaty, whereby Eletski and Olferiev desired, contrary to the principle adopted, to include Riga and Courland amongst the towns and territories ceded by the Tsar, thinking they would thus create a future title for their master. Whereupon the mediator threatened to break off everything. ‘ You have come here to steal, not to treat!’ he shouted to the Muscovites. ‘Be off! Away with you !’ The plenipotentiaries did not move a muscle, and the Legate grew still angrier. Olferiev had the manuscript ot the treaty in his hand. Possevino snatched it from him, threw it out of the window, and, taking hold of the astounded diplomatist by the buttons of his pelisse, shook him roughly, pushed him outside the door, and thrust his companions out after him.

His will carried the day, and on January 15, 1582, the signa­tures were duly exchanged. Not without some help on Posse- vino’s part, the advantage, from the purely diplomatic point of view, lay with the Russians. Their final position was very much that they had taken, up at the opening of the Congress, and they only surrendered what the Tsar himself had sacrificed some three months previously. The sacrifice was a heavy one, nevertheless. After twenty years of a straggle which had apparently been crowned with success, Russia was once more cut off from Europe and the Baltic. Yet a twofold result, of which the country' may scarcely have been aware, had been gained in that very country of Livonia, p jssession of which she was forced to relinquish for a time. The Teutonic order of knighthood was extinct, and that meant the destruction of the German garrison in the province. And a conflict between Poland and Sweden had been prepared—a storm-laden future —in the course of which,the two countries, wearing out their own strength in a fierce struggle, were to ensure their common foe a double and most profitable revenge.

The Russian occupation of Livonia, shortlived as it had been, had left a durable mark on the Russian nation, and strongly in­fluenced its ultimate development, by introducing a number of foreign elements into the country, which ultimately incorporated and absorbed them—the nucleus of that German colony

destined to play so important a part in the Empire of the Tsars, and the civilizing influence of which cannot be denied.

After all. what had just been signed was not a peace—it was only a ten years’ truce. According to precedent, certain dis­puted points which had been kept out of the discussion—such as the theoretical claim to the disputed possession of all the Russo-Lithuanian countries—prevented any final agreement. When the victors occupied the town and province of Derpt, now made over to Poland, they were struck by the proofs left by their beaten foes of a power—a gift of organization and a military superiority, at all events—which would have been turned to better account, no doubt, in the hands of such a genius as Batory. ‘ We were all astonished,’ writes the Abbe Piotrowski, ‘ to find in every tort a quantity of guns and an amount of powder and ball such as we should not have been able to get together in the whole of our country.’ And he adds : ‘ We have won something like a little kingdom ; I doubt whether we shall know what to do with it!’ In spite of the fault-finding quality so constantly apparent in the Abbe’s diary, these impressions of his reproduce a certain amount of truth, the consequences of which were to be evidenced by history.

Latin inscriptions on the restored walls of the. castle of Riga and on the doorway of the church at Wenden thus expressed the meaning of the event which was taking place.

‘ Devicto Moscho ....

Prisca religio Rigam rcnovato vigere Cap era t in templs. . . .’

And again :

‘ Htrresis et Moschipostquam d-evicta pclcstas Livonidum primus p is tor ovile rego.’

All this was a proof, in the eyes of the Livonians, that Batory’s triumph was above all things the triumph of Catholi­cism and of the Jesuits, who came close on the victor’s heels, wherever he went. The, new Polish Government was to feel the consequences of this conviction.

As far as Possevino was concerned, the important matter was the form the treaty took. It openly asserted the Pope’s authority, ‘ so that everything appeared to have been carried out in his name.’ Thus the Legate boasted in his letters to the Cardinal of Como, and, in spite of his disagreement with the Muscovite envoys, he was eager to pursue the advantage he had gained at the Kremlin itself. To put forward the anti­Ottoman league once more, seeing it would serve as a pretext

for the intervention of the Holy See ; to open the question of the reunion of the two Churches, seeing it had been agreed that should be discussed when peace had been arranged, but, above all, without indulging in any great illusion as to the success oi these two items in his programme ; to carry on his media­torial tunctions ; to intervene as to the difficulties arising out of the treaty of Iam-Zapolski ; to make a fresh attempt to take Swedish affairs in hand ; and in every case to appear, or make the Pope appear, the fjial arbiter accepted by both sides— such, seemingly, was the Jesuit’s plan of action. Circum­stances so fell out that this plan agreed fairly well with the state of mind then dominant at Moscow. Disappointed as the Tsar was with the power of the Pope’s authority, he might still make use of it to mask the humiliation of his defeat to some extent; and it was well, for the sake of appearances, that the Pope’s emissary should seem to have transacted the Tsar’s business, and should continue to employ himself in the same fashion. Wherefore Possevino was to be made welcome at the Court of Ivan the Terrible.

IV.—POSSEVIXO AT MOSCOW.

The historical terms of the religious problem, the solution of which was to be the ostensible and principal object of this journey, are well known. The separation of the two Churches, prepared as early as in the seventh century by John the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople, who had assumed the title of ‘ Bishop Universal,’ and then by the conciliable called in Trullo, or Quiniscxt (690), which authorized the marriage of priests, had been accomplished in the course of the ninth century. At that moment the Greek Church, during and after her war with the iconoclasts, reached the height of her glory and external development, gave birth to a pleiad of doctors, saints, and poets, and was called to the great work of evangelizing the Slav races. Photius, who carried the principle laid down by his predecessors, that the fall of the Roman Empire had involved the ruin of the spiritual sovereignty connected with it, to its extreme point, converted the schism into an actual fact. The union of the two Churches, re-established afterwards for a very short time, and in the most precarious manner, was finally severed by Michael Cerularius in 1054. Attempts to restore it were numerous, from the thirteenth century onwards. The Council of Florence (1439) only renewed the endeavour made at the Council of Lyons (1274). In 1518, Poland, contrary to her usual policy, seems to have favoured a fresh attempt (Fiedler, Ein Versuch der Vereinigung . . . Sitzungsberichte dcr K.K. Akadcmie in Wien, vol. xl., 1862). But the idea of a third Rome,

already well rooted and constantly strengthening at Moscow', was an unexpected obstacle to all such undertakings. In vain did a physician in attendance on the Grand Duke Vassili, one Nicholas Boulew, or Lueo, commonly called Niemtchine, carry on an active campaign in support of union at the Sover- eig-’s own Court, and hold controversy on the subject with Maximus the Greek and Filofe'i, a monk of Pskov. The only proselytes he is known to have won were a boiar named Feodor Karpov, and one prior whose name has not been handed down to us.

The Pontificate of Gregory XIII. did not appear likely to win much more success for the claims of the Roman Church. Though the Pope’s skilful efforts had succeeded in making the King of Spain arm against the heretic Queen of England, and in supporting the struggle for restoration carried on by the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach—the Guises of Germany—they could not wipe out the stigma laid on the Catholic religion, in the eyes of the whole, world, by Alva’s rule in the Low Countries, by St. Bartholomew, by the horrors of the Inquisition, and, above all. by those scandals within the Papacy itself, which had been the direct cause of the Reform. It was to the political, and not to the religious, power in Rome that Ivan had first addressed himself through his Ambassador, and it was the representative of this same secular power, the diplomat, not the apostle, whom he prepared himself to welcome in Possevino’s person.

The Jesuit reached Moscow on February 14, 1582. He found the Court in mourning, and the Tsar himself plunged into deep sorrow, by a tragic event, which, if the question they had to discuss had been one of moral interest only, should in itself have sufficed to exclude any possible communion of thought or feeling between the priest and his royal host. The Tsar, in a fit of rage, had just killed his own son. I shall have to return to this gloomy episode. But there was no question of moral interests here ! The anti-Ottoman league itself was very soon to be put aside. Ivan, to enable him to hold his own against Batory, had been obliged to make a truce with the Khan of the Crimea ; he now avowed himself ready to break it, and take up arms against the Turk, but not until the Pope had made arrangements with the Holy Empire, France, Spain, Venice, England, Denmark, and Sweden, and requested all these powers to send embassies to Moscow, to concert a final arrangement! The Tsar was evidently joking, though he did offer to send an important Ambassador of his own to Rome, instead of a mere courier. He was anxious to preserve the useful friendship he had made.

The agreement with Sweden fell through likewise. It was not for the sake of treating with King John that the Tsar had

yielded up Livonia to Batory. Gently but firmly Ivan cleared the ground, limiting Possevino’s good offices to the only matters still to be settled with Poland—frontier delimitations and exchanges of prisoners. At the same time, fond as he was ot a controversy, he endeavoured to slip out of any discission of a religious nature. He constantly affirmed that such a debate might become offensive to the Pope. When, on February 21, in the course of an audience devoted to secular interests, Possevino requested a private conversation to discuss ‘ the great business,’ the Tsar devised another excuse. He was quite incompetent, personally, to carry on a controversy of this kind. But when the Jesuit pressed him, and begged to be allowed to comnrmicate his views in writing, Ivan probably concluded he had better end the matter. And his love of polemics may have overcome his other objections.

By a literary artifice which has no doubt deceived himself, Father Pierling has imagined the existence of a dialogue pre­pared beforehand, as in Rokita’s case, and graced with appro­priate surroundings. The very dates and words quoted by the learned historian prove that nothing of the kind can have oc­curred. It was quite unexpectedly—this detail is somewhat important—at this very sitting, devoted, in the first place, to quite different subjects, and "n the absence of those representa­tives of the clergy whose presence would have been indis­pensable if the discussion was to be of a really serious character, that the Tsar made up his mind to settle the question, or, rather, to cut short the importunities in connection with it, which were a constant worry to him. He did not fail, indeed, to lay stress on the uselessness of a controversy carried on under such cir­cumstances. But, after all, as the Jesuit seemed so anxious about it, he should have an immediate explanation (‘ Diplo­matic Documents,’ 1851-1871, x. 247, etc.).

Possevino lorthwith laid himself out to offer the most tempt­ing arguments, with the most cunning precautions as to the language he employed. This was no question of a break with the Greek Church, the ancient and venerable Church of St. Athanasius, St. Chrysostom, and St. Basil, to which the Church of Rome felt herself bound by indissoluble ties, but that of restoring a unity which had only been disturbed by the aban­donment of certain ancient traditions. It was a work of re­storation, which would also inevitably lead to the creation of a new Empire of the East, whereof the Tsar, crowned by the Pope, like a second Charlemagne, might be the head. This proved the Jesuit little knew the formidable antagonist with whom he had to deal. Ivan, with his self-possession, his quick­ness, and his wealth of fantastic erudition, made short work of the brilliant display on which the Roman orator had reckoned

to dazzle him. ‘ What was this talk of Byzantium and the Greeks ? The Greek religion bore that name because King David, long before the birth of Christ, had foretold that Ethiopia should enjoy the first-iruits of the Divine mercy ; now Ethiopia was Byzantium ! But he, Ivan, cared neither for the Greeks nor for Byzantium ! His religion was not that of the (keeks, but that of Christ—the only true religion ! And what was this talk, againj of a traditional union with people who shaved their beards off, contrary to every tradition ?’

Possevino fancied he had found a crushing answer: Gregory XIII.’s chin was adorned with a magnificent beard.

< And thou thyself ?’ rejoined the Tsar, pointing to the Legate’s shaven countenance.

According to the record of the sitting drawn up at Moscow, Possevino, whose own report is dumb as to this incident, ascribed his hairless condition to a physical cause : he did not cut his beard, and neither did he shave. But already Ivan was growing hot over the game, and, carried away by his natural temperament, he was to deliver yet harder blows, and crush his adversary altogether. Very cunningly he turned the discussion to a question where all the advantage would be on his side, and which, .ndeed, was the crux of the disagreements between East and West—that of the Pope’s primacy. The Popes of the earlier centuries—Clement, Sylvester, and so forth—had always been revered as saints by the Muscovite Church. But their successors, who had cast off the poverty and austerity of the primitive Christians ; who lived in a pomp which had aston­ished Chevriguine ; who had mounted a throne, and wore the holy symbol of the Cross upon their boots ; who, forgetting every leeling of decency, publicly indulged in the most shameful debauchery—this new order of Pontiffs must be considered to have fallen from their ancient dignity ! In vain did Possevino make signals of distress and strive to check the flood of invec­tive. He had had his warning. If the dispute turned out ill, now, for his master and himself, so much the worse for them ! Like all orators of his kidney, Ivan lost control of his own tongue, and when the Jesuit tried to put in a timid apology, the Tsar cried out, ‘ Your Roman Pontiff is not a shepherd at all: he is a wolf !’

¹ If the Pope is a wolf, I have nothing more to say !’

This reply, and the outrage which called it forth, both of them reproduced in the Russian version, do not appear in Possevino’s published narrative (Moscovia). But the original manuscript, it would appear, does mention the incident (Pierling, as above, ii. 169). According to the Russian version, it ended the discussion, and Ivan dismissed the Jesuit with more kindly words, and immediately afterwards sent him

dishes from his own table. But Possevino asserts that the dispute went on, and even grew more lively, so much so that the Tsar at one moment came very near striking his opponent with the terrible spear of which we have already heard, while the Russians present talked of ducking the Jesuit in the water.

In any case, the parties separated on tolerably cool terms, and a few days later, on February 23, when Possevino received another summons to the Palace, he betrayed no desire to re­open the conversation. This time the Tsar, on his own initia­tive, and as though to make up somewhat for his previous sharpness, suggested he should send him a memorandum dealing with the differences between the two Churches. But the Jesuit had convinced himself, no doubt, that this would be mere waste ot time. He contented himself with offering the Sovereign a Latin copy of Gennadius’ book on the Council of Florence, and fancied he had got rid of this far too dangerous subject. But he was reckoning without the great despot’s capricious and masterful nature. A surprise was in store lor him.

As to this final episode, again, the witnesses are at variance. Possevino, according to the Russian version, expressed a wish to see one of the churches in the capital, and the Tsar suggested his accompanying him to a service to be performed for his special benefit with all the pnmp of the Orthodox rite. Where­upon the Jesuit, who had eagerly accepted the invitation, took it into his head to enter the precincts of the church beiore the Sovereign had arrived. A dispute ensued, and, to cut the matter short, the Tsar sent orders that the Legate was to be brought back to the Palace, there to continue the discussion of the political business still to be settled. The invitation, Possevino declares, was quite unexpected, and he simply de­clined it, and slipped away when the boiars tried to drag him towards the church. Most likely there is an equal amount of truth and invention in both stories. The Jesuit, in all probability, did betray a very natural curiosity, and also most probably refused to take part in a function which would cer­tainly have compromised him. The one undoubted fact, amidst all the contradictions and obscurity which still hang round this chapter of history, is that the attempt to which Rome thought fit to sacrifice the interests of her Polish adherents utterly failed. On May 11, 15&2, Possevino took farewell of the Tsar, and Ivan’s Ambassador, Iakov Molviani- nov, who was sent with him to Rome, went there empty- handed, save for civil speeches and sable skins. The Pope’s representative had made an appcarance in the agreement brought about between Russia and Poland, and might even claim to have played a leading part therein ; but the work he had done, being purely secular, and in opposition, as I have

shown, to those real interests which the Holy See should have striven to protect, was threatened, like all the rest, with early and complete extinction.

V.—The Day after the Truce,

Very soon—and this time Rome never even dreamt of any interference—the relations between the two countries were to culminate in a fresh and most violent rupture. The difficulties connected with the execution of the treaty of Iam- Zapolski were not very important in themselves, and on both sides the inclination was to solve them in the broadest and most conciliatory spirit. There was a dispute over the posses­sion of a small fort iji the province of Vielije, at the mouth of the Meja, on a very important line of river communica­tion between Smolensk and Louk^;. When the Palatine of Witebsk, Pa9, seized this place in a somewhat high-handed fashion, Ivan ordered his envoy to give up the whole province rather than risk any reopening of hostilities, and Batory, for his part, had the fort destroyed. But though both parties were bent, for the present, on avoiding any immediate conflict, we know that Ivan meditated a fresh appeal to arms, at a more or less distant period, and was soliciting England’s help for the purpose. And the whole history of the closing years of Batory’s reign proves that he himself looked on the truce of 1582 as a mere halt on that victorious march whereby, his- turbulent Poles once thoroughly tamed and subjugated, he hoped to lead his armies on triumphant, far beyond Pskov. I have already made my readers aware of this vaster military undertaking meditated by the King, supported by the assistance, swiftly obtained, of Rome, and the hoped-for help of Florence and Venice, and which he began to put into execution in the course of the years next following. Under the charm of the great warrior’s bold spirit, Gregory XIII.’s successor, Sixtus V., was to turn his back on fancies, and enter the sphere of practical realities, themselves splendid enough. The anti-Turkish league, in which Ivan proposed to wed Elizabeth with the Emperor, never advanced beyond the condition of a theme for the Tsar’s bitter jests. But Batory, having proved the road from Moscow to Constantinople ran through Warsaw, was resolved, now, to pass through Moscow on his own way to- Constantinople, and to make others furnish him with the means of doing it. In former conversations with Possevino at Wilna he had outstripped Peter the Great, and mentioned Azov as the indispensable base of any decisive action against the Ottoman power. To obtain a hold on Azov he must have a Moscow won over to the common cause behind him—and this had just

proved impossible ; or else a Moscow conquered—and this Batory was prepared to do.

That the plan was feasible was to be proved by Dmitri’s easy triumph, and the victorious though useless campaigns of his Polish protectors under Sigismund III., and only the pre­mature death of the victor of Polotsk, in 1586, wiped out a pro­ject so worthy of his powers. Ivan himself was not to live long enough to feel the direct threat it involved. But we may be quite sure he had an alarming inkling of it. The phantom thus rising up beiore him certainly darkened the Sovereign’s closing days, and affected his last decisions. Even before the King of Poland, having resolved to relinquish his views on Hungary and end the consideration he had hitherto shown the Porte, fully revealed his idea to the Papal Nuncio Bolognetti, in a conversation lasting four hours (1584) (Boratynski, ‘Stephen Batory and his Plans for a League against Turkey,’ Reports of the Cracow Academy, May, 1902), Ivan, moved by his sense of approaching peril, had made up his mind to treat -with the Swedes. After appealing to England, he ap­pealed oncc more, and as vainly, to Germany. The Empire was wrapped up in its religious quarrels, and the Emperor in his artistic and scientific studies. By a truce made in August,

1583, all the Russian towns taken by the Swedes—lam, Ivan- gorod. and Koporie—were made over to them altogether. And after this, as Vienna still turned him a deaf ear, Ivan fell back again on London, clinging to this last plank with the gestures of a drowr ing man.

In the hour of his supreme effort, death overtook him. But Fortune, who does not love old men, and who had steadily failed her former favourite, showed greater kindness, at that very moment, to the interests of the Empire he was leaving behind him. Batory was not to outlive his adversary long, and at the other end of the huge dominions, scarce nibbled at, as yet, by Poland, an unforeseen and mighty compensation for the loss of Polotsk and Livonia was beginning to appear. Siberia, distant, mysterious, far extending, was opening her arms, not, as has been so generally supposed, to the bold attack of a handful of Cossack raiders, but to the long and patient efforts of a peaceful army of toiling colonists.

CHAPTER III THE CONQUEST OF SIBERIA : ERMAK

I.—CONQUEST AND COLONIZATION. II.—THE STROGANOVS.

III.—THE COSSACKS. IV.—ERMAK IN SIBERI \.

I.—Conquest and Colonization.

The word ‘ Siberia ’ docs not appear in any Russian document until towards the latter half of the fifteenth century, and it was only applied at that time to a portion of the present Government of Tobolsk, occupied, till the sixteenth century, by Tartar Khans. But long before that period the Russians had discovered the road to the highlands of the Ural, and, crossing that chain of mountains, had slowly made their way from the basin of the Pietchora to the basin of the Ob. Even in the eleventh century, the servant of a Novgorod nobleman, called Giouriata Rogovitch, had reached the mountains, and in 1364 an expedition sent out by that enterprising republic got as far as the river. In the following century the Nov- gorodians were keeping up regular political and commercial intercourse with the Iougra, as the countries west of the Ural were called from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries ; and the name was extended, in the fifteenth, to the western slopes of the Ural Mountains. The Iougritchy paid the republic a regular tribute in furs, and even in silver. The metal was probably taken out of some primitive workings, now known as the Finnish mines (Tchuudskiie Kopi), which have quite lately served as a guide to modem prospectors.

After the annexation of Novgorod, the Grand-Dukes of Moscow carried on the work, but impressed it with the military character inherent in their own traditions. In 1472, Perm was conquered ; in 1483, an army commanded by Prince Feodor Kourbski, ‘ the Black,’ and by Ivan Ivanovitch Saltyk- Pravine, crossed the Ural, followed the course of the river Tavda, which falls into the Tobol, an affluent of the Irtych, and then that of the Irtych itself, reached Siberia, and pene­trated into the basin of the Ob. The Princes of the Iougra and the Vogoule, and the Siberian Prince Latyk, all made their submission, went to Moscow, and agreed to pay tribute to the Grand-Duke, who added the name of Sovereign of the Iougra to his other titles, but was obliged, in the year 1499, though as successfully as on the first occasion, to re-establish himself in possession by force of arms.

The advantages thus gained were by no means commensurate

with the object it was necessary to attain. After the capture of Kazan and Astrakan, numbers of other Princes offered to pay tribute, and among them Iadiger, a Siberian Prince, who held a Tartar iourt in the middle of the present province of Tobolsk, and reigned over some 30,000 subjects. But few of the engagements taken were kept. In 1556 Iadiger only sent in 700 out of the 30,000 marten-skins he had promised— one for each inhabitant. He excused himself on the score of the violence, and exactions he had been forced to endure on the part of his neighbours, against whom the Tsar had pro­mised him assistance and protection. But the Tartar Princes, who were perpetually fighting amongst themselves, were not easily put down, or even reached. When hard pressed they fled into the steppes, and ensured themselves impunity by accepting the sovereignty of Moscow, coupled with similar obligations, quite as unfaithfully fulfilled.

When Ivan’s attention became quite absorbed by his Livonian enterprise everything went thoroughly astray, and the Tsar’s last envoy, a sort of half ambassador, half tax- collector, was killed. No effectual and lasting result was attainable in such a country, save by a conquest on quite different lines, of the necessary elements for which the Muscovite Empire was by no means destitute.

Even nowadays, mobility is one of the most characteristic features of the race which has peopled the huge tracts of the European east and the Asiatic west, and I have already pointed out the reasons which account for this (p. 23). ‘ The fish seeks the deepest water, and man the place where he can live best.’ This proverb reproduces, in most expressive fashion, a tendency which is the secret of the great work of colonization accom­plished by the subjects of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

For this work the resources supplied by the basin of the Pietchora—the base of perpetual military enterprises up till the sixteenth century—were insufficient. Only an industrial population could have turned them to account, and the Musco­vite nomads were a race of husbandmen. It was on a private family that the honour devolved of imparting a more useful character and a more favourable direction to the national ex­pansion, by appealing to the powerful current of emigration which constituted its real strength, and directing that current towards the basin of the river Kama.

II.—The Stroganovs.

At a very early date the Stroganov family had been given special privileges, with a view to populating the uninhabited tracts in the district of Oustoug, north of Viatka. The soci^d

and judicial position of this family is still under discussion. Tradition connects its members with the patrician stock of the Dobrynine. But, historically speaking, it seems to have been included in the class of the merchants or husbandmen, betw^reen whom no distinction existed in the Muscovite law of the six­teenth century (Serguieievitch, ‘ Lessons on the History of Rus­sian Law,’ St. Petersburg, 1883, p. 622; and Tyjnov, ‘Siberian Collections,’ 1887, p. 119). ‘ I Hi vivunt sua negotiationssays the unknown author of the Historia de Siberia (1681), when referring to the Stroganovs. They were neither boiars nor ‘.men who served.’ Yet, on the huge domains which con­stituted their patrimony in the sixteenth century, they enjoyed very exceptional privileges. They had power to exercise j ustice of every kind, and themselves answered to nobody but the Tsar. They built towns and fortresses—it is true they had to get the Sovereign’s leave each time- -they had an army and a cannon foundry of their own, they made war on the Siberian Princes, and traded, untaxed, with the Asiatic races. They w ere merchants and husbandmen indeed, but of a special kind ; For though, ;n Alexis’ Code, we see them assimilated to the gosti, or merchants of the first rank, it is a matter of assimila­tion, and not of confusion. In the chapter devoted to the fines due for certain offences, the same scale is applied to the gosti and to the Stroganovs, but these last are mentioned by name. It has therefore been claimed, and with some show, of reason, that this family constituted a social class in itself.

In 1558, Gregory Anikiev Stroganov applied to Ivan for a concession of 106 square versts of land on both banks of the Kama, above Perm ; he proposed to build a fort to defend this tract against the Tartars, to break up the soil, lay down pasture lands, and establish salt-works. Ilis request was granted, and the Tsar released the concession from all taxes for a period of twenty years, only reserving any silver, tin, or copper mines that might be discovered on the ground. This was the usual condition on which such favours were granted, and the Sovereigns of Moscow were habitiially open-handed in this respect, save as regards the right of keeping up an armed force. In this matter their political system was opposed to any division of power. But on the Siberian frontier necessity became a law unto itself. Stroganov built his fort on the Piskorka River, and called it Kankor. Iri 1564 he solicited and obtained permission to build another, about 20 versts away, on the Orel, and this was Ker- gedan. In 1566, at the powerful family’s own request, all its establishments were' included in the Opritchnina, and in 1568, these were still further and considerably increased. But these wade tracts of land had to endure perpetual attack on the part of the Tcheremisses, Bachkirs, and other wild tribes of the

neighbourhood. Ivan, informed of this, advised the colonizers to arm a sufficient number of Cossacks and Ostiaks to enable them to put a stop to these aggressions. The Cossacks, in their pursuit of the aggressors, soon found their way across the Ural, and thus the legendary series of brilliant exploits began.

Just at that time a Tartar Khanate had risen up in Siberia, founded, it is believed, by the Taibougi family, which, having quarrelled with the reigning house, had separated from it, and was labouring to bring the neighbouring countries, held by Bacbkirs and Ostiaks, under its own rule. The capital of this State was called Sibir, or Isker. Here a Khan of Kirghiz-Khaisiac origin, named Koutchoum. had reigned since 1556, when he had dethroned Ivan’s former vassal, Iadiger. Alarmed by the progress made by the Stroganovs, and anxious to preserve his own independence, Koutchoum despatched his son or nephew, the Tsarevitch Makhmetkoul, to attack the new Russian settlements. Hostilities continued till 1582, and Ivan was thus led to increase the concessions and powers granted to the brothers James and Gregory Stroganov. The banks of the Tobol and its affluents beyond the Ural were made over to them. Between 1574 and 1579, the inheritance of this immense power and the burdens con­nected with it passed, by the death of its holders, to a third brother, Simon Anikiev, and to his two nephews, Maxi­mus Iakovlevitch and Nikita Grigorievitch, who, to save a perilous position, had recourse to a most dangerous expe­dient. The Cossack encampments (stanitzy) on the banks of the Don were the refuge and meeting-place, as I have already remarked, of a population of outlaws, drawn from every comer of the Russian Empire—men who were half-robbers and half-soldiers, most of whom had slipped through the hangman’s hngers, and in whom that recollection served to wipe out all fear of Tsar, or God, or devil. Proposals for enlistment sent to these places, and coupled with liberal lar­gesse, attracted to the banks of the river Kama, with a whole troop of bold companions, the man who is taken, even now­adays, to have been the conqueror of Siberia, but who was only the hero (his special glory was the result of a mere acci­dent) of one out of a thousand episodes in which brute force, serving the steadier and surer progress of civilization, has insured the Muscovite domination in the Far East of Asia. Legend will indulge in such whims as these.

23

III.—The Cossacks.

All over the Empire, the Cossacks formed an integral por­tion of the Muscovite population. In the northern provinces, they were nomad labourers, agricultural or industrial. In the southern zone, the perpetual state of warfare generally converted them into soldiers. Commonly speaking, however, the generic title of Cossack was applied to vagabonds of every description, whether husbandmen or warriors—peaceful labourers when the occasion served, robbers in' convenient seasons. The word, of Tartar origin, originally meant a peasant who had no local or personal connections, but more particularly, a soldier recruited frorti this nomad class. These men, in whom the quality of submission was lacking, to all eternity, went whither their fancy led them—some fled into the farthest steppes, and there formed military brotherhoods ; others stayed in their birthplace, and there organized armed bands, employed, for the most part, in robbery by violent means. For these last the official name was ‘ Cossack robbers ’ (vorovskiie).

The constitution, geographical and ethnographical, of ancient Russia, her lack of strictly-defined limits, and pro­vinces possessing historical boundary-lines, resulted in the fact that this mobile element, nominally dependent on the State, but practically almost completely independent of it, became the vanguard of the great colonizing movement. Thus, under Vassili, the Riazan Cossacks had sought, and found, the road to the Don ; under his successor they were settled on both banks of that river, and were soon a bugbear to the Tartars of the Crimea and of Azov, and the Nogals. The northern Ukraine was the first to send them a contingent of intrepid comrades, recruited among the Sievrouki, whose courage was proverbial; but the attractions of the settlement were soon felt on every side. Town Cossacks and country Cossacks, all of them, the moment they were guilty of any crime, hurried to the same city of refuge. It gave Ivan considerable trouble. The Tartars, who were perpetually harried, made complaints, and the Tsar was fain to plead his own powerlessness in the matter. He could not contrive to keep all the ‘ brigands ’ in order. Now and then, in the interval between two incursions into Tartar territory, the said ‘ brigands ’ would take to the Volga, turn themselves into pirates, and, manning their swift tchaiki, fall on the Russian merchants. Then the Tsar’s troops took action, and regular campaigns were made against them.

Yet it was with the Sovereign’s permission that the Strogariovs enlisted a body of these miscreants, 640 men,

commanded by two principal chiefs. One of these, Ivan Koltso, had already been sentenced to death, and the other appears to have possessed a heavily-laden conscience and a tolerably black judicial history—his name was Ermak T^irnofieievitch. i

Historians do not agree as to the origin of the name which has attained such extraordinary popularity. Some guess it to be a corruption of Ermolai or Hermann ; others take it to be a nickname, recalling the humble duties performed by the hero in connection with the preparation of the kacha in some stanitsa. Ermak, in the speech of the Volga country, means a handmill. Yet Monsieur Nikitski has found the name and its diminutive, Ermachko, in the lists of the inhabitants of Novgorod, where they seem to have been common.

On September i, 1581, a little body of these Cossacks, strengthened by a detachment of soldiers drawn by the Stro- ganovs from the garrisons of their different forts—Russians and Lithuanians, Tartars and Germans—which swelled its numbers to some 840 men, all under Ermak’s command, started forth to cross the Ural, following the path of twenty previous expeditions in the same direction, and attack Koutchoum on his own ground. That very day, a band of savage warriors, gathered by the Tartar Prince of Pelym, raided the province of Perm, and the voievode of that province found himself overmatched. He applied to the Stroganovs for reinforcements, and they were obliged to decline on the score of the weak state in which the departure of Ermak and his men had left them. The voievode made a complaint to Moscow, and so little was the Tsar disposed to look on this new trans-Uralian campaign as anything decisive or even exceptional, that he taxed the Stroganovs with treason, and sent orders to Perm that Ermak and his followers were to be brought back without the smallest delay. This order could not be carried out. Ermak was far away already.

IV.—Ermak in Siberia.

Makhmetkoul, who had been sent to meet the invaders, came upon them on the banks of the Tobol, and was terrified —he had never seen firearms before—by the ‘ bow that smokes and thunders.’ He was completely routed. Arrived at the Irtych, Ermak defeated Koutchoum himself, and, in October, took possession of the capital, from which the Khan had fled. In the spring his Cossacks captured Makhmetkoul, and they spent the summer in occupying and subduing the little towns and Tartar ouloussy on the Irtych and the Ob. This done, Ermak bethought him of sending news of his doings to

23—2

the Stroganovs, and even to the Tsar, actually venturing to send Koltso, the sentenced man for ■whom the executioner was still waiting on the scaffold, to the Sovereign.

He was not mistaken in thinking Ivan would be disarmed. Koltso was not even questioned as to his past, and, with the Tsar’s congratulations, Ermak received a considerable sum of money, to which, so the legend assures us, Ivan added splendid gifts—two richly-adorned cuirasses, a silver goblet, and a pelisse, taken off his own shoulders. At the same time the Tsar despatched two of his voievodes, Prince Simon Bolk- hovski and Ivan Gloukhov, to take possession, in his name, of the territories wrested from Koutchoum. This was the usual course of events. The Cossacks were sent on in front : when they were beaten they were disowned and called ‘ brigands ’; when they won, the fruits of their victories were forthwith absorbed.

Ivan the Terrible did not live to hear of the fate which overtook his envoys, nor the tragic close of the enterprise in which Ermak had just won immortal renown. In the month of August, 1584, the valiant leader lost his life, on the banks of the Irtych, in a night surprise, the details of which have never been known. According to the legend, he tried to swim the river, and was dragged down by the weight of his cuirass, the Tsar’s fatal gift. The Tartars recognised his corpse by the armour, which bore a gilded eagle, set his body on a scaffold, and used it for a target for the space of six weeks. Meanwhile, the huge clouds of birds of prey that hovered over the brave man’s corpse did not dare to settle on it; terrifying visions appeared around it, and so alarmed did the Tartars become that they resolved to give the hero magnificent burial, and killed and ate thirty oxen in the course of the ceremony. But fresh wonders occurred, even over the ashes of the heroic warrior, and at last the Moslem priests resorted to the expedient of burying the remains, and so thoroughly hiding the place of sepulture that it has never been discovered.

The only fact known to history is that Bolkhovski had already been carried off by sickness, and that after Ermak’s death the second envoy was fain to beat a retreat in the direc­tion of the Pietchora. As to its immediate results, therefore, this expedition was very much on a par with its predecessors. And yet a new thing had happened. The popular imagina­tion had been stirred—by a more resounding name, it may be, or a bolder gesture—and out of the long series of efforts, repeated year b\ year, out of the crowd of unknown heroes in whose steps Ermak had followed, the popular legend had chosen its own. The bandit of those far-off days, whose

glories the bylines have sung, whose monument stands at Tobolsk, whom the very Church venerates almost as a saint, was to be lifted up. in posthumous apotheosis, as high as Cortez or Christopher Columbus.

Legend is a power, for it commands, in a certain measure, those moral forces which play so decisive a part in the destinies of every race. It was inevitable that Ermak, magnified after this fashion, should have imitators and avengers. Dying, as he did, when his task was but half accomplished, he might well have said, ‘ Non omnis morior /’ He had been no more than an instrument, and behind him, ready to begin again, to send forth more warriors, and push forward the never- ending progress of their peaceful toil under cover of the ‘ bows that smoked and thundered,’ stood the real conquerors of Siberia—the Stroganovs, and their industrious army of colonists.

When the news of the catastrophe on the banks of the ' Irtych wldch had momentarily checked the Cossacks’ onward march reached Moscow, Ivan was no more. Before I relate the story of the Sovereign’s end—as tragic, though in a different way, as Ermak’s—1 will endeavour to evoke, in its splendour, its singularity, its horror, the picture of the strange sur­roundings, both of the Court and the home circle, in which he lived.

CHAPTER IV

THE COURT OF IVAN THE TERRIBLE—HIS PRIVATE LIFE

I.---------------------- THE COURT. II.— THE SLCBODA OF ALEXANDROV. III. IVAN’S

DOMESTIC LITE. IV.—THE TSAR’S FAMILY.

I.—The Court.

Chancellor’s first impression, when he arrived at Moscow, was a mixture of admiring astonishment and disappointment. The town struck him as being larger than London—city and suburbs together—but he looked in vain for the splendour of which he had heard at Kholmogory. The only way in which the Kremlin surprised him was by its lack of everything he had expected to find there. He was conducted into an edifice which he had heard described as a ‘ palace of gold," andjt was not much more than a hut. *

The celebrated enclosure already presented that appear­ance of an agglomeration of small things forming one huge

whole which endues it, in. our day, with such a peculiar type of its own. The great hall of the Palace, with its low vault resting on a single pillar, was ift-suited to the splendour of which it was destined to be the scene. And Ambassadors and distinguished travellers were generally received in another building, of still more modes* proportions. Here and there, the furniture stood sparse and rustic—benches and stools of unpainted wood ; no trace of comfort of any sort, except a certain quantity of fine carpets and, if we may believe Mas- kievitch, whose Memoirs were written in 1594, a calorifere which heated the great hall, and possibly some of the rooms nearest it.

} In the sixteenth century, as now, the Kremlin was above all things a little town of churches—the Church of the Annuncia­tion, nearest the Palace, where the Tsar went to Mass every day; the Church of the Assumption, the Metropolitan’s cathedral, where the Sovereigns were crowned, and whither they went to hear Mass on great feast-days ; the Church of the Archangel Michael, which contained the tombs of the reigning family, and where in those days, as now, wax tapers dropped oily stains on the black palls that covered the wooden coffins ; the Church of St. John, with its tall tower full of a multitude of very heavy bells, never rung, for the building would have fallen down, but sounded by moving the clappers to and fro—some score of churches altogether, crammed into a comparatively narrow space, nestling one against the other, and rubbing shoulders with monasteries; dwelling-houses reserved for the use of persons belonging to the Court, shops and workshops.

But Chancellor’s first impression was to be altered when he was brought into the presence of the Tsar and his Court. He had seen the royal pomp of the Tudors and the Valois, but none the less was he astonished and delighted. The Sovereign, first of all. . . . Was that a mere Sovereign he beheld, seated on the famed throne, borne by four creatures modelled on the fantastic monsters of the Apocalypse ? Some twenty years later, when Possevino thus saw the Tsar, robed in a long tunic-shaped garment, a tiara on his head and a crozier in his hand, he fancied himself face to face with another Pope, a Pontiff-K^;ng, a rex sacrorum. A picture of the Virgin above the throne, one of the Saviour on its right, and Biblical scenes painted on all the surrounding walls, framed the monarch in a religious setting, like a god in a temple. Young warriors, with axes on their shoulders, stood on either side of him, indeed, but the Roman Pontiff had his halberdiers. And the most striking point of all, in these sacerdotal surroundings, was the attitude, preserved by every

person present—motionless, as though stricken with a kind of stupor. At a slightly later date, Margeret and Fletcher were to be equally struck by this detail. When the Tsar made his entry, the silence over that crowd of officials of every rank, and the serried lines of guards, in long white velvet or satin gowns* and tall white fur caps, half soldiers and half Levites, their gold chains crossed over their breasts, their gleaming axes lifted as though to strike, was so intense that an onlooker, closing his eyes, might have fancied the Palace utterly deserted.

Certainly, if the Sovereign’s dwelling struck the traveller as being unworthy of its owner, his courtiers, both as to numbers and splendour, exceeded any to be seen in other countries. A perfect swarm of gentlemen, all glittering with gold and gems, crowded each other to suffocation within the narrow limits of the presence-chamber, overflowed on to the outer landing and the staircase, and filled all the approaches to the building.

Let us consider the elements which composed this gorgeous Court. In the Russian of the sixteenth century the word Court (dvor) had two meanings. It was used to designate the Sovereign’s residence, and also to describe the various services centralized in it, and connected alike with the monarch’s person and with the necessities of the State. The Sovereign lived in the upper story (vierkh) of the Palace ; the rest of the edifice and the buildings connected with it were occupied by various officials who worked in different offices or depart­ments (prikazes), and were employed either in the business of keeping up the Court or in administering the affairs of the country. A century later, Kotochikhine counted forty of these prihazes, divided into chambers (palaty), and forming as many independent ministries—the town prikaze, the Customs prikaze, the Chief Court prikaze, which last fulfilled the functions of the present Court Minister. Yet the servicc of the Court was in the hands of a number of special depart­ments—the prikaze for supplies, or jiteinyl dvor, for the Court table ; the kormovoi dvor for bread ; the khlebnyi dvor for the cellars, the wardrobe, the stables. The wardrobe depart­ment, which had to clothe, not the Sovereign only, but, on certain occasions, the whole of the Court, both great digni­taries and ordinary officials, had its own workshop, the masterskala palata, and huge warehouses, and its work was no sinecure.

The posts connected with the Court were very numerous. Some were very ancient, others of quite modem growth. Nestor mentions the stolniki (dapiferi), whose duty it was to offer the dishes, afterwards cut up and distributed by the kralichyi and

the okolnitchyi (carving equerry and Great Officer of the Crown), to the Sovereign and his guests at the State banquets. In very ancient times, too, the stolniki were employed in other ways, as envoys to foreign Courts and as provincial governors. The number of these dignitaries reached 500. In the second rank came the spalniki (from spat, to sleep) and the postielniki (from •postiel, bedtime), whose duties were to dress or undress the Sovereign and look after his bedchamber. Besides this, the spalnik was a member of the Privy Council, and the posttilnik was Keeper of the Seals for all secret business. Both these officials slept in the Tsar’s room.

The okolnitchyie (from okolo, around- -qai circa pfincipem versalantur, as Du Cange says) make their first appearance in 1356, and their duties, likewise exceedingly varied, were gener­ally of a judicial nature. For current affairs the Sovereign also had his striaptchyie (from stria pat, to fulfil a duty), who, on great ceremonial occasions, tore the sceptre before him, held up his train, and looked after his arms. 1 hese were officers of an inferior rank, but not the lowest in the official hierarchy. After them came the diaki and the podiatchyie, clerks, learned men, who knew how to read and write. Their original function had been to sing in church, and hence their name— diak stands for deacon. They were employed at a later period as clerks in the offices, and by the sixteenth century these diaki were doing very much the work of the modem French reftrendaire. Some of them had seats on the Council, and were called dcumnyie diaki. The podiatchyie w^rere their assistants. At the very bottom of the ladder, and occupying a post which in other countries, and especially in Poland, carried much mure prestige with it, came the dvoretskii, or dvornik, originally a sort of Court Marshal, but from the sixteenth century onwards a financial official, more especially— Keeper of the Privy Purse —a reproduction of the Eastern cv.rialis, who underwent the same transformations.

The Tsarina’s Couit, with the exception of a few pages, none of them over ten years of age, who passed, as they grew up, into the Tsar’s household, consisted of ladies only.f The chief post was held by a to'iarinia, who was responsible for the Privy Purse and the Bedchamber. Next to her a krditchinia, whose duty it was to look after all the personnel of the house­hold, ruled a little world of malsterytse, dressmakers and em- broideresses, gave orders to the postielnitse, and shared with them the honour of sleeping, turn about, in the Sovereign’s room, and attending her on the rare occasions when she went abroad. When this occurred, the poslielnitse turned them­selves into amazons, mounted horses, and surrounded the Tsarina’s coach.

The largest and best-lighted apartment in the portion of the Palace reserved for the ( onsort’s use was a workroom, out of which opened a suite of other chambers—svietUtsy (from svietlyi, light;—occupied by some fifty women, all employed either in ‘white sewing.’ otherwise the making of linen garments, or ‘ gold sewing,’ embroidery in gold or silver thread or silks. These last rooms formed a sort of school of art, just as the Ikonopisnatc -palate1, on the other side 01 the Palace, was at once a studio for producing ikons and an academy of painting. In the svietUtsy, ikons were also embroidered with a delicacy which still stirs the wonder of modem archaeologists.

Ivan, as we have already perceived, was the very wealthy Sovereign of an exceedingly poor country. When Fletcher paid a visit to the Tsar’s treasury’, he thought he must be dreaming. Great heaps of pearls, emeralds, and rubies lay amongst piles of gold plate and hundreds of gold cups enriched with gems and precious stones of every kind. These riches, which had been constantly amassed from reign to reign, were generally kept hidden away. They were only shown on rare occasions, arid then chiefly ior the benefit of foreigners. Chan­cellor, on the occasion of the departure of an embassy to Poland, saw 500 horsemen dressed with a magnificence exceeding any­thing he had ever imagined. Their garments were of gold and silver tissue, their saddle-housings of pearl-embroidered velvet. All these splendours had come from the Grand Duke’s treasury. The boiars composing the guard of honour in attend­ance on Maximilian's embassy undressed before the envoys to show off the splendour of their undergarments; but all their clothes, upper or under, were the Sovereign’s property, and, the display over, everything had to be returned to the place whence it come, ‘ untom and unstained,’ on pain of fine.

And all this splendour was combined with strange omissions. Jenkinson, when invited to the Tsar’s table, was served on gold plate, and reckoned the value of the goblets handed about among the guests at an average of /400 sterling. Fletcher, on a similar occasion, counted 300 officials in gold and silver brocade, who waited at the repast. The Sovereign himself sat at a massive gold table. One hundred dishes, gold, silver-gilt, or silver, were brought in at the same time. But the guests were given neither plates nor knives and forks, much less napkins. The Muscovites habitually carried a knife and spoon in their belts, and the lack of any other convenience was supplied by little cakes, round and flat. In 1576, the Emperor’s envoys noticed that the guests, numbering some 200, at the banquet given in their honour, were themselves supplied before the repast with gold brocade gowns from the Sovereign’s wardrobe, and these were replaced, as soon as

everyone was seated at table, by white mantles trimmed with ermine.

All these features have an importance of their own with regard to the history of the country and the formation of the national ideas and habits ; for they inculcated the conviction that the Russian people, in itself, was nothing, and had nothing. Everything was summed up in the Sovereign’s person, and to him everything belonged. The ceremonial observed at these banquets contributed to this belief. The Tsar, having first crossed himself devoutly, helped himself to a slice of meat carved by the equerry carver, offered morsels of it to some of the great personages present, and overlooked the distribution of the dishes amongst the other guests, the bearers of the portions saying to each person, ‘ The Tsar sends you this,’ whereupon the recipient rose in his place and thanked the donor. The same ceremony attended the pouring out of the various beverages. The quality of these last was generally praised by foreigners, but the saffron used in seasoning the dishes, the sauces made of sour milk, and the condiments, cucumber and vinegar, introduced into many of them, were unpleasant to their palates ; while the necessity of remaining at table for five or six hours, and drinking every cup of wine sent them, was a trial to the toughest. Further, there was a custom whereby the Sovereign, after the banquet, sent his chief guests, at their own houses, a further supply of victuals and drink, which they were expected to share, then and there, with the Tsar’s officers who had brought it. On one occa­sion one of the Emperor’s Ambassadors thus received seven goblets of Burgundy, as many each of Rhine wine, Muscat, French white wine, Canary, Alicant, and Malmsey, twelve measures of the best hydromel, seven hundred jars of an in­ferior quality, eight dishes of roast swan, as many of spiced crane, several dishes of cocks dressed with ginger, boned fowls, black-cock cooked in saffron, hazel-grouse cooked in cream, ducks with cucumber, geese with rice, hares with dumplings and turnips, elks’ brains, innumerable cakes and pies made with meat, cheese, or sugar, besides pancakes, fritters, jellies, creams, and preserved walnuts. And the poor man had just risen from table !

In that country, truly, Gargantua dwelt in flesh and blood.

At Court, as in all private houses, feasts, immoderate and excessive eating and drinking, were the indispensable accom­paniment of every merry-making, and the greatest entertain­ment that could be offered. And, in spite of the Church’s anathemas, other pleasures were by nu means banished. One special chamber, the potiechnala -palata, had charge of these, in fact. Games were much played in the Tsar’s immediate circle—

chess, draughts, and cards. There wasmuch hunting with hounds and greyhounds, hawks and falcons. There was bear-hunting, too, and in his earlier years Ivan appears to have been passion­ately addicted to this sport. Later, when the cares of govern­ment absorbed him, the hunting department suffered from his neglect, and when, after the truce of Iam-Zapolski, Batory expressed a desire to have red falcons, such as he had heard the Tsar possessed, Ivan sent the King back a message to the effect that the breed was extinct; the Tsar, owing to his sorrows, had long since given up hawking. Batory, on his side, inquired what present from himselt would be most agree­able to the Sovereign. The reply was ‘ Good liorses. iron helmets, and light, straight-carrying muskets.’

All the vanquished foeman of Polotsk and Vielikie-Louki asked of the victor was arms !

Yet even at that moment he kept a certain number of jesters about him. those douraki or chouty who, even as late as towards the middle of the eighteenth century, were to form an integral part of the Court circle. The jokes perpetrated by these official entertainers may have been more or less witty, but they were almost always obscene. Poverty of intellectual culture favoured an excessive coarseness of imagination, anti the extreme moral pressure imposed by the ascetic doctrines which prevailed drove men, by a sort of natural reaction, into the most cynical license. Further, the jester, with the freedom of speech permitted him within certain limits, supplied that need of critical and satirical expression which exists in every society, and which, having no literary vent, here found some measure of satisfaction. The choute, with his jeers at the pre­cepts of the Domostroi and the rules of an Oriental etiquette, stirred the heavy atmosphere of prison and cloister combined, which hung stagnant in every Russian household ; he opened doors and broke window-panes, and let a little fresh air into these smothering stoves. In those days every house oi any importance sheltered one or two such persons. Ivan had dozens of them, and some paid with their lives for the honour of rubbing elbows familiarly with their Sovereign. There was one called Gvozdev—a Prince, like the man who afterwards became the Empress Anne’s dourak—who held an important Court appointment ; such pluralism was quite a usual and recognised thing. On a certain day, Ivan, for a joke, turned a bowl of boiling soup (chtchi) over Gvozdev’s head. When the poor lellow cried out, the Sovereign, who was drunk, replied by a dagger-thrust, and the jester fell, covered with Mood. A physician was summoned. ‘ Cure my faithtul servant,’ said the Tsar, quite sobered now ; ‘ I have played with him im­prudently.’ ‘ So imprudently,’ replied the leech, ‘ that neither

God nor your Majesty will ever make him play again in this world !’

Gvozdev was dead!

Like Peter the Great in later days, Ivan gave his jesters a place and a part even in the most solemn ceremonies, and hence the religious emotion felt by those present on these serious occasions, and shared by foreign witnesses, was now and then replaced by very different impressions. Ivan the Terrible, being what we know him to have been, was not capable of keeping up that hieratic attitude in which he would first reveal himself on his throne to his admiring spectators. One day he snatched the cap off a Polish Ambassador’s head, put it on that of a choute, and ordered him to bow in the Polish manner. When the man demurred, on the score of ignorance, the Tsar himself mimicked the gesture, went into fits of merriment, and raised a laugh all through the assembled gathering at the foreigner’s expense. Or, again, like Napoleon I., he would startle, another envoy by an outbreak of rage, a flood of abuse and threats. And it was terror, then, that bowed the backs of the courtiers gathered under the low-vaulted roof of the Kremlin.

But at the Sloboda of Alexandrov, most especially, the various aspects of the Court life, thus adapted to the character and habits of the Sovereign of that particular period, made up one of the strangest pictures ever bequeathed by history to a wondering posterity.

II.—The Sloboda of Alexandrov.

After the conflagration of 1547, by which the Kremlin was almost entirely destroyed, Ivan lived for some time in the village of Vorobievo, while a wooden residence was being hastily constructed for his use at Moscow, and the brick-built Palace, which had been ravaged by the flames, was being restored. In 1565, when he founded the Opritchnina, the Sovereign thought for a moment of building himself another palace within the Kremlin. On consideration, however, he concluded it would be better to remove his new dwelling-place to some distance from that he was giving up to the Tsar Simeon, and he chose a site outside, on the Vozdvijenka, and close to the present Gate of the Holy Trinity. Here he took up his quarters in 1567, but his stay was not a long one. Moscow was always as hateful a residence to him as it was to be to Peter the Great. He preferred Kolomenskoie, his father’s favourite home, where he himself, went every year to keep his fete-day. In spite of its wild and forbidding landscape, Vologda, on the river of the same name, also had its charm? for him. Here, by his orders, a

huge wooden palace was raised on an eminence on which the present Government offices now stand. Here, too, he built a cathedral on the model of that of the Assumption. But before long the Sloboda of Alexandrov took the gloomy despot’s fancy, and held it.

This famous suburb was Ivan the Terrible’s Plessis-les- Tours, just as Maliouta-Skouratov was his Tristan-l’Ermite. A. Tolstoi has given us a picturesque but purely imaginary de­scription of the dwelling. The buildings of the present Monas­tery of the Assumption at Alexandrov are said to contain part of the ancient Palace, which has disappeared and left no visible trace behind. This monastery, like the Palace at Vologda, stands on an eminence over the river. The cathedral within its walls does appear to be of Ivan’s date. We can still recog­nise a door brought from Novgorod after the sacking of that town, and the whole edifice looks like a reconstruction, into the composition of which elements originally intended for a quite different purpose have entered ; the doors and windows are dotted about with no apparent meaning, and there are recesses in the walls which are quite unsuitable to modem requirements. The same peculiarities are noticeable in the Monastery of the Child Jesus at Tver, where St. Philip’s cell has been turned into a chapel. At Alexandrov, apart from the cathedral, a block of masonry which certainly belonged to some other building still e.xists. Some persons have thought they recognised in this the site of the rooms once tenanted by Ivan and his associates. This conjecture would seem to be confirmed by the huge base­ments, with their mysterious recesses and subterranean pas­sages plunging into unknown depths, out of which the visitor expects to see bloody phantoms rise.

But these walls, which may have seen and heard so many things, are dumb now, and local tradition is as dumb. To reconstitute the history of all that happened there—all that stood for so much in the life of a most remarkable man, and the story of a great country, we are fain to fall back on legends and on a few unreliable chroniclers. This suburb, the seat of a government, the centre of an administration, has slipped, as to both these memories, through the fingers ot posterity, even that nearest to it; and those contemporaries who mention it at all consider it little better than a resort of brigands. Yet a verification of their narratives by comparison with some few more reliable documents and certain established facts may enable us to form some idea of what the dwelling, and the lives of those who dwelt in it, may have been.

I have already given my opinion as to the accusations brought against the Opritchnina. It was a revolutionary undertaking, and its natural consequence was a reign of terror,

attended by inevitable excesses. The fellow-workers to whom Ivan found himself obliged to appeal, some of them drawn from the lowest strata of society, and all incapable of under­standing the nature and real object of his enterprise, were even more inclined than he himself to confuse violence with energy. And, docile instruments and complaisant courtiers as they were, they flattered and increased the taste for coarse debauchery which the Sovereign owed to his education, and to certain cruel instincts, inherent, no doubt, in his temperament. The chroniclers have preserved the names of these fellow- workers to us. First of all, and ir the front rank, came the bo'iar Alexis Basmanov and his son Feodor ; Prince Athanasius Viazemski; Vassili Griaznoi, Archimandrite of the Monastery of Tchoudov ; Levkil ; and, fiercest and most illustrious of them all, Gregory Loukianovitrh Maliouta-Skouratov. At a later period, Bogdan Bielski. who, with Basmanov and several others, was reported to be. the Tsar’s mignon, and Boris Goudounov, Skouratov’s son-in-law, and himself to be Tsar one day, were paramount in the Sovereign’s favour and con­fidence.

In this inner circle, legend assigns the highest place to Anastasia’s brother, Nikita Romanovitch Zakharine, a per­sonage with whom we have already made acquaintance. Relying on I know not what or which appearances or realities, it has endued him with virtues — a generous and loyal heart, and a pure and upright mind—which strike one as being somewhat incompatible with such surroundings. Taking it all together, I am inclined to think Ivan, in that par­ticular phase of his life, at all events, could not have put up with a comrade of this sort, and that Zakharine has reaped the benefit of a deliberate process of idealization applied to the historical origin of the whole of his family, once it had become the ancestor of an Imperial house.

In principle, indeed, the Sloboda of Alexandrov was any­thing but a home of debauchery. Ivan, as we know, always affected a great inclination towards the monastic life, and certain monastic tendencies were frequently allied, in his case, with a looseness of morals really by no means foreign to the cloistered rule of those days. We have seen, too, that he was anxious to work a reform which would have brought back the monastic world to a stricter observance of the rules, all too often broken, of the religious life. The idea of setting a personal example in this respect certainly swayed the con­ception of the system he adopted, and applied, for many years, to the internal arrangements of his Court at Alexandrov. The chief features of the constitution of the Opritchnina already endued it with certain of the characteristics of a

brotherhood. Each of the Opritchniki took a special oath which bore some resemblance to vows. He renounced the world, after a fashion, and gave up all his former relations. The Sloboda bore all the outward appearance of a hermitage. Within its walls 300 comrades, more imperially attached to the Sovereign’s person, lived according to a most severe rule. Over their gold-embroidered kaftans they had to wear black gowns, and take their part in most complicated religious observances. The Tsar was the prior, Viaziemski cel­larer, Skouratov sacristan. The Sovereign himself, with his sons, rang the bells for service. At midnight everybody was on foot for the first prayers. At four o’clock in the morn­ing all were in church again for matins, which lasted till seven. At eight everyone heard Mass, and Ivan took pains to edify his comrades by prostrating himself over and over again, till his forehead was covered with bumps. At twelve o’clock dinner was served in the refectory, the Tsar reading aloud from some pious book, and, as in the best-managed monasteries, all the food that remained over was given to the poor. The Sovereign, as prior of the community, ate his meals alone, but everybody sat down together afterwards to drink. Some of the Opritchniki made these entertainments as lively as if they had been qualified jesters, and ladies were admitted to them. . . .

To Ivan, as to most of his contemporaries, this constituted the ideal of the religious life—excess of devotion redeeming excess of debauch, external practices and material austerity atoning for lack of internal piety, and excusing the worst moral failings. And in that sense, the Sloboda of Alexandrov was a place of stem discipline. There is no doubt Ivan took his parody in the most serious way. I see a proof of this in the celebrated epistle he addressed, in 1575, to the Archi­mandrite and monks of the Monastery of St. Cyril at Bieloo- ziero. The man who indited this missive was certainly imbued with the conviction that he himself was a monk called to hold converse with other monks on a subject peculiarly interesting to men of the same vocation. The correspondence took its rise out of the following circumstances. The powerful family of the Cheremetiev was one of those which had been most sorely tried by the persecution under which the upper aris­tocracy had suffered subsequent to Ivan’s accession to the throne. One of the three brothers who were its chief members,- Nikita Yassilivitch, had been put to death ; another, Ivan, a renowned warrior, had made acquaintance with prison and the torture-chamber. To escape worse treatment, he had retired to the Monastery of Bielooziero, and there be­come a monk, under the name of Iona. According to the

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custom of those days, such an entrance into the religious life, imposed by sheer necessity, admitted of a very liberal amount of compromise. Brother Iona gave up part of his fortune to the community, but he still retained a very large amount, and led an independent life in a house close to the monastery, where he was attended by numerous servants, and kept a liberal kitchen, and everything else to match. He was ex­ceedingly hospitable, and the monks, who took advantage of this, returned the compliment by showing him every kind of civility, sending him presents and dainties of various kinds. The monastery itself was not addicted to privation. The establishment was an enormous one. Round the chief build­ing stood eleven others, which sheltered the kitchens, the. bakeries, the storehouses, and in one part of the edifice, still intact, there are 700 rooms, supposed to have been occupied by servants. Cheremetiev was not the only monk of noble birth in the establishment. The community could likewise boast the presence of Vassili Stepanovitch Sobakine, known in religion as Varlaam ; Ivan Ivanovitch Khabarov, son of the famous Khabar Simskii ; and other vielmoji, sent there in disgrace by Ivan. There were frequent disputes between these guests, some of whom, less rich, and consequently less well treated than Cheremetiev, looked on the favours of which he was the recipient with a jealous eye. In this way a com­plaint reached Ivan, who could not fail to be displeased at hearing that men whom he had disgraced were still enjoy­ing so many privileges in their exile. And the Sovereign at once set about calling the monks to order. Cheremetiev must take his meals at the common table. When the monks ex­cused themselves by saying that their brother’s health had rendered the concession necessary, the Tsar thought it well to press the matter further, and wrote the epistle, which, from the literary point of view, is probably his masterpiece.

He begins by a confession which would seem to justify the worst of the accusations brought against his private and his public life. With his usual bluntness, he calls himself a ‘ stinking dog,’ living in ‘ drunkenness, adultery, murder, brigandage,’ and other mortal sins. Are we to take him literally ? One might fancy there was no reason why he should slander himself. But still less do we see any reason why he. should declare, immediately afterwards, that the few truths he proposes to tell his brothers ’ come out of his foolish­ness.’ The real meaning of this preamble is very soon ap­parent. The Prior of Alexandrov is talking the language habitually used by the monks of his period. He accuses him­self and humbles himself, he bows his head and strikes at himself by a sort of irony, which is to make the blows he is

about to deal others mightier still. His conscience is a heavy one indeed. But the repentance of which he makes such a show is as sincere as his claim to be a member of the Bieloo- ziero community, and thus to a right to interfere in its inner workings, is serious. Some years ago, when paying a visit to the monastery, he remembers having expressed a desire to enter the Order at some future date, and now, turning that intention into accomplished fact, for his own convenience, he arrives, taking this ingenious by-way, at the object of his endeavour, in other words, to lash his contradictors with the spiritual rods which, for the moment, are the chosen weapons of his fancy. And after this fashion he addresses them, sprinkling his discourse, as usual, with quotations and examples culled from the Fathers of the Church and from Scripture history, from Roman annals and Byzantine chronicles.

¹ Under your roof you have Haman and Caiaphas—Chere­metiev and Khabarov. You have Pilate—Varlaam Suba- kine—and you have the Christ, nailed once more upon His Cross. ... It is no longer Cheremetiev, it is no longer Khabarov, who have taken the monkish habit ^;n your house —it is you who are their guests. They are a law to you. Go on ! To-day some boiar will introduce one piece of license into your midst. To-morrow another will make you accept some fresh concession to your common weaknesses, and thus, little by little, the whole rule of the monastery will be broken down, and your way of life will become exactly the same as that of the rest of the world. ... You began by giving Jehosaphat (Kolytchev) a pewter service, and allowing him to be served in his own cell. . . . Now Cheremetiev has his own table and his own kitchen. And the consequences are beginning to be manifest: all the monks live just as they please. . . . Tumult, disorder, noise, rebellion, frivolity! . . . Wherefore ? For whom ? For that rogue, that dog whose name is Sobakine ’ (a play on the word sobaka, dog), ‘ or for that son of the devil whose name is Cheremetiev, or for that idiot whose name is Khabarov ! . .

This epistle has been published in the ‘ Historical Docu­ments ’ (i., No. 204). Karamzine (‘History of Russia,’ ix., p. 37, note) believes it was written about 1578. But A. Bars- soukov seems to me nearer the truth when he gives the date as having been somewhere between the spring of 1574 and that of 1575 (‘ The Cheremetiev Family,’ i. 324). I must add that all Ivan did was to take and rearrange, to suit his own purpose, texts borrowed from old works on religious contro­versial subjects, current diatribes against the dissolute habits of the religious communities, with which the monks of Bieloo-

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ziero were already well acquainted, as the copies found in their own library prove. As for the spirit which inspired his intervention, it is made evident by the following detail : With the epistle he sent a gold braiina adorned with figures of naked women, in relief, as a present from the Tsar to the community he desired to recall to a sense of its duties !

Here we have the true spirit of the Sloboda of Alexandrov!

Ivan lived there, as Louis XI. had lived at Plessis-les-Tours a century previously, between the monks whose pious exer­cises he shared, the locksmiths who laboured on the famous fillettes du roi—heavy chains fastened on the legs of the prisoners shut up in the iron cages,—and those other servants of his, whose accounts appear in His Majesty’s books under the head of ‘ Voluptcs ’—so much one day for having brought a lady who pleased the King’s fancy from Dijon to Tours, and so much another for purchasing two dozen of canary- birds ! (Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vii. 145). Though Louis did not turn Plessis-les-Tours into a monastery, we know he built one, close by, for the Calabrian monk Francesco di Paulo. He, too, surrounded himself with ‘ evil folk of low condition,’ while at the same time, to drive away the ennui which devoured him, or still the terrors that haunted him, he collected ‘ players of the. bass viol and of sweet instru­ments ’ from all parts of the world. But, so the chronicle of St. Denis tells us, ‘ nothing could amuse liirn.’

After evening prayers at the Sloboda of Alexandrov, Ivan betook himself to his bedchamber, where three blind old men awaited his coming. Their duty was to send him to sleep by telling him stories, and no doubt to save him. by their com ■ pany, from the horrors of loneliness and darkness. In the daytime the Sovereign had other amusements. Is it true, as we have been told, that, when dinner was over, he went round the torture-chambers to enjoy the sight of the anguish inflicted at his command ? Did he even act as executioner himself from time to time ? Can it be that, morose and gloomy as he was everywhere else, his face changed and he grew merry in the midst of all these horrors, mingling his shouts of laughter with the shrieks of his victims ? It may be so. But the Tsar also found pleasure in the less sanguinary sport afforded him by Skomorohky—tumblers, jugglers, and bear-leaders. Search was made for these all over the country, and those who chose them.out were not over-particular. The Novgorod chronicle tells us the story of a certain Soubota Osi6tr, who, after abusing and striking a diak named Danilo Barteniev, turned a bear loose on the unlucky official’s heels, and let it hunt him into his office, where it spread terror among

a knot, of employes, some of whom were knocked down by the infuriated creature’s paws. After this exhibition of prowess, the beast and its owner were deemed fair game for the Tsar’s entertainment, and were at once sent off to Alexandrov with a troop of skomnrokhy.

Bears, whether wild or tame, played a leading part in the life of the suburb. They were made to perform grotesque pantomimes. They were used to startle and mystify visitors. Often, too, they were set to fight pitched battles, not with dogs only, but with human beings. Horsey’s story of the terrible experience of six fat monks who were accused of rebellion and forced to fight for their lives with six huge bears, which ate up five of them, though the sixth beast’s adversary was strong enough to overcome him, may not be worthy of credence. Guagnino declares that in winter, as soon as the ice-bound river became, as usual, the common haunt of the whole population, which crowded to amuse itself by staring at the shops, the Tsar habitually let some of his domestic planti­grades loose on the peaceable inhabitants. One isolated fact of this nature may have taken place, but its habitual recur­rence would no doubt have prevented people from coming back to the river. On this point, as on so many others, the chronicle has probably exaggerated features belonging to some extent, as we have seen, to the history of the general habits of a country and a period in which bear-baiting con­stituted one of the favourite and most ordinary entertainments of every class of society.

All legends apart, the Sloboda of Alexandrov has left memories most offensive both to morality and decency. The banquets that followed on the pious exercises already referred to were absolute orgies. Women played an im­portant part in the life of Ivan the Terrible, and the Opritchniki, it may be, did what they could to ensure the satisfaction of tastes and needs which neither age nor sick­ness seem ever to have diminished, in this passionate and most immoderate nature. It is quite probable that this daily debauch may have been marked by odious and occa­sionally cruel refinements of detail, even if we conclude the chroniclers to have been drawing on their imaginations when they describe Skouratov and Basmanov and their peers as indulging in a dehrium of monstrous wickedness with the young peasant women they had stripped and forced to run naked after flying poultry, while they shot at them with arrows. ... At a time when genuine monasteries only too often took on the appearance of houses of ill fame, we may easily guess what went on in this one, which was a mere imitation. Adultery throned it there, with the Tsar-Prior,

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the husband of three or four cast-off wives ; and after Anas­tasia died there was certainly nothing edifying about the life Ivan led. Yet the very fact of his otherwise inexplicable obstinacy in seeking to enter into fresh bonds of matrimony would seem—so far as the Sovereign himself is concerned, at all events—to weaken the authority of the legend concerning the troops of women conveyed into the suburb, and the harem said to have accompanied the Tsar wherever he went. Ivan was a man addicted to women, but his religious scruples made him a man addicted to wives, and who cared so much about marrying them that he would play at being honestly wedded just as he played at living in a monastery.

III.—Ivan’s Domestic Life.

The Tsar’s second wife, the wild Circassian called Temriou- kovna, baptized under the name of Maria, whom he married in 1561, and who died in 1569, bears the reputation of having possessed morals as loose as her instincts were fierce. Two years after her death, Ivan’s choice fell on the daughter of a plain Novgorod merchant, called Marfa Vasilievna Sobakine. She only lived a fortnight after her wedding-day, and the Tsar declared she had been poisoned before she had really become his wife, and died a maid. Thus, at least, he strove to justify the fourth union, to which he at once turned his mind, and which the rules of his Church forbade. He pleaded necessity, pointed out that three of his wives had been poisoned, one after the other; that when the second died he had felt a strong inclination to enter a monastery; that the cares of his children’s education and of his Empire—his exact words were ‘ of the defence of the Christian faith ’— had kept him in the world, and still retained him there, and that therefore, ‘ to avoid falling into sin,’ he must take him a wife. The Church gave in, though she imposed a penance on this obstinate espouser of wives, and in 1572 he led the daughter of one of his dvorniks, Anne Koltovski, to the altar. Three years afterwards he sent her to a monastery, accused, so it seems, of being mixed up in a plot, and in the massacres consequent on this accusation the whole of the wretched woman’s family appears to have perished. Under the name of Daria, this ex-Tsarina lived on at Tihkvine till the year 1626.

The Tsar then took two mistresses, one after the other, named Anne Vassiltchikov and Vassilissa Meletiev. They passed as his wives, though the Sovereign never went beyond asking his confessor’s leave to live with them, and no doubt this dignitary felt the confessional must not deal too strictly with a man ot Ivan’s kidney. About both these favourites a

crop of legends has sprung up, and the work of many a poet and novelist has been inspired by them. Ostrovski, in a famous play which puts both heroines on the scene, and sets one against the other, gives us a striking picture of a rivalry which may be imaginary, but which is wonderfully representa­tive of the historical surroundings amidst which the two women lived and suffered. He makes Anne Vassiltchikov, who realizes that she is on the brink of being supplanted by Vassilissa, whom the author turns into her serving-woman, speak as follows :

‘ I am terrified here, I cannot breathe ; my heart Is not at rest : the Tsar has ceased to be kind to me :

The servants look at me askance. From far away I hear the echoes of the master's pleasures,

The noise of his gaiety. . . . Th's dreary palace, for an instant,

Is full of singing and laughter,

Then the silence of the grave falls on it again, as though Death were everywhere. Only in the recesses Of the terem I hear low whispers—of executions !

Nothing to warm my heart! I am the Tsar’s wife in the flesh,

But in my heart I am a stranger to him ! lie frightens me. . . .

He terrifies me when he is angry, and quite as much when he is merrv.

I do not know his love. . . .

. . . Like a beast He seeks my caresses. . . . Never a tender word And as to what I feel in my heart he never asks !’

Ostrovski has probably written true history, again, when he shows us Ivan alone with Vassilissa, now his acknowledged favourite. The Tsar wants to leave his new companion, of whom he is beginning to tire, and she keeps him because she is afraid. She speaks of the dead folk that he between them, and makes him tremble too. She bids him amuse her, and in vain he answers roughly that he is not where he is for her amusement ! She feels cold, and at a sign from her, and after drawing his dagger to strike her, he takes off his kaftan and throws it over her feet. She asks him to call her Tsarina. He answers indignantly, ‘ What kind of a Tsarina are you ? Did I lead you to the altar ? Did I have you crowned V But she replies, ‘ How can you argue with a silly woman ? Spit on her. and then do as she chooses !’ And the Tsar obeys once more. She falls asleep, and then, when he is sure she cannot hear him, he speaks to her of love. He, who dares everything, had not dared to do it before !

As to the causes which brought about the disgrace of these two favourites we have no information. Ostrovski may have guessed them rightly when he puts these words, addressed to Anne Vassiltchikov, into Ivan’s mouth: ‘You are growing thin. ... I do not like thin women ! . . .’

According to one of the current legends, a third mistress succeeded these two in 1573, Maria Dolgoiouki by name, who was sent away after the very first night—either because the Tsar suspected her affections were engaged elsewhere, or bccause he had discovered she was not a maid—and drowned in a carriage dragged by runaway horses into the river Siera. But this story has been told of several of the Tsar’s temporary companions, and Anne Vassiltchikov, according to several chroniclers, whose testimony is confirmed by that of Printz von Buchau, was still in favour three years later than this, and finally died a violent death, as it would seem. Vassilissa, after a much shorter career, was shut up, while still young and beautiful, if we may believe the chroniclers, in a cloister at Novgorod, Ivan having perceived that she cast a too friendly eye on Prince Ivan Devtclev, whom he caused to be executed at the same time.

In September, 1580, iust when Batory was preparing for his second victorious campaign, the Tsar contracted a seventh or eighth union, more or less legitimate, with Maria Nago'i, daughter of Feodor Feodorovitch, one of his bo'iars, and this lady soon became the mother of the Tsarevitch Dmitri. At the same time he married his son Feodor to Irene, sister of Boris Godounov, and thus provided himself with a fresh family circle, on which he seems to have concentrated all the affec­tions of his later years. This, however, did not prevent him, as we have already seen, from pursuing his plan for a marriage with Mary Hastings.

My readers will imagine what were the conditions, under such circumstances, of the family fife still further disturbed and darkened, in 1581, by a catastrophe to which I have already referred.

IV.—The Tsar’s Family.

By his first wife Ivan had two sons. Of these, the second, Feodor, sickly in body and weak in mind, was a person of small importance. The eldest, Ivan, seems to have borne a considerable resemblance, both physically and morally, to his father, and he shared all his occupations and amusements. Like his progenitor, he had literary tastes, and composed a Life of St. Anthony, the manuscript of which is preserved amongst the papers of Count A. Tolstoi. And by the time he was thirty he had married his third wife. Oderborn de­clares the father and son were in the habit of exchanging their mistresses. When one of these, living at that moment with the Tsarevitch, complained of the language used about her by other ladies, the Tsar is said to have had the culprits

seized and laid naked on the snow, so that all the passers-by might see them and jeer at them. I merely mention this story to give, some ^;dea of the general opinion as to the rela­tions existing between the Sovereign and his heir.

The Tsarevitch’s first wife was called Eudoxia Sabourov ; the name of the second was l’raxevna Solov. Both were cast off, and forced to take the veil. The third wife, Helena Cheremetiev, was pregnant when the Tsar killed her husband in a fit of rage. There are various versions of what happened in connection with this murder. Some chroniclers have in­vented a scene in the course of which the Tsarevitch reproached his father for his cowardice in face of Batory’s successes, and demanded the command of an army to make an effort to drive out the invader. Others have supposed he interfered in favour of some Livonian prisoners who were being ill-treated by the Qpritchniki. Considering the agreement of feeling and thought which, according to most witnesses, admittedly existed between father and son, these stories strike one as highly improbable. Possevino, who was at Moscow three months after the catastrophe, suggests another, and a much more plausible cause. Ivan seems to have met his daughter- in-law within the precincts of the Palace, and noticed a lack of modesty in her attire. She may, owing to her condition, have omitted putting on a girdle over her sorotchka. In his displeasure, the Tsar-Prior struck the poor woman, and so roughly that she miscarried in the course of the following night. As an inevitable consequence, the Tsarcvitch re­proached his father, who at once flew into a rage, raised his cruel spear again, and this time his son Was struck on the temple.

The crime, unintentional though it was, was beyond what even Ivan had accustomed his contemporaries to expect, and the Sovereign, Possevino tells us, was in despair. He spent his nights weeping, yelling aloud in his grief, and every' morning he called his boiars together and told them he felt unworthy to continue to be their ruler. But at the same time, basing his request on Feodor’s incapacity, he requested them to choose some other successor, and the courtiers, sus­pecting a trap, besought him to remain in power.

Of all the events which crammed the reign of Ivan the Terrible, this one has taken the strongest hold on the popular imagination. From Arkhangel to Vladimir, from Olonetz to Nijni-Novgorod, over all the wide expanse of the Russian Empire, songs inspired by the hideous drama have been gathered. Rybnikov has published five of them, Bezso- nov twelve, and Hilferding eleven. In one of these by­lines the victim is not Ivan, but Feodor, whom Maliouia-

Skouratov has denounced as a traitor to the Tsar. ‘ Treason is in thine Imperial Palace ; it sits beside thee : it eats out of the same dish with thee ; it wears the same garments as thou.’ The poet evidently had a passage out of St. Matthew in his mind (chap. xxvi. 23) : ‘ He that dippeth his hand with Me in the dish, the same shall betray Me.’ And then, careless of chronology, he brings in the Tsarina Anastasia and her brother Nikita Romanovitch, who save the innocent Tsare­vitch just when he is about to suffer final execution. I11 others of the poetic versions of the story the Tsar commands that his son’s head shall be cut off and set up in front of his Palace ; his heart and liver tom out and brought to him ; the dagger dripping with his blood shown him, at the very least -and Nikita Romanovitch, the darling hero of the popular poet, deceives the Sovereign by killing a slave, and thus renews the story of Cyms saved by the envoys of Astyages, or that of Genevieve de Brabant, or of the Sleeping Beauty.

In spite of his resemblance to his father, or because of it, rather, the elder Tsarevitch himself enjoyed considerable popularity. His death was regarded as a national calamity, and all the more so because the future of the country seemed to be threatened by it. Feodor was half an idiot, Dmitri was a little child. The Tsar had had several sons by his numerous concubines—Feodor Basmanov, a brave but cruel man, was believed to be one of these—but none of them had been acknowledged by him. More than ever did Ivan cling to his adopted family, for this man, who did not know what pity meant, had a great need of tenderness. Speaking of Boris Godounov and his sister, he was heard to say they ‘ were like the two fingers of his hand.’ But more than ever, too, he sought to drown his sorrows, and_; it may be, his remorse, in an excess of debauchery which was completing the ruin of his already sorely-tried health. Did those gloomy suburb walls hide a mixture of Sodom and Cythera, as most chroniclers have admitted, and as Sylvester’s former warnings to his unruly pupil might well lead us to suppose ? The authen­ticity of Sylvester’s epistle is doubtful, and a passage from Possevino’s narrative has certainly been quite wrongly in­terpreted in this sense. The Latin words, Qui gratissimus tredecim annos cpud Principem fucrat, atque in ejus cubiculn dormiebat, simply imply that Bogdan Bielski, to whom they refer, performed the duties of a spalnik about the Sovereigns person (see ante, p. 360). Many items of the accusation brought against the mysterious Sovereign by chroniclers and historians are no better founded, doubtless, than this one. But the disorders of his life cannot be denied, and they certainly hastened the close of a career which, with

Ivan’s robust temperament, should have been a very long one.

After Anastasia’s death, the Tsar sent 1,000 roubles to the Monastery of the Troiitsa, just twice the amount of the offering he had given for ‘ the repose of his father’s soul.’ In the Tsarina Marfa’s case, he reduced his gift to 700 roubles. In that uf his son, and moved by feelings which are easy to divine, he sent five times as much, and added an equal sum for him­self. He was taking his precautions, and he was not mistaken. His days were numbered.

CHAPTER V THE MAN AND HIS WORK

J.—HIS DEATH. II.—CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT. III.— KNOWLEDGE AND INTELLIGENCE. IV.—IDEAS AND FEELINGS. V. THE RESULTS OF HIS REIGN.

I.—His Death.

In August, 1582, Possevino, delivering his report of his mission to the Signory of Venice, expressed an opinion that the Tsar would not live long. Early in 1584, alarming symptoms began to disturb the minds 01 the persons compos­ing his immediate circle. His body began to swell, and the odour became almost unendurable. The physicians recognised signs of approaching mortification, and, according to Horsey, Bogdan Bielski consulted the astrologers, who announced that death would ensue on a certain date. The favourite did not care to tell his master of this gloomy forecast, but he warned the prophets that they would be burnt alive if it did not come true. This amounted to putting a price on murder, and hence the suspicion as to poison cast, after the event, on Boris Godounov, and the accomplices he is said to have secured for his ambitious plans.

Horsey further tells the story of an extraordinary scene witnessed by him in the treasure-chamber, where the dying Tsar was fond of lingering amidst all the riches lie was soon to quit for ■ever. One day he desired the Englishman to attend him there. He had a number of precious stones exhibited, and explained their quality and value to the persons about him. Suddenly he took up some turquoises, and said to Horsey, ‘ See how they change their colour! they are turning paler. I hat is because I have been poisoned: they foretell my death !’ Immediately afterwards he asked for his sceptre, ‘ made of a unicorn’s horn.’

My readers are aware that until Ambroise Pare’s days, and even later, the ivory of the narwhale was believed to exorcise certain curative properties. The Tsar’s physician, armed with this instrument of magic, was made to draw a circle on a table, and within the line some spiders were put down. These died at once, while others, placed outside the circle, ran away.

‘ Too late !’ said Ivan ; ‘ the unicorn’s horn cannot save me now !’ And he went back to his gems. ‘ Look at this diamond,’ said he to Horsey again : ‘ it is the finest and most precious of all the Eastern stones. I have never cared for it. Tt curbs fury and lust; it instils abstinence and chastity. . . . I feel E. . . . Take me away. . . . We will come back another time. . . .’

On the day the astrologers had fixed—March 18, 1584—the Sovereign, according to Horsey’s account, felt rather better. Bielski reminded the diviners of the fate that awaited them.

‘ The day will not be over till the sun sets,’ was their answer. Ivan, having taken a bath, asked for a chess-board. On the preceding days circulars had been sent to all the monasteries asking their prayers for the ‘ sick man who repented,’ and who likewise besought the Divine mercy— on the faults of which the monks had been guilty with respect to himself ! These docu­ments, still in existence, prove that the Sovereign, even yet, was striving to combine his care for the safety of his own soul with that of his political interests. The legend assures us, too, that, though he treated all those about him with a most unaccustomed gentleness, and enjoined his son to follow this example, to avoid wars with Christian Princes, to reduce taxes, and set prisoners free, he never ceased indulging in every kind of physical excess, even going so far as to make an abomin­able attempt, so Oderbom affirms, on his daughter-in-law Irene, whom he had treated with paternal fondness.

The only points quite free from uncertainty are the date of Ivan’s death and a few trifling details connected with it. He had sent for Boris Godounov to play with him, and was setting up the pieces on the chess-board when he turned faint. A few moments later the death-rattle was in his throat, and the astrol­ogers’ presage was realized. The last sacraments were adminis­tered, and at his own request the usual ceremony of putting on the monkish habit was pertonned upon the Tsar’s person; so that it was the monk Iona who relinquished the crown into Feodor’s hands, and the power into those of Boris Godounov.

I have endeavoured to show what the first Tsar of all the Russias was. I must now close by defining some features of a physiognomy by no means easy to reconstitute, athwart all the uncertainty which hangs round so obscure a past.

II.—Character and Temperament.

This uncertainty defies any attempt beyond a general ap­proximation, even as to the external appearance of the man. According to Russian authorities, he was tall and thin. He struck foreigners, on the contrary, as being stout and fat. This, probably, is a mere question of siandar i. The Russians of that period, as we know, were most of them corpulent to an extent rare in other countries. As to Ivan’s stature, everybody is agreed. He was very tall and strongly built, high-shouldered and broad-chested. Yet in the Treasury of the Laura of St. Sergius at the Troitsa there is a kaftan which belonged, so tradition asserts, to the Sovereign, though Monsieur G igoliev, who has lately taken and published its measurements (Russian Archives, July, 1902), seems to have been led by them to a different conclusion. As to the Tsar’s face, his portraits, all of them of most doubtful authenticity, are no guide at all. Contemporary witness is fairly agreed in describing his nose as long and flattened, or turned up ; his eyes as blue, small, but very quick and keen-looking ; his moustache long, his auburn beard thick, and grizzled towards the close ot his reign. He shaved his head : Cafillos capitis utque flerique Ruthcni novacula radit, says Printz von Buchau.

During the second halt ot the Sovereign’s life, as to which we possess most information, his habitual expression struck the majority of witnesses as being threatening and gloomy, though he otten burst into roars of laughter. But here we come to the moral aspect of his physiognomy, which even now remains a riddle, m spite of the innumerable attempts made to solve it, and we find ourselves face to face with con­tradictions resulting not so much in a divergence of opinion among observers, as in a division of the subject they observe.

Ivan was energetic to the point of violence, and yet timid to" downright cowardice ; his pride amounted to positive madness, and his humility occasionally descended to baseness. He was intelligent, and yet capable of saying and doing the most foolish things. Why did he insult Erik just when he desired his alliance ? How did he come to call himself a ‘ stinking dog,’ and yet persevere in the behaviour which led him to apply this epithet ? To such questions, which might be multiplied with­out end, some people have thought an answer had been found in the recent discoveries ot a science at present enjoying what may prove to be an ephemeral favour. Ivan’s father and grand­father appear to have possessed well-balanced minds, but his great-grandfather, VassUi the Blind, was a man whose intellect and will were both equally weak. His mother, Helen Glinski,

was a sickly creature, and his father was over fifty when the boy, whose childish health was most frail, was born. His grandmother Sophia may have brought the vitiated blood of the Paleologi, with all that predisposition to nervous com­plaints which was so strongly marked among them, into her husband’s family. Ivan’s brother George became an idiot ; he himself had three times as many wives as he had children. His eldest boy died an infant ; his second, a man of cruel and sanguinary tastes, died by his own father’s hand ; another, Feodor, was half-imbecile ; Dmitri is said to have suffered from epileptic fits.

My readers will guess the conclusion : Ivan the Terrible was probably a ‘ degenerate,’ one of those ‘ paranoics ’ to whose psychology Lombroso has devoted so much attention.

The most evident weakness of this explanation is that it does not explain anything at all. Before the days of the Italian psychiater, Reveille-Parise (1834) ^and Schilling (1863) had already made an attempt to establish the fact that genius is always a form of neurosis, and very often of madness ; and this theory may be traced back to far more ancient authorities, from Aristotle down to Pascal. More recently Monsieur Mejja (Nevrosis de las Hombres Celebres, Buenos Ayres, 1885) has told us that almost all the great men of the Argentine Republic have been drunkards, neuropathic subjects, or madmen. What of that ? It is an established fact, in the eyes of Lom­broso and his disciples, that Napoleon’s genius was a pheno­menon produced by epileptic neurosis. Does that take us any further ? Epileptic neurosis is a label—it is not an ex­planation. The fact still remains that between such a de­generate as Napoleon and such a degenerate as Ivan a huge difference exists : that the acts and behaviour of one present a logical sequence, a harmony, entirely absent from those of the second ; that the first, though he may be mad, if that please you, acts like a reasonable being, and that the other betrays, or seems to betray, frequent symptoms of mania ; that it is the reason for these differences which has to be dis­covered, and that the hypothesis of malady of the brain in both cases may alter the conditions of the problem, but does not solve it.

The interpretations laid on the character and tempera­ment of Ivan the Terrible seem to me based, in the first place, on a general error, which I am inclined to consider an anachronism. The subject under examination has been treated as though he had lived in our own day, and an analysis correct enough in itself falls to the ground because it has been arrived at without any regard for historical surroundings, which ought to have been taken into account. Take such

a man as Louis XI., with the faculties everyone recognises him to have possessed. Put him down into the nineteenth or twentieth century, and ask yourself whether he would be capable, now, with his inherent caution, of falling into the snare laid for him by Peronne, and letting himself, with all his cunning, be conducted right up to the walls of Liege, there to witness the destruction of a town that was under his own pro­tection. Surely not! Then, why was he guilty then of this twofold piece ot folly, aggravated, in the second case, by down­right infamy ? Because he was the man of his own time, of a half-barbarous period during which we see, even at the very top of the intellectual ladder, a lack of that arrangement and discipline of the mental faculties which years ot hereditary intellectual culture have now made a common thing, even in a much lower order of intelligence. Louis XI. was a man of impulse, like most of his contemporaries, and like certain eccen­tric persons of our own day, who owe the quality to certain atavisms which make them ‘ throw back ’ to former generations. Apply this elementary clue to the person and career of Ivan the Terrible, and you will have gone a long way, in my opinion, towards findii.g the desired solution.

Even oftener than in Louis XI.’s case, Ivan obeyed his impulses. Some of these came from without—the result of impressions produced by the men or the events about him; others came from within, and these he owed to his birth and education. Combined with his grandfather’s intelligence— though his own was broader—and his energy—though his was weaker—the Tsar, whose father’s influence on him was nil, possessed his mother’s passionate and violent heart. His action was often taken with a jerk, ^;n most irregular fashion. But the man who conceived the idea ot the Opritchnina and put it into execution cannot be said to have been lacking either in will or in sequence of ideas. I have already shown the value of the theory according to which he always made over his power to other people, because he did not know how to use it himself. But Adachev and Sylvester were no more the masters of Russia between 1548 and 1560 than the Tsar Simeon was from 1575 to 1576, though the Sovereign was pleased, in the first case, to give himself out as the victim ot his favourites, and in the second, to play a farce with his phantom Sovereign for the world’s benefit.

Ivan, according to Printz von Buchau—a really reliable witness, the most faithful of them all—was violent-tempered to such an extent that the smallest annoyance made him ‘ foam like a horse.’ Often he quite failed to restrain and master his rage. But often, too, as during his struggle with Batory, he showed himself extraordinarily pliant. In this case, when

he had given up everything, or very nearly, on the battlefield, he disputed the victory, foot by foot, in that of diplomacy, never neglecting any expedient nor the smallest chance of success.

I have already spoken of his education. It is not surprising, considering the lack of affection, and even of kindness, he ex­perienced, and the perpetual terrors he had to endure, that he should have contracted a timidity which sometimes took the form of want of confidence in himself, and sometimes that of physical collapse in the face of danger. But the man who held his own for twenty years against all the Kourbskis in his Empire was no coward. From the same source, thanks to those who brought him up with an equal care to flatter his worst instincts and offend his best feelings, he drew that scorn of men in general which accident transformed ^;nto downright hatred. Taube and Kruse both speak, as men who know, of his listiges krokodilisch Herz. Cum mg he was, indeed, and cruel. He had been ill-treated and scoffed at in his youth, and all his life long he seems to have sought impossible revenges. He seems to have felt a passionate need of jeering at men, when he could not or did not desire to make them suffer otherwise ; a bitter pleasure in putting them in the wrong, and taking advantage of it ; an utter and absolute lack of sympathy and pity. This last feature he possessed in common with Peter the Great, and it had its roots in the same cause. Read these lines addressed to Kourbski after a victorious campaign : ‘You have complained that I sent you to distant towns, as though you were in disgrace ! With God’s help, we ourselves are now much farther off. . . . And where did you expect to find repose after such great fatigues ? At Wolmar ? We are there now, and you have had to flee whither you did not expect to go!’ . . . And remember the story of the favourite Opritchnik Vassili Griaznoi, who was taken prisoner by the Tartars. Did his master pity him, and take compassion on his fate ? No, indeed I ‘You should not have gone into the infidels’ camp for no reason at all, Vassiouchka, or, having gone there, you should not have slept like a top according to your usual habit! You thought you were out hunting with your hounds, and would have caught your hare, and instead of that the Tartars have caught you in your form, and tied you up to their saddle­bow ! . . . These Crimean fellows do not snore, like all of you, and they understand how to humble you, pack of women that you are! . . . I wish they were like you! Then I should be sure they would not dare to cross the river, and still less should I have to fear I should see them appear at Moscow! . . .’

Yet after he had thus made merry at the captive’s expense, Ivan paid his ransom, just as, after he had torn his beard out in

the presence of Devlet-Ghire'i’s envoy, he consented to treat with the Khan. This is a true picture of the man. For if there w'as no method in his madness, he had constant recur­rences, at all events, of the most perfectly lucid reason, and the very same irascible despot who raised his staff to strike the Protestant pastor who dared to compare Luther to St. Paul in his presence was soon to be seen calmly arguing with Rokita.

Judging by his constant fits of rage, one misht fancy him imbued with that insensate fury which afflicted the Norsemen, according to the Sagas, and under the influence of which they would spend their strength against trees and rocks, when there was no living adversary within their reach. But this pas­sionate being did not war with mountains, nor yet with wind­mills. lie was no Norseman—he was a Mongol, rather, cold in his anger, and as perfidibus as he was cruel, full of artifice and hypocrisy, but knowing what he wanted, and only wanting reasonable things, or which seemed so to him, considering the circumstances, subtle, refined, full of a universal curiosity.

If he sometimes overshot his mark, it was because he did not know how to control his temperament; and if he made more victims than he had enemies, it was because, as Lombroso remarks, and very truly this time, ‘ Once the horrible delight of shedding blood has been tasted, the necessity for slaughter becomes so imperious that no man can master it.’ And he adds, ‘ It almost seems as if physical love were often connected with this phenomenon, and as if the sight of blood imparted a special stimulant to this passion. . . . These sanguinary scenes are almost always followed by shameful fits of de­bauchery ’ (U Uomo Dclinquente, i. 389).

This explains the Sloboda of Alexandrov.

And here, too, the historical surroundings must not be allowed to slip out of sight. Soloviov was certainly wrong when he quoted the example of St. Philip as a rehabilitation of the habits of his period. Saints have always been the excep­tions everywhere. Was Ivan an exception in the opposite sense ? The docility with which the massacres he ordered were endured would seem a proof to the contrary*. There is no doubt that by their means he aggravated the savage atrocity of the instincts and habits of those about him, and sowed the Russian soil with a seed of blood, whereof the murder, of his younger son at Ouglitclx, the reign of the false Dmitri, and the horrors of the ‘ troublous times ’ were the harvest. But the Choulskis and the Kourbskis only reaped what they themselves had sown by teaching him who was to become their executioner to disdain human dignity and human life, and scorn all justice and every law.

And Ivan’s education bore a much closer resemblance than

has been commonly imagined to that of all the European Princes of his time. We all know what the childhood and youth of Don Carlos—that cruel tormentor of the men and beasts about him, that hideous monster who had the birds brought in from his hunting excursions roasted alive, and delighted in mutilating the horses in his stables—were, before the fictions of poets and romance-writers cast a glamour over them.

Some people have regarded Ivan’s propensity to confess his crimes, and even exaggerate them, to which I have already referred, as a sign of mania or neurosis. This, as it seems to me, is merely a symptom of the actor’s temperament, frequent in the case o' men who, having every other passion likewise, have that for showing themselves off, attracting onlookers’ attention, even to their own disadvantage. Look at Luther, amongst the Tsar’s own illustrious contemporaries. He carried his mania for this sort of thing beyond all the limits of decency. And, in this matter, Ivan proved how modern he was. None of the Sovereigns of ancient Russia had felt his need or possessed l is gift of speaking, discussing, either viva voce or in writing, on the public square or between four walls, with a fugitive boiar or a foreign envoy, ceaselessly, unrestingly, without decency, too ; for on these occasions he undresses his soul as he might undress his body ; he strips it naked, he shows all his sores and all his warts, and cries, ‘ See how ugly I am !’ He exaggerates them, writing to Kourbski, ‘ Though I am still alive, I am nothing in God’s eyes, thanks to my vile actions, but a corpse, unclean and hideous. I have done worse than Cain, the first murderer ; I have imitated Esau’s shameful excesses ; I have been like Reuben, who soiled his father’s bed !’ Which does not prevent him from thinking and saying that the man to whom he confesses himself guilty of so many shameful acts is quite in the wrong as to the disagreement between them. But if he cannot make himself admired, he is quite willing to inspire horror, so long as people notice him and pay attention to him. Jean Jacques Rousseau must surely have been trained in the self-same school.

Though he generally appears ^;n tragic parts, Ivan, as I have shown, does not object to play chief buffoon at his own Court. Any part will do for him, so long as he can be upon the stage. Now and then he mingles the two styles together. The aged Tchieliadnine falls under suspicion of being a conspirator. The Tsar is not content with handing the traitor over to the executioner. He steps down from his throne, seats the aston­ished boiar upon it, bows to the ground, salutes him by the title of Tsar, and then thrusts his dagger into his heart. ‘ You were able to think of taking my place, but I am able to kill you !’ Printz von Buchau recognises features of resemblance

between Ivan the Terrible and a certain cardinal celebrated for his jovial gestures and talk. He is also struck by the ex­treme mobility of the Sovereign’s countenance and attitudes ; the very expression of his eyes and his voice changing from one minute to the next. The Tsar would be talking with some of the gentlemen about him, his language might be gentle and his gestures kirdly ; but supposing one of the persons with whom he was converging was slow to understand his meaning, his words instantly became rough and his manner threatening, and everybody was in expectation of some outburst. And with all that, so the same witness tells us, there was something about him which would have marked him out as a great per­sonage, at all events, if he had been put in the middle of four hundred peasants, and dressed exactly as they were dressed.

In him, as in most men, the mania for putting lumself forward was a form of pride—a pride which in his case was overweening, though by no means so extravagant as it has been taken to have been. Acquainted as he was with both history and geography, he may very naturally have believed himself superior to all the other European Princes—to the Emperor himself, who was only an elective Sovereign, or to the Sultan, who could not trace his family and titles back to the Romans. Did not a Pharaoh of the twentieth dynasty claim to be master of the whole world ? And do not certain Sovereigns in the Far East still betray symptoms of a similar infatuation ?

This pride, too, had something to do with Ivan’s dislike of risking his own person in the tumult of battle, which might have placed his hierarchic Majesty in too dangerous a position. And in this, as I have already observed, he was only obeying the traditions of his race. Ivan, like his grandfather, was no hero in the commonly accepted meaning of that word. Such men as Alexander, Hannibal, Gustavus-Adolphus, Charles XII., Napoleon, come and go like meteors. For labour which is to •endure, men like the Rurikovitchy are far more reliable. It is true that Louis XI., though he had nothing in common either with Alexander the Great or with Napoleon, exposed his own person bravely at Montlhery, but then Louis XI. was not a semi-Oriental Sovereign.

Ivan was Oriental, too, in the ease with which he would pass from the heights of insolence, in prosperity, to the depths of humility when evil fortune overtook him. And yet he is not broken down by adversity. He bends his back, he crawls, but he is always ready to rise up again. The qualities of the European and the man of culture reappear in some other features. He does not like coarse flattery. The following anecdote, reported by Guagnino, the probability of which is strengthened bv several others of the same nature, would

25

appear authentic. Two voievodes, Joseph Chtcherbatyi and George Bariatinski by name, who had been taken prisoners by Batory, were ransomed by the Tsar. He plied them with eager questions. The first spoke honestly as to the King of Poland’s power ; the second, thinking to please his master, contradicted his comrade’s assertions, declaring Batory had neither men nor forts, and that the Tsar’s very name made him tremble. ‘Poor King!’ quoth Ivan, ‘how I pity him!’ And then, grasping his spear, he dealt the impudent courtier a sudden blow. ‘ Here are your wages, impostor !’

After his own fashion, Ivan was more cultivated than the majority of his Russian contemporaries, and quite as much so as the most enlightened European Princes of his period—if not as to what he knew, as to his desire of knowledge, at all events. In this he differs essentially from Louis XI., ‘ who had a mortal hatred of literature,’ and said ‘ learning made him melancholy.’ He was more like Francis I. But to what did his knowledge really amount ?

III.—Knowledge and Intelligence.

He knew many things, drawn from his wide reading, but he was incapable 01 understanding them thoroughly, or setting them in clear order in his mind. During the first years of his reign, when, the government being in the hands of the bolars, he had long hours of leisure, and was driven to commune with himself in savage loneliness, he read everything that fell into his hands and roused his curiosity—sacred history, Roman history, Russian and Byzantine chronicles, the works of the holy Fathers, and menologies. His memory retained many passages, and by preference he chose those that seemed to him applicable to his own person, his position in the world, and the part he desired to play in it. His correspondence with Kourbski gives us a sort of inventory of the knowledge he thus acquired, and also some idea of the use to which he knew how to put it. It constitutes a pamphlet in two parts against the bo'iars, combined with a treatise on the absolute power, both of them elaborated by means of quotations which are certainly from memory. In most cases, indeed, the words are not exactly quoted, though there is nothing to indicate any intentional alteration. Gregory of Nazianzus and St. John Chrysostom, Moses and Isaiah, the Bible and the Greek mythology, the ‘ Iliad ’ and the legends of the Siege of Troy, which have been incorporated into the ancient literature of Russia, have all been laid under contribution, and present us with an extraordinary mixture, in which we come on names which must be astounded to find themselves in such close proximity—Zeus and Dionysius

along with Abimelech and Gideon, /Eneas beside Genseric, King of the Sauromates (sic)—Ivan writes his name Zinzirikh— swarming with the most improbable anachronisms, and in which the boldest political aphorisms rub shoulders with the most unexpected philosophical considerations. And yet, in spite of Kourbski, who calls all this literature ‘old woman’s talk,’ this confused tumult of memories and impressions, this chaos of imagery and confusion ot ideas, forms a solid whole, bound together, evidently, when we look at it closely, by a thin bu* always visible thread, which connects it all with one sole and only object, the theory of sovereign power as the author con­ceives it—supreme and absolute, Divine in its origin and superior in its essence. And little does it matter, in all truth, that the self-taught writer confuses dates and events, talks of the division of the Empire under Leo the Armenian, makes a mistake of two centuries as to the period of the conquest of Persia by the Arabs. His trumpery barbarian’s learning is a thing of nought. It is the ideas and feelings that live in it and use it which are important, and when we see the fiery despot juggling with things of which his father and grandfather knew nothing at all, and turning them into arguments in favour of a theory of which they never dreamt, or to which, at all events, they never gave a thought, we realize that a new world has come into being, and that to have been conscious of that fact is in itself sufficient to make; the glory of the extraordinary man who, in spite of his lack of modem science, was the first, in his own country, to acquire the instinct, the taste, the passion, for modem progress. „

On this impressionable nature, indeed, memories acted like events. To such an extent did they take hold of Ivan’s thought and rule his speech that the erudition he had gathered up so confusedly in his mind was a law to him as much as it was his servant; it dragged him perpetually from one subject to another ; it suggested the most unforeseen digressions to him, and at the same time the eagerness he threw into everything, like the rage that almost always shook him when he was writing, rendered him incapable of using his knowledge with discern­ment, weighing the elements he drew from it, and considering how he should employ them.

And though he may be fond of showing off what he knows, or fancies he knows, he is, speaking from the literary point of view, above all things a controversialist, wordy and prolix to excess, but skilled, amidst all his digressions and circuitous way's, in finding out his opponents’ strong and weak points, and bent, most especially, on striking home. Kourbski, according to the fashion of those times, was a learned man— in other words, a man of wide reading—and the Tsar breaks

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him down with his own booklore, convinced, and rightly so, no doubt, that the other will be quite incapable of verifying the accuracy of his quotations. But, knowing him as re­ligious as he is lettered, he does not forget to address himself to this weak point, and we find him calling up a picture of the fugitive boiar helping the Poles to destroy the Orthodox churches, trampling the holy ikons underfoot, and presiding, like a second Herod, over massacres of innocent children. . . . He weeps over the victims and their executioner, for he loves the lyric, and by no means despises the pathetic. Kourbski has said something about the blood he has shed in the Tsar’s service. ‘ And I,’ replies Ivan, ‘ have I not shed my blood too ? If not from wounds made on my body, at all events in the tears of blood your treacheries have drawn from my eyes ! . . .’

We may agree with Monsieur Rlioutchevski (‘ Course of History,’ i.) that this rhetoric betrays more artifice than con­viction, more phosphorescent brilliance than heat; but it is an anachronism to seek in the sixteenth century, close to the Scholastics, all the sincerity and emotion the modern soul has learnt, since those days, to put into its external manifestations. As for taking the Tsar’s letters to be a collective work in which his favourites were his collaborators, this conjecture, borrowed by Monsieur Mikhai'lovski, an acute but biassed critic, from the author of an inferior novel (‘Prince Kourbski,’ by Fedorov, 1843), will not bear even a superficial examination of the docu­ment, in which Monsieur Mikhai'lovski himself recognises the existence of a perfect unity of style and composition, and in every line of which the author’s hall-mark, his personal touch, is evident.

Ivan certainly does not hold the first place in the intellectual movement of the period, and the part he played in the struggle then going on between the moral idea elaborated in the her­mitages 01 the north, and the coarse corruption prevalent among the great majority of Russians, was neither the best nor the worst. This conflict had brought two eccentric types face to face and into bitter conflict. There were solitary ascetics on one side and heroic bandits on the other, and both classes lived on the outer margin of society. Ivan remained in the middle. Highly gifted as he was, his mind was not sufficiently ripened by study, nor, above all, was his soul so filled with generous impulses, as to enable him to represent the noblest tendencies of a chosen few. He went to the Stoglav firmly intending to support the reform party, and he failed to adhere to his intention, less from lack of energy than from want of conviction. In religious matters he continued, at heart, to belong to the old school, in which the wearing of the full beard

and of the odnoriadka—a garment recently recalled to honour— were matters ot doctrine. Nil Sorski’s teachings glided over his intelligence, but never reached his conscience. And, on the other hand, he possessed no means of initiating him=ell into the wider intellectual currents of Europe, whether in the domain of science or in that of art. Europe was still too far away, and Russia too far behind the West. Ivan turned his mind to the most pressing matters, and those easiest of accom­plishment. What he asked his neighbours to give him was results—engineers, artisans, printers. This is the course generally pursued by backward peoples anxious to make up for lost time. Look at Japan. In this fashion, too, artificial and superficial civilizations are attained. Modem Russia is an example of this even in the present day.

The detractors of Ivan the Terrible have gone the length of refusing him any originality at all, declaring all he did was to walk, and rather clumsily at that, in the rut his grandfather had cut for him, defend old theories against literary attack on the part of the opposition party, and turn over ideas drawn from the tooks he had read. The historic prerogatives of the Boiarcktchina were already broken down, the appeal to the new strata of society had begun, the attempts to reorganize the communes on the autonomic principle were nothing but a return to the older form ot these institutions, and Ivan, even in his conception of the part he was personally called to play, simply drew his inspiration from the teachings ot Holy Writ. These over-severe judges seem to me to forget that it takes something to make anything, and that Napoleon did not find the elements of his Code in his own brain. Besides, they graciously grant the great value of the reforms carried out in the early years of Ivan’s reign, though they give all the credit for them to the men who were about the Sovereign. Have they taken the trouble of reading the thirty-seven proposals as to the reorganization of the Church, and the ten proposals or rough drafts of laws, for the organization of the State ? If so, they should have realized that the man who wrote these pages was the man who corresponded with Kourbski at a period when Adachev and Sylvester were both far away. In both cases the spirit and style are identical, and that style is most personal in its nature. Adachev, Sylvester, and Kourbski certainly had no hand in the Opritchnina, and yet the Opritch­nina and the reforms of the year 1551 together form one complete whole. I have demonstrated this already. And it is because Ivan’s biographers could not understand what the Opritchnina was that they have refused to grant him what they have grunted to his fellow-workers. Peter the Great was never deceived in this matter.

Ivan was the first of the Russian Tsars, not only because he was the first to assume the title, but also and especially because he was the first to comprehend the realities correspond­ing with it. The theory was there, no doubt, and had been worked out, ever since the fifteenth century, in the literature of the country. But neither to Vassil? nor to Ivan III.—the Great—had it occurred to lay hold of the concrete meaning of that theory—the idea of a Sovereign whose power came to him from God, and who was responsible to God alone for the way in which he used it, unaided, as the sole representative of the Divine will and the Divine wisdom, on whom no human assistance could be imposed, and who could not accept any control whatever.

To this theory Ivan added a personal commentary of his own of which none of his predecessors had thought, and which none of his successors were to adopt. Peter the Great was to regard himself merely as the first servant of the State ; Ivan regarded the Sovereign’s person as a kind of Divine essence, and boldly set it far above the State. ‘ We know,’ he writes, after pouring abuse on Batory, ‘ what is due to the majesty of Princes. But the Empire is majesty, and above that majesty stands the Sovereign in his Empire, and the Sovereign is above the Empire!’ (Note handed to Possevino in September, 1581,

‘ Historical Documents,’ x. 223). Poland had won the day, and Muscovy was forced into submission. But the Tsai set himself above this necessity — he hovered in higher space, where no such outrage could reach him. The idea is a subtle one, but it is a feeling rather than an idea. Ivan’s ideas and feelings have often been confused together, and a short analysis must be devoted to them.

IV.—Ideas and Feelings.

Ivan the Terrible went through a great deal of suffering, and these sufferings, which he exaggerated as he exaggerated every­thing, have been rightly ascribed to a twofold moral cause—to his very lively consciousness of all the faults and vices of the political and social organization over which he had been called to rule, and an equally painful consciousness of his powerless­ness to apply any efficacious remedy to them. This painful sensation was repeated in his own consciousness, in the midst of the personal weaknesses of which he recognised the shame­fulness, and the useless acknowledgment of which he was perpetually multiplying. But it is a mistake, 111 the first place, to take all this for an exceptional case of selt-distrust. It is the eternal history of the human race before Medea’s video meliora firohoque, and after it, for ever and ever. Historians of

the school of George Samarine are certainly mistaken when they take Ivan to be a man who lived lonely and misunderstood. He alone, according to their theory, recognised that the habits of his period were full of terrifying symptoms of decomposition and awful omens for the future, and, finding nobody wouid share his scorn and hate of all these things, he grew so bitter in his loneliness that he struck out blindly at everything around him. because he did not know how to separate the evil i^om the good, either in himself or his surroundings, and also because his will was not so strong as his intellectual superiority was great. This judgment wrongs the Sovereign and his period. Ivan knew and frequented the company of men far more capable than himself of conceiving the necessity, and also the conditions, for a renovation of morals. In this particular the disciples of Nil Sorski aimed at a much higher ideal than his. On the other hand, the Tsar, in his struggle with his bolars, knew right well what he was doing, and the objects at which his blows were struck. To represent him, as Bestoujev-Rioumine has repre­sented him, as a sort of Hamlet, constitutionally inclined to abstract reflection, and stumbling hither and thither at every step the moment he entered the world of realities, is an his­torical absurdity. The Opritchnina. was not an abstract idea, and Hamlet would certainly have been quite incapable of playing the most delicate of games with the most finished diplomatists of his time.

Ivan had a will of his own. Some people have thought they perceived a proof of the weakness of his will in the instruments he chose to carry out his plans—instruments which he con­stantly destroyed because he could not find suitable ones, and which he nevertheless replaced, because, being himself unable to give form to his own ideas, he could not do without them—a man of meditation, not of action, a theorist, an artist too, who could conceive what was good and beautiful, but had not the skill to pass from conception to realities ; and a man, also, who sought sensation and picturesque effect even in the horrors of the torture-chamber. . . . This is the theory put forward by Constantine Akssakov. It seems to admit the possibility, for the head of a State, of doing everything himself. In this even Peter the Great could not succeed, and he has been blamed, with some show of justice, for having lost himself in details. The great man could not find enough helpers. Ivan’s helpers were inadequate, like Bielski, or vile, like Skouratov; but he set to work in his own person, and put his own hand to the task, oftener, indeed, than he should have done.

Like Peter the Great, again, he was a carrier on of a previous work. He followed in his grandfather’s footsteps, and was, like him, the champion of similar interests—moral,

intellectual, social, and more especially political—in the struggle between the future and the past. He brought in a few new ideas, but more particularly some new weapons, of his own. Ivan III. had fought in silence, with an axe. Ivan IV., true to his own period, did not, indeed, put the axe back into its bear-skin sheath, but he supplemented the labours of the executioner by the action of his economic reforms and of the power of speech. Was he not bound to speak, since men’s tongues were wagging all round him ? Silence was to fall once more, when the theory of the absolute and despotic power had triumphed, and the Empire was subject to its rule ; and no faint echo of Kourbski’s bold clamour was to rise till Europe witnessed the coming of another epoch of revolutionary dis­turbance, and heard the voice of Radichtchev. But Ivan, in the sixteenth century, could do no less than follow the impulse which prompted every intellectual being, even in Russia, to discourse.

Yet, contrary to the general opinion, he proved himself much stronger in practice than in theory ; for though within the borders of his own country he maintained his adopted pro­gramme against every Kourbski of them, and carried it to its logical conclusion, and though, outside them, he yielded to nothing but Batory’s genius and the good fortune which attended it, his ideas, both as to politics and religion, frequently strike us as vague, confused, and unsettled, and his powers of reflection by no means correspond with the power of his in­stinct, which is extraordinarily sure, as a rule. He is instinc­tively inclined to depend on the masses of the population, and yet he gives over his peasants to be squeezed by his ‘ men who serve.’ Devout as he is—a fortnight after his marriage in 1547 he makes a pilgrimage to the Tro'itsa, and goes the whole way on foot, in spite of the bitter cold—and deeply convinced of the excellence of his form of religion, as his discussions with Possevino and Rokita prove, he frequently gives vent to sallies savouring strongly of free-thought. On other occasions he shows a tolerance which does not seem to be founded on any principle, for it is intermittent and opportunist. The Protestants had an experience of this when they were first permitted to build two churches at Moscow, and then vilely maltreated after they were built. After the taking of Polotsk in 1563, the Tsar was present at a general drowning of the Jews in the river Dvina. Just at that moment there was an inter- di< t on all Jewish trading in Muscovy ; but Ivan gave a very singular explanation to the Polish envoys when they com­plained of this edict. ‘ The Jews,’ he said, ‘ were turning his subjects away from the Christian faith, and, further, they were addicted to guilty attempts to kill with poisoned herbs.’

The Tsar was here alluding to a most extraordinary story. Giovanni Tetaldi, a Florentine agent, who lived in Russia from 1551 to 1565, and whose recollections have been published by Monsieur Chmourlo (St. Petersburg, 1891), speaks of certain mummies, the introduction of which into the country would seem to have resulted in a smuggling trial, complicated by aggravating circumstances. These embalmed corpses, im­ported from Africa via Constantinople, were, it appears, much sought after in Russia, and there was a considerable tralfic in them, which, like that of all kinds of spices, was in the hands of the Jews. To play a trick on some of these, a Polish merchant sent them, as though it had been a mummy, the body of a recently executed criminal, which he had previously stuffed with aromatic herbs. Mummies paid no entrance duty, and the Jews were accused of habitually and fraudulently intro­ducing, under this name, products liable to a very heavy tax. To this sin the popular imagination had added homicidal inten­tions. Ivan does not seem, however, to have taken any pains to clear the matter up, being quite satisfied with the repugnance with which the Jews inspired him personally. This man of impulse was, after his own fashion, likewise a man of sentiment.

No one can deny that there was a great deal of sentiment in the fixed idea of going to England which he nursed until he died. That was the romance of his life, and though he did not overlook the practical side of the adventure, he put a great deal of fancy into it. The alliance against Batory and the marriage with Mary Hastings were part of the same dream.

Ivan’s exceedingly personal conception of his part and way of playing it, his impetuous vigour of action, his exuberant mimicry, his fulness of gesture and redundance of language, have built up the illusion as to his having been a sort of hero- Cossack, out of the cycle of Ilia of Mourom. It must be admitted, indeed, that this cycle was only definitely closed in Russia by the reforms of the eighteenth century, and that up till that date the existence of the race ruled by Peter the Great was spent in a series of exploits, and lulled by the har­monious chantings of its rustic bards. Ivan shares with Ilia of Mourom that quality of humour which still exists in the national temperament, and his fits of furious rage. But the Tsar’s psychology is far the more complicated of the two. Behind the external mask which imparts a family resemblance to these figures, and in spite of the dreamy quality common to both, we note, in Ivan’s case, a great depth of realism. After he passed away, leaving his iron sceptre ia feeble hands, and carrying the secret of his all-powerfulness with him into his grave, his people was to sing on, and dream on, for another century. But he had shaken it rudely once, and his life had

narrowed the space available for heroes who would not wake out of their dreams and take, their place amongst realities, in the hierarchy, under discipline. Such as they had better flee to the Ukraine.

Imagination held a great place in the moral existence of the man we are now studying, and in this there is an essential difference between Ivan and Peter the Great, one of the most positive intelligences the world has ever known. He is also distinguished from his great successor by his very high opinion of his own powers, which is most curiously mingled with that distrust of himself and others of which he was never to rid himself. Peter, like that builder up of a colossal* American fortune whom a reporter lately questioned as to the talents to which he owed his success, would have readily affirmed,

‘ Talents ? I have none at all! I work—I work myself to death, and that is all!’ Ivan thought he had a great many talents, if not every one. He represented a race of foreign conquerors, and in this very fact of his origin he recognised an element of personal superiority. In Peter the Great we see the consciousness and pride of a common nationality strongly developed. As to certain sides of his temperament, the Re­former was of the populace, and was proud of it, and he would never have said, when handing over some ingots of gold to a foreign workman, ‘ See. well to the weight, for all Russians are thieves !’ Ivan frequently made speeches of this kind. lie was always talking about his ‘ German ancestors.’ Do the Viennese archives contain a last will, according to which the son of Vassili left his Empire to the House of Hapsburg ? I have not been able to verify this fact, which has been advanced by Kostomarov (‘ Monographies,’ xiii., p. 304, note), and I think it most improbable. But the clumsiest fables often have some foundation in truth, and Veit Venge was no doubt merely echoing some remark that had fallen from the lips of the Sovereign—who was fond, it seems, of tracing back the deriva­tion of the word boiar to Baiern (Karamzine, ix., note to p. 166)—when he speaks of the Bavarian descent of Ivan the Terrible. Ivan’s real last will, and the best expression of his being, is to be found in his work, to which I must now return for the last time, so as to sum up its nature and point out its results.

V.—The Results of His Reign.

The massacres ordered by Ivan have been notoriously exaggerated by his enemies and his detractors, the first egging on the second. Kourbski mentions the entire destruction of families—such as the Kolytchev, the Zabolotski, the Odievski, the. Vorotynski - all of which appear in the inventories of the

following century. The gaps created in the ranks of the aristocracy by emigration were certainly much larger, and even so they were not entirely emptied. Ivan’s conduct in this particular was not dictated by any fixed principle, and he himself endeavoured to ensure the future of three great houses —the Mstislavski, the Glinski, and the Romanov—whose fidelity seemed guaranteed by lack of connections in the country, by a material state of dependence, or by family relationships. The two first-named families had just arrived from Lithuania, and the last was related to the Sovereign’s own house.

The principal factors in the weakening of the aristocratic element were economic causes and political measures. In the course of the sixteenth century, as a result of the condition of debt to which everybody had been reduced, landed property began to crumble away of itself in the boiars’ hands. In the registers kept by a moneylender of that period, nam^d Proto- popov, is a list of noble names, and the archives of the Monas­tery of St. Cyril afford proof of the continuance of this state of things. In 1557 Prince D. L>. Oukhtomski, whose credit with such persons as Protopopov had probably become exhausted, sold the monks a village, with twenty-six hamlets round it, for 350 roubles ; three years later he received 150 roubles, and gave up possession of four more outlying places. At about the same time the community acquired a large property, also belonging to this family, and in 1575 it received another lot of meadows, ‘ for Masses ’ ; so that, in one way or another, the whole of the Oukhtomski properties passed into the same hands (see Rojkov, * Agriculture ... in the Sixteenth Century,’ 1899, P- 39^)-

Now, this financial distress amongst the great families was the direct consequence of the new political system, and the obliga­tions it had cast upon them. Universal service implied resi­dence at Court, or near it, even if it did not imply active military service or the performance of some official function or other. "When the nobles had lived on their family properties they had found it hard enough to draw a scanty income from them. Once they left them, they were very soon ruined. Thereupon came the Opritchnina—that is to say, wholesale dispossession under the conditions I have already described—and this dealt the position, economic and political, of the persons concerned its death-blow. Ivan’s system of guarantees increased the effect of emigration twofold—nay, a hundredfold, seeing that for every fugitive there w^rere from ten to a hundred persons who had to pay for him. Except for the Stroganovs, you will not find a single instance of a large fortune in the aristocratic class which escaped this other form of massacre. If in the present day some few authentic descendants of Rurik and Guedymine, such as the Troubetzkois, the Galitzines, the Kourakines, the Soltykovs, the Boutourlines, still possess some worldly wealth, their opulence only dates from the eighteenth century, and from the favours of some Empress.

And thus a class which already differed from the Western aristocracies, in that the feudal principle was entirely absent from it, was completely and democratically levelled. The hierarchy of the service did indeed create new titles and fresh prerogatives, guaranteed by the miestnifchestvo, but these were not corporative elements in the Western signification of the term. They rather tended to break up the family and reduce it to atoms, on which the hold of the absolute power continued, and grew perpetually stronger.

This revolution, which had seemed destined to benefit the popular element, brought it nothing but the bitterest fruit. The new system was a house of two stories, both built on the same plan. The officials were upstairs, the serfs below, and slavery everywhere. But in this matter all Ivan the Terrible did was to complete or carry on that which had been the Moscow programme for two centuries past, and the Opritchnina. itself was no more than an extension of the policy applied by the Tsar’s predecessors to all their conquered towns and territories. It was a sort of colonization backwards. As to colonization in the normal direction, it continued to depend on private enter­prise ; but Ivan opened a wider field for it.

Westwards his expansive policy failed. It would not be just to cast all the responsibility for this on him. If Peter the Great, when he took the same road 150 years later, had found his way barred by a man like Batory, instead of by a madman like Charles XII., the result of the Battle of Poltava might have been very different. Eastward, Kazan, Astrakan, and Siberia make up a noble score in Ivan’s favour.

From the economic point of view, the conquest of Kazan did not result in the immediate advantages that might have been expected from it. The trade of that place, which the Tartars had exaggerated in their desire to induce the Sultan to retake possession of the town, was a disappointment to the English merchants. Ivan did not fail to seek compensation elsewhere. When he offered the Swedish traders a free passage through his dominions, even for going to India, he stipulated for a similar privilege for his own subjects, in their enterprises, existing or to bo undertaken, with Liibeck and even with Spain. In 1567 the chroniclers mention the departure of Russian merchants for Antwerp and London, and in 1568 English authorities mention the presence on the banks of the Thames of two such Muscovites, Tvierdikov and Pogorielov, who were taken to be Ambassadors. They performed both offices, no doubt, and devoted their endeavours partly to diplo­macy and partly to mercantile affairs.

The development of industry' in Ivan’s time was rather superficial; the field was widened by the annexation of the eastern provinces. The acquisition of the Lower Volga favoured the development of fisheries. There were ninety-nine establishments of this kind at Pereiaslavl in 1562. After the occupation of the banks of the Kama by the Stroganovs, and the discovery of salt-mines near Astrakan, the salt-works there attained great importance.

Ivan’s financial policy does not call for praise. It may be si:mmed up as a series of expedients, all savouring more or less of robbery. Fletcher mentions several ot these. Governors of provinces W'ere treated with the utmost tolerance till they had gorged themselves with plunder, when they were forced to give up the spoil. The same system was applied to monasteries, which were allowed to heap up wealth in the same way. There were temporary seizures or monopolies of certain forms of produce or merchandise, thus made to bring in very large profits. Fines were imposed on officials for imaginary offences. The English diplomat tells an almost incredible story about a capful of live fiios demanded iii this w^Tay from the Moscow municipality.

The taxes themselves were managed in the most senseless manner that could have been devised. Generally speaking, every fresh need resulted in the imposition of a fresh tax, and there never was the smallest care as to fitting the burdens to the means of those who had to bear them, nor the slightest prudence as to ki’ling the goose that laid the golden eggs. By the time the end of the reign was reached, the bird’s iaying- powers were very nearly exhausted.

The interests best served by the conquest of Kazan and Astrakan were those of the Church, whose borders were thus enlarged. Gourii, first Archbishop of Kazan, made a good many converts among the Tartars ; but this triumph of ortho­dox proselytism was counterbalanced, till the close of Ivan’s reign, by the prolonged resistance of the paganism still existing in the interior of his dominions, and especially in certain dis­tricts in the province of Novgorod. As to the Tsar’s attempts at religious reform, which he soon abandoned or only carried on in a most perfunctory fashion, they produced no appreciable result at all, and the intellectual and moral condition of the clergy was in no way altered by them.

Yet, from a more general point of view, there was a visible increase in the intellectual lift; of the country. Though the schools planned in 1551 never were anvtiiing but plans, though printing did not get beyond the stage of rudimentary attempt, the author of the letters to Kourbski did none the less witness a certain upward trend of ideas, which took their flight out of the narrow walls of the cloister and the confined circle of re­ligious discussion into the world of secular thought. This beginning of the secularizing process was one of the great conquests of Ivan’s reign.

On the other hand, Ivan, even in his international dealings, could not or would not break with certain barbarous traditions which harmonized but ill with progress such as this. Just as in past times, envoys sent to his Court were often treated as if they had been prisoners of war, and the fate of his genuine prisoners of war continued to be lamentable. The happiest thing they could expect was to be sold or given to the monas­teries as serfs. Occasionally they were simply thrown into the water. In 1581, Ivan gave orders that when the Swedish ‘ tongues ’—in other words, the persons, belligerents or non­belligerents, taken with a view to obtaining information—had served their purpose, they were all to be ailed. Polish and Swedish captives were used as current coin in the exchanges arranged by Tartar merchants on the Constantinople markets.

But as he stood, with all his faults and vices, his errors and his crimes, his weaknesses and his failures, Ivan was popular, and his was a genuine popularity, which has stood the twofold test of time and of misfortune. This, too, is a result. In the cycle of the historic songs of Russia, the Tsar holds the place of honour, and is shown in by no means repulsive colours; he is open to every feeling of humanity—severe, but just, and even generous. True, indeed, his sacerdotal majesty lifts him up so high and surrounds him with such an aureole of glory that no critic would dare to lay his hand upon him. But we feel that, in spite of that, all the popular sympathies are with him. When he indulges in savage orgies over the corpses of the vanquished Tartars, or hands one of his boiiars over to the executioner on the merest hint of suspicion, the masses are on his side ; they applaud the carnage, and rejoice in their master’s joy. Even when they cannot applaud, they shut their eyes respectfully, religiously, and cast a mantle of decent fiction over that which makes their consciences revolt. The populace will not admit that the Tsar killed his own son. The Tsar of the bylines bestows a noble reward on Nikita Romanovitch, who, at the peril of his own life, saves that of the victim ; for the moment the order was given the Sovereign had repented. This Tsar has some weaknesses, indeed ; he is apt to be choleric, and his first instinct is not always his best. Under the walls of Kazan, whither the intentional anachronism of the poets has already brought Ermak and even Stenka Razine, Ivan taxes his artificers, who have been too slow about blowing up a mine, with treason, and threatens them with the gallows. The chiefs, cowards in this case, as always, according to the popular historians, shelter themselves behind their subor­dinates. But one young soldier speaks boldly in defence of his fellows, the mine blows up, and the Tsar acknowledges his own mistake and the merit of the humble hero. Passing into the conquered town. Ivan spares the Tsarina Helen, who comes out to meet him bearing bread and salt, and is content with having her baptized by force and thrust into a convent. But he has the eyes of the Tsar Simeon, who shows less goodwill and greater dignity, tom out of his head ; and here, again, the populace applauds the victor.

This is the theory of morals peculiar to the period to which Ivan’s name is attached. The ideal it evolves is one of material greatness and brute force—a twofold postulate to which the Russian race has proved itself ready to sacrifice everything else, though it has endeavoured to delude itself as to the value of the end pursued, and the extent of the sacrifice it has entailed. In this other dream, Tsar and people both had their part, and they were to make it a living reality on the day when Peter took Ivan’s place, and completed the incarnation which gave birth to modem Russia. But when Ivan died, this work was in the embryonic stage. His labour had been one of destruc­tion, more especially, and he had no time to build up again. Still less had he ensured the continuity of his effort. The legacy left his country’ by the luckless adversary of Batory, the murderer of the Tsarevitch, his own heir, was a war with Poland and a state of anarchy. The germ was there, too, of a fresh inroad by the rivals of the Slavonic' West, destined, under the shelter of the false Dmitri, to reach Moscow itself, and of a triumphant return of the aristocratic oligarchy, which, favoured by the general crumbling of the unfinished edifice, was to recover its old advantages. This was to be the history of the seventeenth century. But Peter the Great was not to guard his inheritance any better against future risks; and yet, after a fresh eclipse, Catherine was to come, even as he had come. The strength was there still, increased materi­ally and tempered morally—the imperishable pledge of a mighty future.

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Chnourlo (E.) : The Russian Narratives of Giovanni Tetaldi (Izviestia G. T. o Rossii). St. Petersburg, 1891 (pamphlet).

Choisnin (J.): Memoirs. Michaud and Poujoulat Collection, xi.

Christiani : Die GegenrtformaUon in Lifland. Baltische Monatsschrift, 1889.

Chronicle of the Reign of Ivan IV. (Tsarstvi6nna'ia Kniga ou Lieto- pissi6ts Tsartsvovcixiia Tsaria I. V.). St. Petersburg, 1769. 1 vol.

Thi Russian Chronicle of Lvov (Lvovskala Lietopis). St. Peters­burg, 1792. 1 vol.

The Russiari Chronicle of Niconius (Nikonovskaia Lietopis). Complete Collection of the Russian Chronicles, ix. and x. See this tit le.

The Siberian Chronicle of Essipov (Essipovskaia Lietopis), Spaski’s edition. St. Petersburg, 1823. 1 vol.

The Siberian Chronicle of Strogonov (Stroganovskaia Lietopis), Spaski. St. Petersburg, 1821. 1 vol.

The Siberian Chronicle, Remezov (Remczovskaia or Koungourskaia Lietopis). St. Petersburg, 1880, published by the Archaeographical Commission. 1 vol.

Chronicle, Alexander Nevski’s (Alexandrovskaia Lietopis). Bibliog. Hist, of Russia, iii., 1876.

Chronicles, Novgorod Novgorodskiie Lietopisy). Complete Collection of the Russian Chronicles, iii. and iv. -

Chronicles, Pskov (Pskovskiie Lietopisy). Complete Collection of the Russian Chronicles, vols iv. and v.

Chronicle, Moscow (Mosknvskaia Lietopis), L6b6diev, Readings of the Moscow Society, Historical and Antiquarian (Tchtenia), 1895.

Chronicle, Norwantski (Normantskai'a Lietopis). Annals of the Imperial Society, Historical and Antiquarian (Vremiennik Imperatorskavo Obch. isti Drev), 1850.

Chronicle, Tver (Tverskaia Lictopis). Complete Collection of Russian Chronicles, xv.

Chronographers, Russian. See Popov.

Chtcherbatov (M. M.) : History of Russia (Istoria. Rossii). St.

Petersburg, 1777, vol. v.

Chytrsus (D., : Ch/onico Saxonies. Leipzig, 1593. 1 vol.

Ciampi : Bihlingi aphia Critic a. Florence, 1838—1842. 3 vols.

Code of Iian IV. (Souiiebnik), with the Commentaries of Tatichtchev. Moscow, 1786. 1 vol. Text of the Code, and additional laws. Historical Documents, vol. i., 1841.

Collection of Polish Historians (Zbior dziejopisow polskich). Warsaw, 1766, vol. ii.

Collection of the Russian Imperial Historical Society (Sbomik 1st Obchtestva), vols. xxxviii., dii., lix., bod., cxvi.

Collection of State Papers and Treaties (Sbranie goussoudarstviennykh gramot i dogovorov. Roumiantsov, St. Petersburg, 1819, vol. i.

Collection of Travels in the North. Amsterdam, 1727, vol. viii.

Complete Collection cf Russian Chronicles (Poinoie Sobranie Rouskikh Lietopissov). Moscow, 1846 (in course of publication).

Conxarim : Diplomatic Reports. Library of Foreign Historians of Russia.

Conversation of the Wonder-workers of Valaim (Biessicda Valaam. Tsoud.). V. G. Droujinine and M. A. Diakonov. St. Peters­burg, 1890 (pamphlet).

Custime (M. de) : La Russie. Paris, 1855. 1 vol.

Czermak (V.): Lithuanian Pa/liai,ie.itarianism previous to the Union of Lublin (Parlamentaryzm litewski . . .). Lemberg, 1891.

1 vol.

Czuczy^ski, editor of Piotrowski. See that name.

Daklmann (A.): Dissertatio de Occasione Fcederum Regis Erici XIV. cum Russid. Upsala, 1783. : vol.

Darcel : L’Art Russe. Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1878.

Deeolski (N. N.): Judicial Capacities in Russian Law up to the End ot the Eighteenth Century (Grajdanskaia dieiesposobnost po rousskomou pravou). St. Petersburg, 1903. 1 vol.

An Examination into the Literature of History affenting the . Question of Serfdom. Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction,

1895.

Delmar-Morgan : Early Voyages ... to Russia. London, 1886.

| « 1 vol.

De rebus gestis Siephani I. .. . contra. Magnum Moschorutr. Duce„i. Rome, 1852. Pamphlet (Manifesto of Stephen Batory to his army in 1579).

Diakonov (M. A.): Enquiries into the History of the Serfdom of the Russia,r Peisantry (Razzyskania p<j istorii prikri 'pliur.ia vladiel- tcheskikh Krestiane v Moskovskom gossoudarstvie). St. Peters­burg, 1901. 1 vol.

General View of the History of the Rural Population in Russia (Otcherki po istorii ssielskavo nassielienia Moskovskavo gossou- darstva. St. Petersburg, 1898.

The Power of the Muscovite Sovereigns (Mast Moskovskikh Gossoudarei). St. Petersburg, 1889. 1 vol.

Documents connected with the History of the Qua’ified' Popula­tion (Akty otnossia.chtchj'itsia k istorii tiaglavo nassielienia v Moskovskom gosso iidarstCie). Derpt, 1895-1897. 2 vols.

26—2

Ditiatine (J.): Organization and Administration of the Russian Towns (Oustroistvo i Oupravlienie gorodov v Rossii). St. Petersburg, 1875, vol i.

Dmitri£v (F. M.): Works. Moscow, 1899, vol. i.

Dniivnik posli/'dnavo pokhoda Stef ana Batoria (Journal of Batory’s last campaign), Kojalowicz’s edition. See that name.

Documents, Diplomatic. See Papers.

Documents of the A rchreographical Society (Akty Arkheogr. Ekspedytsyl). St. Petersburg, 1836, vols. i. and ii.

Dogiel : Codex Diploiraliens Regni Polonice et Magni Ducatus Lithu­ania. Vilna, 1758, vol. v.

Domostroi, The, Golokhvastov’s editions. Readings of the Historical and Antiquarian Society of Moscow, 1849. Iakovlev’s edition, St. Petersburg, 1867; and Zabieline’s edition, Moscow, 1882, etc.

Drevnaia Rousskaia Vivliofika. See Ancient Library.

Essipovskaia Lietopis. See Siberian Chronicle.

Evers. See Beitrage.

Evfimenko (Mme. A. I.): Studies of the National Life (Izsliedovania narodno'i jizni). Moscow, 1884. 1 vol.

Peasant Property in Land in the Far North (Khrestianskiie ziemlievladi<5nie . . .). Russian Thought, 1882-1883.

Fahxe ( A.) : Livland, ein Beitrag zur Kirchen und Sittensgeschichte. Dusseldorf, 1875. 1 vol.

Fechner (A. G.) : Chronik dcr Evangelischen Gemeinden in Moskau. Moscow, 1876. 1 vol.

Fiedler : Lin Vermch der Vereinigung dcr ruSsischen mit der romis- schen Kischt (Sitzungsberichte der K.K. Akademie der Wissen- schaften). Vienna, 1862, vol. xl.

Fischer (I. E.): History of Siberia (Pibirskala Istoria). St. Peters­burg, 1774. 1 vol.

Fletcher (G.) : The 1 realise of the Russian Commonwealth, publisher! by the Hakluyt Society in ‘ Russia at the close 01 the sixteenth century.’ Bond, London, 1856. 1 vol. Translated into French by Du Bouzet, ‘ La Russie au Seizieme Siccle.’ Leipzig and Paris, 1864. 1 vol.

Forstf.n (G. V.): The Struggle for the Empire of the Baltic (Borba iz za Gospodstva Balitiiskavo moria). St. Petersburg, 1884. I vol.

The Baltic Question (Baltiiskii vopros), vol. i. The Struggle for Livonia (Borba iz za Livonii). St. Petersburg, 1893. 1 vol.

Documents connected with the History of the Baltic Question (Akty i pisnja k istorii b. v.). St. Petersburg, 1889-1803. 2 vols.

Forster : Geschichie dev Entdeckungen irn Norden. Frankfort, 1784.

Foscarini : Narratio Historica dt Moscovitico Imperio (Historica Russias Monumenta). See that title.

Golokhvastov (I). P.), continued by Monsignor Leonidas : Silvester and his Writings (Blagoviechtchenskii ierei Silvester i ievo pisania). Readings of the Historical and Antiquarian Society, 1874.

Goloubinski (E.) : History of the Canonization of the Saints of the Russian Church (Istoria kanonizatskii sviatykh v roussko'i tserkvi). Sergievskii Posad, 1894. 1 vol.

Gorski (C.): Life ... of Prince Kourhski (Jizn i istoritcheskoie znatchenie Kniazia A. M. Kourbskavo). Kazan, 1858. 1 vol.

History of the Polish Infantry (Historya piechoty polskiej). Cracow, 1893. ^{1 v}°l-

Gorski (C.): History of the Polish Cavalry (Historya jazdy polskiej). Cracow, 1894. 1 vol.

History of the Polish Artillery (Historya artyleryi polskiej). Warsaw, 1902. 1 vol.

The Wars of the Palish Republic with Moscow under Batory (Wojny Rzeczypuspolitej z Wielkiem Ksiestwem Moskiewskiem za Batore^o). Warsaw Library (Bibljoteka Warszawska), 1892.

Goumilevski (Consignor Ph.): History of the Russian Church (Istoria Rousskoi Tserkvi). Moscow, 1888, Part III.

Gradovski (A. D.) : History of Lccal Administration (Istoria roiestn^vo oupravlK-nia). St. Petersburg, 1868, vol. i.

Principles of the Common Law in Russia (Natchala rousskavo gossoud, prava). St. Petersburg. 1883, vol. iii.

Study of the Peasantry. Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1868.

Grefenthal : Livonian Chronicle (Monumenta Livoniae, vol. v.). See that title.

Guagnivo (A.): Omnium' Regionum Moscovice descriptio(Startchevski, i.).

See that title.

<Juepin (Doxi): Vie ds St. Josaphat. Paris, 1874, vol. i.

Gyulay : Commentarium rerum, a Sttpha.no R. P. . . . gestarum, anno 1580. Claudiopolio, 1581. 1 vol. (No author given.)

Hakluyt (R.): Collection of Early Voyages. London, 1599, vol. i.

Hamel (J.): Tradescant der csltere, 1618, in Russland. St. Petersburg, 1847. 1 vol. English translation by J. S. Leigh, ‘ England and Russia.’ London, 1854. 1 vol.

Hawsen (H. I.): Geschichte der Stadt Narva. Derpt, 1858. 1 vol.

Havsmann (R.): Studitn zur Geschichte ies Koenig’s Stephan oon Polen (Verhandlungen der gelehrten etnischen Gesellschaft in Dorpat, 1880).

Heidenstein (R.): De hello Moscovitico . . . cornmentarionim, libri vi. Bftle, 1588, and Startchevski, vol. ii.

Return Polonicarum, libri xii. Frankfort, 1672. 1 vol.

Henning (Salomon) : Liflendische vnd Churlendische Chronica (Scrip- tores rerum Livonicarum), vol. ii.

Herberstein (S.): Return Moscoviticamm commentarii. Bile, 1571, and St,i.rtc ievski, i.

Hewins : English Trade and France. London, 1892. 1 vol.

HrAERN (Th. Ehst. Lyf. und Lcttlaevdische Geschichte (Monumenta Livonise Anxiquas, i.). See that title.

Historical Papers (Akty Istoritcheskiie). Published by the Archaeo- graphical Commission. St. Petersburg, 1841, vol. i., and Supple- _ ment, 1845, vol. i.

Historical Documents connected with the History of Western Russia (Akty otnosiachtchyiesia k Istorii zapadnoi Rossii,. St. Peters­burg, 1846-1853, vols. i., ii., and iv.

Historical Documents connected with the History of South-western Russia (Akty otnosiachtchyiesia k Istorii iougo-zapadnoi Rossii). St. Petersburg, 1862-1869. 6 vols.

Historical Documents connected with the Reign of Stephen Batory (Akty historyczne do panowania S. Batorego), Ianicki. Warsaw, 1881. 1 vol.

Historical Documents (Akty historyczne). Published by the Academy of Sciences at Cracow, 1887, vol. xi.

Historia rerum a PolonicB rege in Moscovia . . . gestarum. Place of p ublication not mentioned (ascribed to Heidenstein).

Histories R'Uhenicce Scriptores Exteri. See Startchevski.

Historicce Russia Monumenta. Published by A. I. Tourgueniev. St. Petersburg, 1841, 1 vol., and Supplement, 1 vol. (The Russian sub-title, Akty Isturiteheskiie, has led to some confusion.)

Horsey (J. J.): Travels. Published by the Hakluyt Society (‘Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century ’), 1856. 1 vol. Extracts in the Purchas Collection. .

Hupel (A. W.): Nordische Miscellaneen and N'eue Nordischen Miscel­laneen. Ri“a, 1781-1798. 5 vols.

Huppe (S.): De Polonice post Henricitm Intcrregno. Breslau, 1866. 1 vol.

Ianicki. See Historical Documents.

Iannau (H. von) : Geschichtc von T.ief und Ehstland (Hupei’s Neue Nordische Miscellaneen, iii.). ^ee that title.

Iaroch (C.): Psychological Parallel between Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great (Psikhologitcheskaia parallel). Kharkov, 1898 (pamphlet).

Iasinski (A. N.) : Works of Prince Kourbski (Sotchinienia Kniazia Kourbskavo). St. Petersburg, 1889. 1 vol.

Ikonnikov (Y.): Essay on the Byzantine Influence on the History of Russia (Izliedovania o glavnykh napravleniukh v naoukie rousskoi isrorii, Vliani6 Vizantiiskoi i joujno-rousskoi obrazovannosti). Kiev, 1869. 1 vol.

Biography of the Metropolitan Macarius (Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1881).

Ilinski (A. K.) : The Town Population of the Province of Novgorod in the Sixteenth Century (Gorodskoie nassielienie Novgorodskoi oblasti v XVI. vi6ki6). Same collection, 1876.

Ilovaiski (D.) : History of Russia. Moscow, 1890, vol. iii.

Critical Notes on Ivan the Terrible. Russi in Archives (Rousskii Afkhiv), 1889.

Ivan IV. : Two Epistles addressed to the Monastery of Souzdal. Russian Archives, 1888.

Ivanichev (N. I).): The Life of Prince Kourbski in Lithuania (Jizn Kn. A. M. Kourbskavo v Litvie). Kiev, 1849. ² vols.

Jdanov : Materials for a History of the Conciliable of 1551 (Mater;aly dla istorii Stoglavnavo Sobora), Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1876.

Jenkinson (A.): Voyages to Russia and Persia. Hakluyt, i.

Jewi aszewski (Th.) : Memoirs, edited by Prince Lubomirski. Warsaw,

i860. 1 vol.

Jmakine (V.): The Mental Struggle in Russia during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century (Borba idei v Rossii v piervoi polovinie XVI. vifka,. Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1882.

A Document dealing with the History of the Anti-Catholic Con­troversy in Russia in the Sixteenth Century (Pamiatnik rousskoi protivkatolitcheskoi polemiki). Same Review, 1880.

Journals of the Polish Embassies. See State Papers.

Jove (Paul) : I)e I.egatione Basilii magni Principis Moscovice ad Clementem VII. pontificem maximum (Reium Mosco\itarum auctores varii).

Juusten (Paul) : Narratives concerning Muscovy (Beitrage zuj Kentniss Russlands, iii.). J

Kalttnbath : Extracts from the Reports of Caligari, Papal Nuncio in Poland, as to Stephen Batory. Weekly Illustrated Review (Tygod- nik illustrowany). Warsaw, 1887, No. 20A.

Kapterev (E.): Nature of the Relations between Russia and the Orthodox East in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Kharakter otno chenii Rossii k pravoslavnomou Vostokou . . .). Moscow, 1885. 1 vol.

Karamzine : History of Russia. St. Petersburg, 1818-1829. (French translation by St. T’aomas and Jauffret, Paris, 1820), vols. TT.il. and ix

Kharpov (G. F.): Diplomatic Rdations between the Empire of Moscow and the Pilish-Lithuanian State, 148"-! 571 (Pamiatmki diplo- matitcheskikh snochenii . . .). Collection ol th* Imperial Russian Historical Society (Sbomik), vols. xxxv., lxi., and lx’xi.

Karwowski : L)e Livonia Imperio Sigismondi A ugvsti regis Pilowics suhiecta. Halle, 1870. 1 vol.

Katyrev-Rostovski (Prince I. M. : Chrestoirathy (Izbomik). Also ascribed to Koubassov, A. N. Popov, Moscow, 1869. 1 vol, see Popov.

Kaveline (C. D.): Works. Moscow, 1859, vols. i. and ii.

Notes on the History of Russia. Messager de l’Eurupe, 1866.

Kelch (Ch.) : Licflaendische Historia. Revel, 1695. 1 vol.

Khu^bnikov (N.): On the Influence of Society on the Organization of the State during the Tsarian Period of Russian History (O vlianii obchtchestva na organizasion Gossoudarstva v tsarskii period rousskoi istorii). St. Petersburg, 1869. 1 vol.

Khomiakov (A. S.): Thirteen Years of i/'t; Reign of Ivan VassiliJjitch (Trinadtsat liet tsarstvoviania Ivuna Vassilievitcha). Educational Library (Biblioteka dla vospitania.. Valouiev, 1845.

Khrouchtchov : Book of Degrees, or Genealogy (Stiepiennaia Kniga). MS. the property of A. F. Khrouchtchov, drawn up about 1690 by S. S. Koltovski (see Platonov’s Notes on Russian History, 1903), and now in the Archives of the Moscow Foreign Office.

Kiprianoff (V.) : Picturesque History of Russian Architecture. St. Petersburg, 1864. 1 vol.

Kirieievski (P. V.): Collection of Songs (Piesni sobrannyla). Moscow, 1860-1862. 1 vol.

Kisewetter (A. A.) : Ivan the Terrible and his Foes (Ivan Groznyi ievo oponenty). Moscow, 1898 (pamphlet).

Klioutchevski (V.) : Course of Russian History (lithographed).

The Council of the Boiars in Ancient Russia (Boiarska'ia douma drevne'i Rossii). Moscow, 1883. 1 vol., second edition.

Internal Economy of the Monastery of Solovki or the Shores of the White Sea (Khozia'iastviennaia dieiatielnost Solovietskavo rronastyra v Bielomorskom kraic). Annals of the University of Moscow, 1867.

Summary of Russian History (Kratkoie xjsobie po rousskol istorii). Moscow, 1883. 1 vol. Second edition.

The Russian Rouble in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Rousskii Roubl xvi i xvii v). Moscow, 1884. 1 vol.

The Origin of Serfdom in Russia (Prolskhojdienie Krirpostnavo prava v Rossii;. Russian Thought (Rousskai'a Mvsl). 1885.

The Composition of Representative Assemblies in Ancient R tssia (Sostav predstavitielstva na Ziemskikh sobovakh drevnei Roussi). Same publication, 1890.

Klossius (Fr.) : The Library of the- Grand Duke Vassili Ivanovitch and of the Tsar Ivan Vassili/vitch. In Russian, Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1834, and in German in the Dorpater J ahrbiicher fur Literatur und Kunst, same. year.

Kniga Possolskaia nietryki. See State Papers.

Koialovitch (M. O.) : Journal of the last Campaign of Stephen Batory againH Russia, and Diplomatic Correspondence of that Time (Dniev-

nik posliedniavo pokhoda Stefana Batoria i diplomatitcheska pieriepiska tavo vremieni). St. Petersburg, 1867. 1 vol. (from a manuscript in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg). The; original, utilized by Polkov.sk: (see that name), is in the Library at Dzikow (Grand Duchy of Posen). The journal is composed of the Abbe Piotrowski’s letters (see that name).

Kordt : Documents bearing on the Commercial Relations between Russia and Foreign Countries. Collection of the Imperial Society of Russian History, cxvi.

Korkounov : Map of the War Operations between the Russians and the Poles. In Russian, St. Petersburg, 1837, and in Polish, Breslau, 1840.

Korzon (T.): Criticism of C. Gorski’s Work on the Wars of Batory. Quarterly Historical Review (Kwartalnik Historyczny) of Lem­berg, x. •

Kostomarov (N. I.): Sketch of the History of the Cotrmerce of the Russian Empire during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. (Otcherki Torgovl^: moskovskavo gossoudarstva . . .). St. Peters­burg, 1889. 1 vol.

Monographic^ and Enquiries. St. Petersburg, 1868, vols. vii., viii., xiii., xix., and xx.

The History of Russia in Biographies (Rousskaia istoria v jiznieopisaniakh ieia glc.vnieichykh dieiatiele'i). St. Petersburg,

1896, fourth edition, vol. i.

Studv of .he External Policy of Ivan IV. Messager de l’Europe (Viestnik Evropy), 1871.

Study of th Origin of Serfdom. Collection of Historical and Practical Science (Arkiv istoritcheskikh i praktitche>>kikh svie- dienii), 1859.

Study of the Assemblies of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Novoi6 Vrdmia), 1880. No. 1485.

Koubassov. See Katyrev.

Koulich : History of the Reunification of Russia (Istoria vozsoiejdin- ienia Roussi). St. Petersburg, 1874. 2 vols.

Kourbski (Prince A. M.): Narratives (Skazania), Oustrialov. St. Petersburg, 1868. 1 vol.

Kouznietsov : Information . . . as to the Construction of the Church of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin at Moscow (Novyia lictopis- nyia dannyia . . .). Readings (Trhtcnia), 1896.

Kovalevski (M.): Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia. London, 1891. 1 vol.

Kovalevski (P. I.): Attempts at the Psychiatry of >omt Historical Personages (Psikiatritcheskiie otcherki . . .). St. Petersburg, 1893, vol. iii.

Kraushaar (A.) : Magic at the Court of Batory (Czary na dworze Batorego). Cracow, 1888. 1 vol.

The True History of the Unhappy Fate of John, Duke of Finland, and of Catherine, Princess Royal (Historya prawdziwa . . .). Cracow, 1892 (pamphlet).

Kroutchtchov (I.): Enquiry into the Works of Joseph Sanine (Izliedo- vani? o sotchinieniakh I. S.). St. Petersburg, 186S. 1 vol.

Kruse (Elert) : Wahrhaftige Gegenbeticht auf die anno 1578, einge- gangene lieflendiscke Chronica B. Russow’s. Riga, 1861 pamphlet).

Lamprecht (K.): Deutsche Geschichte. Berlin, 1891-1895, vols. iii. and iv.

Languet (Hubert) : Arcana Sc^culi decimi sexti. Halle, 1699. 1 vol.

Lappo (I. I.) : The Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1569-1581 (Vielikoie Kniajestvo Litovskoie v. 156^-1581 godakhj. St. Petersburg, 1901. 1 vol.

Lappo-Danilevski (A. S.): Narrative of t'r.e History of Peasant Serfdom in the Muscovite Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Razskazania po istorii prikrieplienia vladieltcheskikli krestianej. St. Petersburg, 1901. 1 vol.

Lasicius f John-Lasi^ki) : De Russorum, Moscoviia/um et Tartarorum rtligione. Spire, 15 82. : vol.

Latkine (V.) : Lessors on the External History of Russian Law (Lektsii po vnieehniei istorii rousskavo prava). St. Petersburg, 1890. 1 vol.

The Assemblies of Ancient Russia (Ziemskiie sobory drevnel Roussi). St. Petersburg, 1855. ^{1 v}°l-

Lavreo (Vincenzo). See Wierzbowski.

Lebediev (N.) : The Conciliable of 15 51 (Stoglavnyl Sobory. Moscow, 1882. 1 vol.

The Metropolitan Macarius (Makarii, metropolit vssiilrossiiskii). Moscow, 1881. 1 vol.

Leger : Russes et Slaves. Paris, 1890. 1 vol.

Leonidas. See Golokhvastov.

Leonidas (Mons.) : Biography of St. Philip. Moscow, 1861.

Leontovitch (F. I.): Study of the Work of Sainokvassov. Collections of Political Science, ii., 1875.

Lerpigny (M.): Un Arbitrage Pontifical au Seiziime Siicle. Brussels (undated). 1 vol.

Levbn:lavius (J.): De Moscovitarum bellis adversus finitiones gestis. Startchevski, i.

Likkatchev (N. P.) : The Origin of Alexis Adachev (Istorltcheskii Viestnik), 1890.

The Library and Archives of the Moscow Sovereigns in the Six­teenth Century fBiblioteka i Arkliiv Moskovskikh gossoudarei). St. Petersburg, 1894. 1 vol.

Lilieikv (N. V.) : Simeon Behboulatovitch, Tsar of Kassimov. Tver, 1891. 1 vol.

Lippomano : Narraiiie (Hist. Russia Monumenta, i.)

Lisch (G.) : Study of the Livonian War (Jahrbucher fiir Mecklem. Geschichte), 1857.

Book of Degrees (Sti£piennala Kniga). Moscow, 1775. 1 vol.

Lossius. See Urkur.den.

Lvovska’ia I.u’topis. See Russian Chronicle.

Macarius (Mons.) : History of the Russian Church (Istoria Rousskol Tserkvi). St. Petersburg, 1877, vol. viii.

Maciejowsk: (W. A.) : History of Slav Legislation (Historya prawo- dawstw slawianskich,. Warsaw., 1856 -1858. 6 vols.

Maikov (L.): Chronological Notes on the Union of Siberia uith Russia (Kronologitcheskiid spravki . . .). Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1881.

Malipovski : Historical Proof of the Ancient Desire of the Polish Nation for Union with Russia. Readings Tcht^r.iai, vi.

Margeret (Jacques): Elat present de VEmpire dt Russie. Paris, 1669. New edition, Paris, 1854. 1 vol.

Markilvitch (A. I.): History of the MUstnitchestvo (Istoria Midstnitch- estva). Odessa, 1888. * vol.

Martens : Collection of Treaties and Conventions between Russia and Foreign Powers. St. Petersburg, 1874-1892. 9 vols.

Martynov (A.): Ancient Monuments in the Neighbourhood of Moscoiv. St. Petersburg, 1889. 1 vol.

Martynov (Father) : Russian Art. Arras, 1878 (pamphlet).

Maskiewicz (S.) : Memoirs. Vilna, 1838. 1 vol.

Massa (Isaac): Chronicon Moscojiticum (Rerum Rossicarum scriptores exteri, H.).

Relatio de Siberia, Collection of Northern Travels. Amsterdam, 1727, vol. viii.

Mayerberg : Travels in Muscovy. Russian and Polish Library, vols. i. _Qnd ii.

Memorabilis et perinde stupenda de err.deli Moscovitarum expeditione rarratio, exgermanice in latinum conversa. Douai, 1563. Facsimile published at Paris, 1858. . vol.*

Michalon (The Lithuanian): l)e Moribus Tartarorum L.ithunaorum et Moschorum. Bale, 1615. I vol.

Miechowski (Matthew, also called Mathias a Michovia) : De Moscovia. Startchevski, i.

Mikhailov (A.) : Study of the ‘ Domostroi.’ Review of the the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1889.

Miksailovski (N. K.) : Critical Studies (Krititcheskiie opyty). St. Petersburg, 1895.

Miklaohevski (I. N.): Contribution to the Economic History of the Russian Empire (K Istorii Khozia'istviennavo byta rousskavo gossoudarstva). Moscow, 1894. ¹ vol.

Milioukov (P.) : Essays on the History of Russian Culture (Otcherki po istorii rousskoi Koultoury). St. Petersburg, 1896-1901. 3 vols.

Disputed Historical Problems (Spornyie Voprossy). St. Peters­burg, 1902. 1 vol.

Mii.ler (G. Fr.) : Description of Siberia (Opissani6 rousskavo tsarstva). St. Petersburg, 1750. I vol.

Mittkeilungen aus dew Gebiete der Geschichte Liu. Ehst. und Kurlands. Riga, 1847-1858. 8 vols.

Moskovska’ia Lute pis, See Moscow Chronicle.

Moukh4nov : Collection (Sbornik). Moscow, 1836. 1 vol.

Muller (Laurenz) : Potnische Lifl. Mosc. ttnd andere Historien.

__ Leipzig, 1585, and various other editions and translations.

Munster (Seb.) : Cosmographei. BAle, 1550. 1 vol. (French trans­lation by Franfois de Belle-Forest, Paris, 1575. 1 vol.).

Napiersky (K. E.): Russisch-livlandische ZJrkunden. St. Petersburg, 1868. 1 vol.

Narrative of the Siege oj Pskov by Batory (Poviest o prikhojdenii Lit- ovskavo Korola Stepana na . . . Pskov). Readings of the Moscow Historical and Antiquarian Society, 1847, and separately under another title (Poviest preslavna . . .). Pskov, 1878. 1 vol.

Narratives of the Apostolic Nuncios and e ther Persons with regard to Poland (Relacye Nuncyuszdw), Rvaczewski. Berlin, 1864. 2 vols. Nehring : The Polish Historians of the Sixteenth Century (O History- kach Poiskich, XVI. w.). Posen, 1862. 1 vol.

Nekrassov (N.) : Attempt at an Enquiry, Historical and Literary, into the Origin of 'he ‘Domostroi’) Opyt . . . izsliedt ivania o pro'iskho- jdienii . . . Domostroia). Moscow, 1872. 1 vol.

Niebolsine : The Conquest of Siberia (Pokorenie Sibiri). St. Peters­burg, 1849. vo¹..

Nilmcewicz (I. U.) : Collection of Memoirs (Zbior Pamietnifolw).

Warsaw, 1822, vol. ii.

Nievoline (K. A.): Complete Works. St. Petersburg, 1857. 3 vols.

* One of the test-known pamphlets of the perioJ, and quoted for that reason.

Nikitski (A.): Sketch of the Internal History of Pskov (Otcherki vn'jutrennoi istorii Psokva). St. Petersburg, 1873. I vol.

Origin of the Name of Ermak. Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1882.

Nikolaibvski (P.): Russiam Sermons in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Same Review, 1868.

Nikonovskaia Lietopis. See Chronicle of Niconius.

Noailles (Marquis de) : Henri de Valois et la Pologne en 1572. Paris, 1867. 3 vols.

Ncrmantska'ia LiHopis. See Chronicle of Ncrmantski.

Novgorodskiic Lietopisy. See Chronicles of Novgorod.

Nyenstaedt (F.): Chronicle (Monumenta Livoniae Antiq/ise, ii.).

Oderborn (P.): Joannis Basilidis vita. Vitebsk, 1585, and Startch- evski, ii.

Oksenov : Ermak in Historical Poetry. Siberian Collection (Sibirskii Sbomik), 1886.

The Relations between Novgorod and the Iougra. Literary Col­lections, 1885.

Olmen (P.): Chronicle. Startchevski, i.

Opokov (Z.): Prince Kourbski (Kniaz A. M. Kourbskii). Ki£v, 1872. 1 vol.

Orignt d’) : The Life of Father A. Possevino. Paris, :7I2. 1 vol.

Oumanibts (F. M.): The Russo-Lithuanian Party in Poland fR.^ssko- litevskala p&rtia v Pulchi/. Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1875.

Degenerate Pi land (Vyrojdienie Polchi). St. Petersburg, 1872. 1 vol.

Study of St. Phili* (New and Old Russia, 1877).

Ouspiknsk^- IF.1 : Tkt Relations betaeen Rome and Moscow. Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1884, 1885.

Negotiations for Poace between. Muscovy and Poland (Peregovory

0 i-irie). Odessa, 1887. ^{1 v0}’-

Origin of the Easterr Question (Kak voznik . . . Vostotchnyi vopros ,. St. Petersburg, 1887 (pamphlet).

Ouspienski (Brothers) : Menology of the Emperor Basil ^Litsevol Miessiatsoslov . . . Irrperatora Vassilia). St. Petersburg, 1902.

1 vol.

Oustrialov (N. G.) : The Stroganov Family (Imiuiityie lioudi Stro- ganovy). St. Petersburg, 1842. 1 vol.

P . . . ski : Prince Kt/urbski (Kniaz A. M. Kourbskii). Kazan, 1873. 1 vol.

Pabst (E.): Die Anfanqe der Deutschen Herrschaft ir. I.ivland (Archiv zur Geschichte Liv. Ehst. un i Kurlands), vols. iii. and iv.

Pamiatniki Diplomatitckeskikh Snochenii. See Papers.

Pamiatniki drevnei pismiennosti i isskoustva. See Papers.

Pavlinov (A. M.) : History of Russian Architecture (Istoria rousskol arkhitektoury). Moscow, 1894. 1 vol.

Pavlov (A. S.): History of the Secularization of the Ecclesiastica' Properties in Russia (Istoritcheskn otcherk sekouliaryzatsii tser- kovnvkh ziemiel). Odessa, 1871. : vol.

Of Certain Assemblies. . . . Annals of the Fatherland.

Pavlov-Silvanski (N.): The Men who Serve (Gossoudarevy sloujilyie lioudi). St. Petersburg, 1898. 1 vol.

PaWinski (A.): State Papers. See that title.

The Early Years of tht Reign of Stephen Batory (Poczatki pancw- ania . . .). Historical Authorities, iv. See that title.

Pawinski (A.): The Financial History of the Reign of Batory (Skarbowosc

i j« j dzieje . . .)• Historical Authorities, vii.

Treasury Accounts during the Reign of Batory (Ksicgi Podskar- binskie . . .)• Historical Authorities, ix.

Peresvietov (Ivan) : Narratives (Skazania). Reports of the Univer­sity of Kazan, 1865.

Epistle and other Writings, published by the Imperial Historical Society. Moscow, 1902 (pamphlet).

Petreus (P.), or Peer Persson: Narrative concerning Russia (Rerum Rossicarum scriptores exteri, i.).

Petrov (I. N.) : Influence of the Literature of Western Europe on the Literature of Ancient Russia (O vlianii zapadno-evrope'isko'i litiera- toury . . .). Published by the Ecclesiastical Academy at Kiev, 1872. '

Philip (St.) : Sketch of a Biography (Natchertanie Jitia . . .). Moscow,

1860. 1 vol.

Contemporary Biography, pnnexed to the preceding work.

Philippson (M.): Westeuropa im Zeitalter von Philipp II. Berlin, 1882. 1 vol.

Pierling (Father) : La Russie et le Saini-Sit'ge. Paris, 1901, vol. ii.

Bathory et Possevino, documents inhiits. Paris, 1887. 1 vol.

Pilinsxki (T.): Das Polnische Interregnum, 1572-1573. Heidelberg,

1861. 1 vol.

Piotrowski (Abbj£ John) : Journal of Batory’s Pskov Campaign (Dziennik wyprawy . . .), Czuczynski. Cracow, 1894.

Pissemski (F.) : Extracts from his Diplomatic Correspondtnce. Sievier- ny'i Arkhiv, 1822.

Plater. Sec BroeL

Platono\ (J. F.): Lessons on Russian History (Lektsii po rousskoi istorii). St. Petersburg, 1901. 1 vol.

Historical Studies (Stati po rousskoi istorii). St. Petersburg, 1903. 1 vol.

Sketch of the History of the Disturbances in the Muscovite Empire during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Otcherki pi istorii smouty . . .). St. Petersburg, 1899. 1 vol.

Pogodine (M.) : Fragmentary Studies, Historical and Critical (Istorico- crititcheskiic otryvki). Moscow, 1846. 1 vol.

Study of the Origin of Serfdom in Russia. Russian Conversa­tions (Rousska'ia Biessieda), 1859.

The Tsar Ivan Vassilievitch. Archives of Historical and Practical Science (Arkhiv istor, i prakt, sviedienii), 1859.

Polevoi (N.) : History of tat Russian People (Istoria rousskavo naroda). Moscow, 1833, vol. vi.

Polkovski (Abbe) : Documents Bearing on the Wars of Batory (His­torical Documents published by the Academy of Cracow, xi.). See that title.

Polroitf sob. a.iie rousskikh Lietopissov. See Complete Collection.

Popov A. N.): Sketch of Russian Chronographers (Obzor khrono- grafov). Moscow, 1866. 1 vol.

ColleUion of Russian and Slav Writings inserted in the Russian Chronographers (Isbornik). Moscow, 1869. 1 vol.

Possevino (A.): Moscovia et alia opera. Vilna, 1587. New edition, edited by Father Pierling. Paris, 1882.

Poviest 0 prikhojdenii Litovckavo Korola Stepana (Story of the Sie^e of Pskov by Batory). See that title.

Pskoi skdia LiHopis. See Chronicle of Pskov.

Prijov (I.) : History of Russian Taverns (Istoria kabakov). St. Petersburg, 1868. 1 vol.

Prijov (I.): Reports of the Assembly of 1551 (Stoglav), Khojantohikov.

St. Petersburg, 1868. 1 vol.

Prziszdziecki (A.): The Polish Princesses of the House of Jagellon (Iagiellonki polskiej. Cracow, 1868-1878, vols. iii., iv., and v. Puri;has (Samuel) : The Pilgrims. London, 1625-1626. 4 vols. Pypine (A. N.): History of Russian Literature (Istoria rousskoi litiera- toury). St. Petersburg, 1898, vols. i. and ii.

Raczynski (Count E.): Memoirs connected with the Reign of Stephen Batory (Pamietmki do historyi Stefana kr61a). \Var.saw, 1830.

1 vol., 8vo.

Rambaud (A.) : La Russle Epique. Paris, 1876. 1 vol.

Regel : Analecta Byzantino-Rossica. St. Petersburg, 1891. 1 vol. Reimann : Das Verkalten des Reiches gege.i Livland in den Jahren, 1559-1561. Ilistorische Zeitsohrift, 1870.

Bit Polnische Konigswahl von 1573. Same publication, 1864. Reimchronik (Die). Scriptores, Rerum Livonicarum, i.

Relations des- Nonces A postal'ques et 1’wires pet sornes s-.:r la Pologne (Relacye Nuncyusziiw), Ryku.czewski. Berlin, 1864.

2 vols.

Remtzovskaea Li/'topis. See Siberian Chronicle.

Renner (J.) : Livlandische Historien. Gottingen, 1876. 1 vol.

Rerum Moscovitarum auctores varii. Frankfort, 1600. 1 vol.

Rerum Rossicarum scriptures exteri. St. Petersburg, 1851. 2 vols. Richter (A. v.): Geschichte der Ostsee P/ovinzen. Riga, 1857-1858.

3 vols.

Ridolfini (Dominic) : Correspondence. Scientific and Literary Col­lection 'Przewodnik Naukowy). Lemberg, 1878, vol. ii.

Rojkov (N.): Agriculture in Muscovite Russia (Ssielskoie Khazialstvo v Mosskovskoi Roussii). Moscow, 1899. 1 vol.

Rostovski (St.) : Litkuanicarum Societatis Jesu Histonaram librii decern. P. Martynov, Paris, 1877. 1 vol.

Rovinski (D.): History of the Russian Schools of Iconography (Istoria rousskikh chkcl ikonopissania). Memoranda of the Archaeological Society, vol. viii., and separately. St. Petersburg, 1856. 1 vol. Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth. Century. London, 1856. 1 vol.

See Fletchi r and Horsey.

Russow (B.): Chonicle. Script, reram livon, ii.

Rutenberg (O.): Geschichte der Ostsee Provinzen. Leipzig, 1859. 2 vols. Rydberg _vO. S.): Swedish Treaties. Stockholm, 1877, and following years.

Rytchkov : Attempt at a History of Kazan. (Otcherk istorii . . .). St. Petersburg, 1867. 1 vol.

Samarine (G.): Works. Moscow, 1880, vol. v.

Under the pseudonym of M. Z. K., Study of Ivan the Terrible in the ‘ Muscovite ’ (Moskvitanine), 1847. (Reply to Kaveline.) Schiemann (Ch.) : Russland, Polen, und Livland, bis ins XVII. Jahr- hundert. Berlin, 1887, vol. ii.

Schiemann (Th.) : Characterkopfe und Sittenbilder ius der Balticher Geschichte der XVI. Jahrb. Mittau, 1877. I vol.

Sckirren : Quelhn zur Geschichte des Untergangs da,' Livlandischer Selhstandigkeit. Revel, 1880-1881. 8 vols. And Neue Quillen, etc. Revel, 1883-1885. 3 vols. Archiv ffir die Geschichte Liv. Ehst. und Kurland. See that title.

‘ Schlichting (A.): Nova ex Mnscovia . . . de principis Ioanni vita et tyrannide . . . narratio (Scriptores rerum polonicarum, i.). See that title.

Schwartz (P.): Chronologic dev Ovdnnmaister ueber Livland. Riga, 1879. 1 vol. (From the papers of Baron von Toll.)

Scriptores rerum Livonicarum. Riga and Leipzig, 1853-1854.

2 vols.

Scriptores rerum Polonicarum. Cracow, 1872, vols. i. and vii.

Senigov (J.) : The Work of Ivan the Great as Judged by Popular Opinion (Narodnoie vozzrenie na dieiatielnost Ioanna Groznavo). St. Petersburg, 1902 (pamphlet).

Serguieievitch (V.): Judicial Antiquities (Drevnosti rousskavo prava). St. Petersburg, 1890-1903. 3 vols.

Lessons on the History of Russian Law (Letksii po istorii rouss­kavo prava). St. Petersburg, 1883.

The Assemblies under the Muscovite Empire (Ziemskiie ssobory v moskovskom gossoudarstviennykh znanii). V. P. Bezobrazov, vol. ii.

Landed Property in Ancient Russia. Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1901.

Historical Study, ir the Observer (Nablioudatiel), 1881.

Sibirska'ia Littopis. See Siberian Chronicle.

Epistles. Barssov, Christian Readings (Khristianskiie Ichtenia), 1871.

Simbirskii Sbornik (Simbirsk Collection). Published by Iazykov, Khomiakov, and Valiouev). Moscow, 1845, vol. i.

Sokolov (M. I.): Summary of Ten Years of Labour by the Archeeo- logical Commission (Otcherk diessiatilietniei naoutchnoi dieiatiel- nosti . . .). Moscow, 1902.

Sokolovski (G. P.): The Economic Existence of the Agricultural Population in Russia (Ekonomitcheskii byt ziemliedietieltcheskavo nassielenia v Rossii). Historical Library (1st. Bibi.), 1878.

Sketch of the History of the Rural Commune in the North of Russia (Otcherk istorii ssielsko'i oochtchiny na sievierie Rossii). St. Petersburg, 1877. 1 vol., 8vo.

Soloviov (S.): History of Russia, numerous editions, vols. vi. and vii.

Study of the Assemblies of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Messager Russe (Viestnik Evropy), 1857.

History of the Rdations between the Russian Princes of the House of Rurik (Istoria otnochenii miedjou rousskimii Kniaziami . . .). Moscow, 1847. ^{1 vo1}-

Soudicbnik gossoudaria Tsaria Ivana. See Code.

Sprawy wojenne Krola S. Batorego. See Wars.

Siartchevski (A. von) : Histories Ruthenicce scriptores exteri sceculi XVI. Berlin and St. Petersburg, 1841. 2 vols.

State Papers of the Polish Kingdom relating to the Reign of Batory (Akta Metryki Korronej . . .), Pawinski. Warsaw, .'884. 1 vol.

State Papers of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania dealing with the Diplomatic Relations of that Country during the Reign of Batory (Kniga possolskaia Metryki vieliKavo Kniajestva Litovskavo). Pcwodine and Doubienski, Moscow 1843. 1 vol.

Stein (Fr.) : Geschichte des Russiscken Hceres. Leipzig, 1895. ^{1 vo}'-

Stepi/nnaia Kniga. See Book.

Stoglav. See Report.

Stroganovskala littopis. See Siberian Chronicle.

Stryjkowski : Chronicle. (Collection of Polish Historians.) See that title.

Sulicovius (I. D. Solikowski): Commentarius brevis re/um poloni­carum. Dantzig, 1647. 1 vol.

Sylvester : Epistles. Barssov, Christian Readings (Khristianskiie Tchtcnia), 1871.

Szadeczky (Lajos) : Bathory Istvan. Budapest, 1887. 1 vol.

Szlachtowsxi : Tt,i Year* of the Reign of Stephen Batory (Dziesiec lat panowania S. B.). Cracow, 1850, unfinished.

Szujski (J.): Works, second series. Cracow, 1894, vol. ii.

Tatichtchev. See Code of Ivan IV.

Taube (J.) and Kruse (Ej. : Zav Ivan der Grausame, Sendschreiben an Gotthard Kettler (1579), (Beitrage zur Kenntniss Russlands.) See that title.

Tchetchouline (X. D.): The Towns of the Empire of Moscow in the Sixteenth Century (Goroda moskovskavo * gossoudarstvo). St. Petersburg, 1889. 1 vol.

Tchitciierine (B. N.j: Essays on the H-story of Russian Law (Opyty po istorii rousskavo prava). Moscow, 1858. 1 vol.

Popular Representation (O narodnompreastavitielstvie). Moscow, 1866. 1 vol.

Theiner : Annales eccleziastici. Rome, 1856. 3 vols.

Tiipoi.o : Narratio Historica dt Moscovitico Imperio, 1559. Hist. Russia Monumenta, i.

Tolstoi (G.): Relations between Russia and England from 155 3— if93 (Piervyi ssorok liet snochenii miedjou R. i A.). St. Peters­burg, 1875. 1 vol.

Tolstoi (I.) and K<">nl>akov (N.): Monuments of Ancient Art in Russia (Rousskaia drevnosti v pamiatnikakh isskoustva). St. Peters­burg, 1897-1899, vols. iv., v., and vi.

Tratche\ ski : The Interregnum in Poland after the Extinction of the J agello/i Dynasty (Polskoie bezkorolevie po prekrachtchenii dinastii Iagiellonov). Moscow, 1869. 1 vol.

Tsarstrienna'ia Kniga. See Chronicle of the Reign of Ivan.

Tsvietaiev (D.): Protestantism and Protestants in Moscow (Protes- tanstvi Protestant}’ v Rossii). Moscow, 1890. 1 vol.

Tverskaia Lie'topis. See Chronicle of Tver.

Tyjnov : View of the Information collected by Foreigners as to Siberia. Siberian Collection (Sibirskii Sbomik), 1887. •

Ulefeld (J.): Legatio Moscovitica she Hodxporicon Ruthenicum. Startchevski, i.

TJrkunden der Grafe.i de la Gardie. J. Lossius, Derpt, 1882. 1 vol.

Valiousv (D. A.): Study of St. Philip. Educational Library (Biblio- teka Jla Vospitania), 1845.

Vasilievski : Tne German and Polish Press on the War between Batory ard Ivan IV. Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1889.

Vkliaminov-Ziernov (V. N.): Study of t',.j Tsars of Kassimov (Izslie- dovania o Ka^simovskikh tsi-riakh). St. Petersburg, 1870. 1 vol.

Vigenere (B'-aise de) : Poloigne. Paris, 1573. 1 vol.

Viollet-le-Dcc (E.): L’Art Russe. Paris, 1877. : vol.

Vladimirski - Boudanov (F.): Chrestomathy of Russian Law (Kristomatia po istorii r.p.). Moscow, 1887. I vol.

Sketch of the History of Russian Law (Obzor istorii rousskavo prava). Moscow, 1890. 1 vol.

Warszbwicki : Vita. . . Step’r.ani, regis Polonice. Bile, 1612. 1 vol.

Wielewicki (Abbe John): Journal, 1579-1599- Scriptores rerum polonicarum, vii.

Wierzbowski (F.): Vincenzo Laureo, Bishop of Mondavi, Nuncio . . . in Pvland, 1574-1578. Warsaw, 1888. 1 vol.

\Vier2BOWski (F.): Two Candidatures for the Throne of Poland, 1574-1575 (Dvi6 Kar.didatoury na polskoii prestol). Warsaw, 1889. 1 vol.

Winkelman;» (E.) : Bibli-itheca Livonics HiJorica. Berlin, 1878. I vol.

Wittsen : North-Western Tartary. Collection of Northern Travels, viii.

Zabikline (I.): Private Life, of the Tsars, and Private Life of the Tsarinas of Russia (Domachnii byt tsarov and Domachnii byt tsarits). Moscow, 1872 and 1895, third edition. 2 vols.

History of Moscow (Istoria Moskvy). Moscow, 1902. 1 vol.

Characteristics of the Knowledge of Ancient Russia. Annals of the Fatherland, 1856.

Original Features of Ancient Architecture. Archives of Russian Art, 1894.

View of the History of the Development of the Muscovite Auto­cracy. Historical Messenger (Istoritcheskii Viestnik), 1881.

Zagoskine (G.): History of Political Law tn the Muscovite Empire (Istoria prava Moskovskavo gossoudarstva). Kazan, 1877. t vol.

Zakrzewski (V.): After the Flight of Henri de Valois (Dzieje Bezkrol- ewia . . . 1574—1575)- Cracow, 1878. 1 vol.

Relations between the Holy See and Ivan the Terrible (Stosunki miedzy Stolica Apostolska a Iwancm Grozny). Cracow, 1874. 1 vol.

Zaleski (Abbk) : The Jesuits in Poland (Jezuici w Polcse). Lemberg, 1900, vol. i.

Zamyslovski (E.): Herberstein’s Data, Historical and Geographical. Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1882.

The Conquest of Siberia. Same publication, 1882.

Study of Sylvester. Political Science Collection (Sbomik Gos- soudarstviennykh Znanii). St. Petersburg, 1875, vol. ii.

Zaoustinski (C.) : The Metropolitan Macarius. Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 1881.

Zarinski (Father P.): Sketch of the Ancient History of Kazan (Otcherk drevniei Kazani). Kazan, 1877. 1 vol.