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With the accession of Ivan III. to the throne of Moskva, Russian history takes new shape and direction. This dark, watchful, brooding kniaz was but the continuator of a dynasty of like princes “of gloomy and terrible mien, whose foreheads were marked by the seal of destiny.”91 “Time and circumstance and opportunity paint with heedless hands and garish colours on the canvas of a man’s life; so that the result is less frequently a finished picture than a palette of squeezed tints.”92 Time and circumstance and opportunity gave Ivan the title of Great, and his principality an importance it had never before enjoyed. That he made the most of his possibilities will not be denied, but in the nature of things this might scarcely have been otherwise. The whole character of the man dovetailed into the part he was required to play.

The growth of Moskovy had been marked by a life-struggle with three hostile factors—internal disruption, the aggression of the Horde, and the aggression of the Lit’uanian Princes; the first had been nearly stamped down by the forerunners of Ivan, circumstances enabled him to deal successfully with the two latter. The Golden Horde had already, in the reign of Vasili, fallen apart into independent khanates, that of Astrakhan representing the parent branch, while those of Kazan and of the Krim Tartars bordered the grand principality on the east and south respectively. The latter khanate was wedged in between the lands of Astrakhan and Lit’uania, and Ivan was able to turn its resources to good account against both these neighbours, as a counterpoise to the concerted action which they were ever ready to take against him. With the Kazanese he carried on, in the early years of his reign (1467-69), a scrambling war, in which, if his armies more than held their own, he personally showed little courage or determination. Possibly, however, he was reserving himself for the inevitable struggle with Novgorod, on the result of which indirectly hung the question whether Vilna or Moskva should be the centre of the Russian state. “Under which King?” was undisguisedly the issue which was before the Novgorodskie at this juncture, and the answer threatened to be unfavourable to Moskva. For once the faction motives that agitated the citizens of the great republic are plainly understandable: on the one side was hostility to the growing and griping power of the Grand Prince, and a desire to seek the protection of Kazimir and the spiritual guidance of the Metropolitan of Kiev; on the other, aversion to a foreign suzerainty and a heresy-tainted Church. Since Olga had lighted the torch of Christianity in the land, since Anastasie of Galitz93 had furnished an illumination of a different nature, women had rarely mingled in the national politics, and “cherchez la femme” would scarcely hold good with regard to Russian troubles. Now, however, at the head of the Lit’uanian-leaning faction appears a woman, one Martha, widow of the posadnik Isak Boretzki, and mother of two of the city notables. The encroachments of Vasili on the liberties and domains of the republic had thoroughly alarmed the citizens, and Martha’s party had little difficulty in rousing a spirit of defiance towards the new Prince, who was held to be of weaker fibre than his father. An alliance with Kazimir was openly projected, and the Moskovite agents were treated with studied disrespect. Ivan expostulated, the Novgorodskie persisted. Still expostulating, the Grand Prince set in motion a formidable array of troops; Pskovskie, Moskovite, Viatkian, Tverskie, and Tartar contingents converged on the lands of the republic, defeated and drove in the forces sent against them, and hemmed the city in on every side. Ivan, breathing peace and goodwill, wound his coils slowly round his prey, and waited. Want, the old enemy of Novgorod, began to fight against the Boretzki faction; “Ivan is at our gates, and your Kazimir, where is he?” demanded the “younger folk,” the first to feel the pinch of famine. Couriers had been sent to invoke the assistance of the King of Poland, but the Land-Master of Livland had turned them back. And this mild-mannered Grand Prince, still breathing goodwill, had taken to cutting off the heads of the most notable of his prisoners; among others, one of Martha’s sons had been so treated. Clearly this was not a man to be trifled with; the city capitulated. 1471Bitter were the terms to which the Novgorodskie had to submit: a fine of 15,000 roubles, the surrender of several contested dependencies, the payment of a tribute to Moskva, an engagement to hold no intercourse with the King of Poland or the Metropolitan of Kiev or any of the Grand Prince’s enemies, the annulment of the acts of the Vetché, and the recognition of Ivan as appeal judge in their civic litigation. Velikie Novgorod had found her master.

The next and most important event of an important reign was produced by an outside circumstance. The tidal wave of Islam which had swept over the cradle of the Orthodox faith, had also cut short the sphere of Papal influence, and threatened to make still further inroads on the Catholic lands of South-Eastern Europe. As Venice mourned her damaged trade so Rome sighed over her abbreviated authority and diminished Peter’s Pence. Pope after Pope cast anxious eyes around the sovereigns of Christendom to discover a possible champion against the Turk; but the days of the Crusades were over. One card there remained for the Vatican to play. Brought up in dependence on the Papal Court, and in conformity with the Latin faith, were the heritors of the dead empire; Sophie Paleologus and her two brothers, children of Thomas, brother of the last Emperor, were, body and soul, at the disposal of the Pope (Paul II.). Of the young Princes obviously nothing could be made, but by proclaiming Sophie as heiress of Constantinople a husband might be found for her who would be willing to break a lance with Mahomet for the possession of his wife’s inheritance. Ivan of Moskva, whose remote ancestors had turned their eyes so persistently towards the Tzargrad, seemed a likely candidate for the hand of the orphan exile, and an embassy from Paul sounded the Grand Prince on the subject. Ivan, whose first wife, Mariya of Tver, had died in 1467, lent favourable ear to the suggestion, and matters were satisfactorily arranged between the high contracting parties. The question of religion does not appear to have been raised as an obstacle, either by Paul or Sixtus IV., who succeeded to the Papal throne while the negotiations were proceeding. Whether Ivan’s ambassadors threw dust in the eyes of the Pontiffs, whether the latter hoped to win him, by means of his bride, over to the Latin faith, or whether the driving out of the Turk was for the moment more important than the genesis of the Holy Ghost, it is difficult to determine, but the betrothal was accomplished with the full blessing of the Church. Of Sophie the information available is curiously unequal, detailed on some points, vague to blankness on others. That, according to the chronicles, she charmed all beholders with her presence—a habit common with princesses—must be dispassionately compared with a contemporary Italian account, which likened her to a disgusting mountain of fat. That she left the Eternal City under the wing of the Pope’s legate; that she passed through Viterbo and Sienna; that the council of the latter city voted, by 124 voices to 42, fifty florins to defray the cost of her reception; that she made her way through Bologna and Nürnberg to Lubeck, and thence by sea to Revel; that she was well received at Pskov, and also at Novgorod, at which place the old bell of Yaroslav might yet salute the honoured guest; all this may be gathered from the records of the past.94 Reared amid the warm and stately cities of Italy, with fond remembrance of the lost glories of Constantinople, there was much that must have seemed strange and wild, perhaps desolate, in the long sledge journey through the unending snow-choked forests towards Moskva; Moskva, which, even in its winter mantle, would compare but meagrely with most of the cities the traveller had passed through. For in those days and at that moment, with its cathedral in ruins, its buildings insignificant, and its limits eked out with meadows and copses, the capital of the grand principality did not make a very brave show.95 The solemnity of her reception was marred by an awkward incident, which showed that, however the case might be at Rome, inter-Christian bitterness still ruled strong at Moskva. The legate, it was understood, not content with flaunting his scarlet robes in the face of the Orthodox, intended to have the Latin Cross borne before him into the city. Should such things be? Ivan held high counsel with his clergy and boyarins on the subject; the majority were in favour of “shutting their eyes” when the objectionable emblem should make its appearance on the scene, but this ostrich-like expedient did not recommend itself to the Metropolitan Filipp, who declared that if it came in at one gate he should go out at another. Happily the Cardinal showed a more accommodating spirit, and, when the situation had been explained to him by the Prince’s messengers, consented to have the Cross smuggled through in a sledge. This concession smoothed over the difficulty, and the catastrophe of the whole bridal train being kept waiting for days in the snow outside Moskva till one or other of the churchmen gave way, was happily averted.96 1472From the moment that Sophie Paleologus became mated with Ivan comparatively little is heard of her; her personality is swallowed up in that of the Grand Prince. But the influence of the Greek Princess can be traced in many of the important developments of this reign. Born amid the extravagant ceremonial of the Byzantine Court, and treasuring the memory of those splendid myths and vanities, the more perhaps because they were wholly lost, the exile transplanted to the rugged soil of Moskovy the ideals that had waxed to fantastic growth on the humid shores of the Bosphorus. The Velikie-kniaz of yore, moving freely among his boyarins and subjects, develops gradually into the heaven-born Sovereign, a being removed from contact with the ordinary sons of earth, withdrawn from profane touch into a Holy of Holies of pomp and ceremony. Here again Ivan was manifestly fitted to assist in working out this evolution. His cold-blooded, calculated policy, his pitiless, passionless judgment, his baleful glance, which is said to have caused women to faint, were meet attributes of a majesty that was accounted something more than human.

Under the influence of the new Byzantine and Italian ideas which the Grand Prince imbibed from the inspiration of his consort and her Court followers, Moskva received new buildings and adornments, a new Cathedral of the Assumption (Ouspienskie Sobor), a new Kreml, new ordnance, new coinage. Received also new laws, new punishments; the old repugnance against taking life, expressed in the testament of Monomachus, gave way to artistically conceived executions and tortures. Heretics were put to death in a manner that the Inquisitors of Western Europe might have been proud to own—roasted gently in a cage, for example, or, if allowed to live, deprived of their unruly tongues. Knout and axe made their appearance in the penal code, flesh and blood cheapened in the market of civil life. Such were the results of the union of the last of the Caesars with the first of the Tzars. The outward expression of this alliance was the adoption on the Prince’s seals of the double-headed eagle, the arms of the defunct eastern empire; a cognisance which had, since the days of Karl the Great, been also the distinguishing device of the western empire.97

In his capacity of appeal judge of Novgorodian suits, Ivan found his influence over the affairs of the city daily growing stronger; an accident furnished him with the pretext for bringing the republic wholly under his authority. By a clerical error in a petition his style was written Sovereign (Gosoudar), instead of Lord (Gospodin). A nod is as good as a wink to an Argus-eyed prince. Ivan thanked the citizens for their voluntary submission and assumed the new title. Novgorod rose in angry rebellion against this last blow at her independence; the faction of Martha lifted its head anew, and the eyes of all men turned towards the King of Poland. But from that quarter came no help. Kazimir was engaged in a struggle with Matthias of Hungary on the one hand and the Teutonic Order on the other, and had, moreover, to maintain his son Vladislas on the throne of Bohemia; hence he was not in a position to court the hostility of the Prince of Moskva. Novgorod had to front alone the overwhelming forces which Ivan led against her. The Archbishop Theofil flitted backwards and forwards between the city and the Prince’s camp, but saw never a sign of yielding on that impassive countenance; saw only fresh troops arriving to swell the monarch’s array. The unequal struggle could have but one end. “Who can resist God and Great Novgorod?” The proud sphinx-riddle had at last been answered, and the republic perished, strangled in the toils of autocracy. 1477As Gosoudar Ivan entered the humbled city the sovereign functions of vetché and posadnik were abolished, and the whole province of Novgorod was added to the domain of Moskva. Loaded with an enormous booty, wrenched by way of fine from the citizens, the Grand Prince returned to his capital, bearing with him as prisoners many of the merchants and boyarins of the disaffected party, and the bereaved Martha, the Helen of this smitten Troy. Bearing also a yet more notable captive, the great bell of Yaroslav, which for many a hundred year had hung like a watchful sprite in its beetling belfry, had clanged, boomed, and sobbed its summonses to council, strife, or revelry, had roused the sleepy monks in many a marsh-girt monastery, and witched with muffled echoes the seals of Lake Ilmen—this voice of Novgorod’s liberty was borne away in the conqueror’s train, to be hung in the new Ouspienskie Cathedral at Moskva, and eat out its life in droning solemn flatteries on Moskovite high-days. Perchance as they lifted it down from its long-accustomed tower it clashed forth one last discordant knell, a passing-bell for the soul of the great republic.

Whatever hopes the Roman Pontiffs had built on the marriage they had negotiated, they were doomed to be disappointed. Sophie Paleologus, so far from converting her husband to the Latin faith, had adopted the Orthodox religion almost as soon as she entered Russia,98 and the decrees of the Council of Florence were worse than abortive as far as Moskva was concerned. Nor was it likely that Ivan, saddled with his own subjection to the sword of the Prophet, was going crusading against the Ottoman power in South Europe. Popular tradition, indeed, gave his wife credit for turning his energies towards the off-throwing of this same Mongol yoke, which was incompatible with the new ideas of princely dignity. The initiative, however, appears to have come from the other side. Akhmet, Khan of Astrakhan, either sensible of the growing independence of Moskva, or acting at the instance of the King of Poland, seized upon a moment when Ivan was embroiled in a quarrel with his brothers (Boris and Andrei the elder) to march against this too-uplifted vassal. 1452Kazimir having, by the Peace of Olmutz (1479), closed the war with Hungary, was in a position to second Akhmet’s attack. The political genius of Ivan was equal to the emergency. By wise concessions he dispelled his brothers’ resentment and presented a united front to the invaders, while his friendship with Mengli-Girei, the Khan of the Krim Tartars, enabled him to send the Krimskie horsemen raiding into Lit’uania—an effective counter-stroke to Kazimir’s intrigues with the eastern khanate. Face to face in equal struggle with the enemy, the Grand Prince showed none of the impatient war-horse-snorting ardour which was expected of him; showed rather a spirit of misgiving and vacillation, which had to be goaded by women and ecclesiastics before it could be wound up to the necessary pitch. This unwillingness to fight need not be set down unhesitatingly to want of courage. Erst wäge, dann wage, the motto of a world-wise man of a later day, was the life-motive of this wary yet strenuous kniaz, and he had good reason to pause before staking the existence of his monarchy on a pitched battle with Akhmet. The disaster which befell Vitovt, and the equally unprofitable sequel to the victory of Dimitri Donskoi, warned Ivan of the risk he ran in courting a like experience. With a little patience, a little more feigned submission, Moskva would see the power of the Horde crumble away of its own corrosive action; on the other hand, the defeat of the Grand Prince’s army would place his territories at the mercy of the real enemy, and the aggrandisement of the Polish-Lit’uanian crown would be a death-blow to Moskovy. For months the two armies faced each other on opposite banks of the Ougr, Ivan urged by his soldiers and by the fiery Vassian, Archbishop of Rostov, to strike a blow against the impious enemy of God, and the impious one waiting for Lit’uanian succours before attacking Ivan. At length the approach of winter froze the dividing river and left no further obstacle to defer the contest. But the final snapping of the Mongol yoke was to be effected in a manner which partook of the ridiculous rather than the heroic. Ivan gave orders to his boyarins to withdraw the army to a position more favourable for receiving the attack; the backward movement engendered a panic among the Russians, and the retreat was changed into a flight. On the other bank of the Ougr the Mongols were alarmed to find that the foe whom they had been watching so closely for months had suddenly vanished; a flank attack, a rear attack, some unseen horror, was evidently creeping upon them, and the hosts of Akhmet raced away from Moskovite soil as though all the saints of the Orthodox calendar had been mobilised against them. Ivan, like many another frozen-blooded strategist, had won by waiting, and might now turn his undivided and untrammelled energies towards the western foe.

The dynasty of Yagiello had emerged from its lair in the Lit’uanian forests at a moment when the old reigning families of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia were dying out, and it seemed not unlikely that this new and vigorous stock would gather up the fallen threads of Piast, Arpad, and Premyslide, and weave together a powerful Slav-Magyar Empire. Already in outward appearance a considerable step towards this goal had been made. Kazimir Yagiellovitch had re-united the Polish and Lit’uanian lands under his sceptre, West Russia was entirely in his hands, Pomerellen and West Prussia had been wrested from the Order, and one of his sons filled the Bohemian throne; in Hungary his pretensions were only held in check by the vigour of Matthias Hunnyades. Against this wide-stretching dominion the Grand-principality of Moskva was pitted in a struggle as deadly as any that was waged between kindred species of life in far primæval days. And for this struggle Moskva was the more strongly equipped, despite her disparity of forces, by the solidly-wrought cohesion into which centuries of adversity had hammered her. Nor did her ruler rely for success on his own unaided resources; besides his familiar sprite of the steppes, the Krim Tartar Khan, Ivan drew into a league of suspended hostility Matthias of Hungary—the great stumbling-block to Polish expansion—and Stefan VI., Hospodar of Moldavia. The latter Prince, whose efforts had raised his country, almost for the first time in her chequered history, to a position of independence, and whose exploits against the Turks had gained for him, from Sixtus IV., the title of l’Athlète du Christ, was allied with the Moskovite princely family by the marriage of his daughter with the young Ivan, son of the Grand Prince by his first wife, Mariya of Tver. The outcome of these preparations was not open war; the two powers remained snarling at each other and watching for some favourable opportunity for attack. Ivan looked on complacently while Mengli-Girei made an inroad upon the Podolian lands and plundered Kiev, while on the other side Kazimir was believed to have incited the Order to hostilities against Moskva.99 Ivan’s forces, however, overawed the Teutons, and in another direction Kazimir’s designs were frustrated; a counter matrimonial alliance, between Mikhail of Tver and a granddaughter of the King of Poland, was nipped in the bud by the Grand Prince’s vigilance, and soon afterwards the Tverskie kniaz, detected in an intrigue with Kazimir, was forced to fly from Ivan’s vengeance. 1485The little principality, which had been for centuries a thorn in the side of Moskva, was swallowed up in the Grand Prince’s dominions, and Kazimir had the mortification of seeing his enemy grow stronger instead of weaker as a result of this diplomatic skirmishing.

If the Polish King counted on wearying Ivan into some rash or negligent act of open hostility or wanton enterprise he knew not his man. The Moskovite never undertook a task greater than his forces were able to accomplish, or attempted to hold more than he could with safety manage. Hence his resources were never exhausted, and the long period of pent hostility was turned on his part to solid advantage. 1487The small appanages of Rostov and Yaroslavl shared the fate of Tver and Novgorod, Viatka was reduced to submission, Perm and the silver-yielding region of the Petchora were added to the sovereignty, and Kazan, long a scourge to the Volga Russians, fell into the power of the Grand Prince. Ivan set a vassal Khan on the throne of this new dependency, reserving for himself the title of Prince of Bulgaria. A new title, indeed, was becoming necessary to describe the august being who was emerging from the cocoon state of a Prince of Moskva, and Ivan henceforth begins to style himself Tzar in his foreign correspondence.100

The growing power and importance of the Moskovite state, emerged from its Tartar thraldom and hallowed by its connection with the dead Byzantine past, brought it more into contact with the western world from which it had drifted so far apart. Like the hero of the Dutch romance, revisiting the haunts of early life after his protracted slumber, Russia was renewing the relations she had held with Christendom before her opium-sleep in the shadow of the Khans. The wily and patient kniaz had a double purpose to serve in encouraging intercourse with the western princes: in the first place, to seek fresh allies against the arch-enemy, Poland; in the second, to procure for his beloved capital a share of the progress and civilisation which was then illuminating Europe. Embassies and presents were exchanged with the Emperor (Frederick III.) and with the young Maximilian, “King of the Romans.” The death of Matthias (1490) and the election to the Hungarian crown of Ladislas, King of Bohemia and son of Kazimir, placed Maximilian in direct opposition to the House of Yagiello, and Ivan was ready to join with the Habsburg in an attack on the common enemy. 1491The hostilities in Hungary were, however, cut short by a peace based on one of the “family compacts” so dear to the House of Austria, and Ivan, in his turn, saw the power of his foe wax stronger in spite of his diplomatic efforts. In another and more unexpected direction the Grand Prince established relations of friendship; the Ottoman power had already stretched its grasp over Kaffa and the fertile lands of the Krim peninsula, and Mengli-Girei was enrolled among the vassals of the Sultan Bayezid II. With this pacific occupant of the Throne of the Faithful Ivan exchanged courtesies—a sorry miscarriage of the hopes of the match-making Pontiffs. Doubtless the Russian Prince saw in the Sultan a possible ally against the new King of Hungary, who might one day unite on his head the crowns of Poland and Lit’uania. Not in this direction, however, were travelling the energies of the house of Yagiello. Kazimir seemed bent on providing his numerous sons with separate kingdoms and principalities; having failed in his attempt to divide the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, he tried to secure the succession of his second son, John-Albert, to the Polish throne, and recommended another son, Alexander, to the boyarins of the grand duchy. Having thus, in marked contrast to the life-work of his great rival, done all that he could to ensure the disintegration of his sovereignty, the King comfortably sickened of a fatal disease and passed away with the famous moriendum ergo on his lips. 1492Subsequent events fell in with his testamentary wishes. The Lit’uanians elected Alexander as Grand Duke, and the Polish Diet, after many stormy sittings, recognised John-Albert as its sovereign—a recognition possibly influenced by the arrival on the scene of deliberation of 1600 armed men enlisted on that Prince’s behalf.101

The enfeeblement of Lit’uania by reason of its separation from Poland invited the long-nursed hostility of the Grand Prince and his faithful ally, Mengli-Girei. The latter ravaged the Lettish territories in the south, while the forces of the former harried all along the Moskovite border. Many of the boyarins and petty princes subject to Alexander passed over to the service of a monarch who was of their own nationality and religion, and the Grand Duke had to signalise his accession by buying off the hostility of Ivan with the surrender of some frontier lands. 1494On these terms an “eternal peace” was accommodated between the two countries, and the following year a matrimonial alliance was effected between Alexander and Ivan’s daughter Elena. Whatever chance might have existed of durable concord between a weak state holding conquered territory and a strong state to whom that territory has once belonged was extinguished by the irritating stipulations with which this marriage contract bristled. Uncomfortable as a neighbour, Ivan was incompatible as a father-in-law; the safeguards which had been insisted on against any tampering with the Princess’s Orthodoxy were supplemented by minute regulations with regard to her worship, her household, even her dress. She might visit a Catholic church as a curiosity—twice; she was to eschew Polish costumes, even her cooks were of Russian selection. In fact, her Court was to be an Orthodox Moskovite oasis in the Lit’uanian desert.102 Alexander found he had sacrificed his domestic independence without obtaining any compensating security for his dominions; the restless Hospodar of Moldavia and the Krimskie Khan continued to harry the Podolian and Galician lands, and the Moskovites were openly aggressive towards the Grand Duke’s subjects. Ivan, indeed, at this period seems to have rated the power of the Yagiellos cheaply, and to have permitted himself a diversion in the affairs of North-western Europe. Whether he had secretly nursed designs against the merchants of the Hansa League, who continued to maintain a flourishing commerce at Novgorod after the civic glories had departed from her, or whether for once his coldly-measured policy was influenced by an unpent passion, the facts scarcely indicate. 1495The spark that roused, or gave plausible ground for, his sudden resentment against the unsuspecting traders was the torture of two Russian subjects at Revel—who were boiled to death for coining false money and otherwise misconducting themselves—coupled with an insult to the Grand Prince. Ivan revenged himself by swooping down on the famous Hanse factory at Novgorod, confiscating all the merchandise therein stored,and seizing the persons of forty-nine merchants of Lubeck, Hamburg, Munster, Dortmund, Revel, Dorpat, etc. By this raid he enriched himself with a sum computed at a million gulden, but the Hansa trade with Novgorod and Pskov was diverted to Revel and the Livlandish towns.103 Skandinavian affairs next engaged the Grand Prince’s attention, and the embarrassments of Sweden offered an opportunity for wiping off old scores with that ancient enemy. Under the administration of the Regent Sture the Swedes had broken away from the Kalmar Union, and refused to acknowledge as their sovereign Johann, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and King of Denmark and Norway; with this monarch Ivan entered into an active alliance, and the bleak uplands and marsh-choked forests of Finland became the scene of an obstinate war. Ivangorod, the newly-built Russian frontier fortress and the Swedish outpost of Viborg were in turn besieged by the belligerents, and the Finns experienced the calamities to which border peoples are particularly liable. Neither side gained any important advantage, and the war was brought to a sudden termination by the election of Johann to the crown of Sweden.

The influence of Byzantine ideas which had permeated the Moskovite Court showed itself in a series of sinister developments, which closely reproduced the palace intrigues for which the Greek capital had been infamous. (1490)By the death of the young Ivan, son of the Grand Prince by his first wife, the heirship in the direct line had devolved upon the former’s infant son, Dimitri; a formidable competitor existed, however, in Vasili, eldest son of Ivan by his second marriage, and herein lay the constituents of a pretty succession dispute, in which of course the two mothers, Elena of Moldavia and Sophie Paleologus, urged with inconvenient insistency the claims of their respective sons. The law of hereditary succession was an exotic plant on Russian soil, and men’s ideas were not yet sufficiently fixed to remove all question of doubt on the subject. For a comparatively newly established Court matters were carried through with remarkable correctness of detail. Plots were discovered—or imagined, tortures extracted confessions, guilty boyarins yielded up their lives on the banks of the river Moskva, Sophie and her son were disgraced, and the child Dimitri solemnly crowned as Ivan’s successor. The latter decision may have been influenced by a desire to “keep in” with the Hospodar Stefan, rather than by any scrupulous regard for hereditary rights, but at least it shows how little the heirship-of-the-Cæsars idea had taken hold of Moskovite minds. 1499Renewed intrigues brought about a reaction, Sophie and her son were restored to the light of the Grand Prince’s countenance, and another batch of executions and imprisonments, among the Dimitri party this time, restored peace and happiness to the domestic circle. Vasili was decorated with the title of Prince of Novgorod and Pskov, and the succession remained for the present a reopened question.

Meanwhile the eternal peace was showing signs of the decay to which such institutions are liable. In August 1499 appeared at Moskva the ambassador of Lit’uania, one Stanislav Gliebovitch, big with grievances against the Grand Prince. Stefan of Moldavia was threatened by the all-devouring Turk; would Ivan unite with the sovereigns of Lit’uania, Poland, and Hungary on his behalf? Why had Ivan, notwithstanding the peace, incited Mengli-Girei to raid the Grand Duke’s territories? And if Alexander conceded to Ivan the title “Sovereign of all Russia,” would the latter promise to renounce all claim on Kiev for himself and his heirs? To the last of these propositions Ivan returned a scornful negative. With regard to the suggested crusade he was ready to give assistance to Stefan when the latter should personally ask for it. The charge concerning Mengli, which could not be denied, was met by counter-recriminations respecting Alexander’s intrigues with the Golden Horde. The irritation felt at Vilna at the uncompromising attitude of the Grand Prince towards the proposals put forward by this mission was not allowed to calm down. Ivan presented on his part a batch of complaints concerning the non-fulfilment of various items in the Princess Elena’s marriage agreement, and the alleged forced conversion of the Grand Duke’s Russian subjects to the Latin faith. The amenities of religion gave the finishing touch to an already overstrained situation. Lit’uania and the Russian provinces included within its political bounds swarmed with an aristocratic population of boyarin-princes, some offshoots of the prolific stock of Rurik, others descendants of Gedimin. The Russian and Orthodox among them naturally inclined towards the rising power of Moskva, while among the Letts were many who bore no affection to the Yagiellos and were disposed rather to cast in their lot with the all-conquering Grand Prince. Even the grandsons of Shemiaka were drawn back to the allegiance which their forbears had deserted; in short, all along the border there was an uprising of princes and voevodas on behalf of the Prince of Moskva.

With the melting of the winter snows both sides prepared to take the field. The Tartars of the Krim steppes turned the noses of their wiry little horses towards the west; those of Kazan pushed along the wooded valley of the Upper Volga to swell the war-bands gathering at Moskva; the Grand Prince’s own horse-carls (with their quaint equipment of sabre, bow and arrows, mace, kisten,104 and whip, and their heavy quilted jerkins) clambered on to their sturdy shaggy-heeled steeds and marshalled themselves under their respective boyarins and captains; the bulbous domes and campaniles of the magnificent-grown city re-echoed the pealing war-notes, and in wood and wold howled S. George’s dogs105 in chorus, in anticipation of the good times coming.

Neither prince commanded his army in person; each in fact was employed in weaving alliances against the other. The main body of the Moskovite troops was under the direction of the voevoda Yakov Zakharievitch; the Letts were generalled by the hetman Konstantin Ostrojhskie. All the advantage of preparedness lay with the Moskovites, who in fact had taken possession of several Lit’uanian places while the Grand Duke was still in the negotiating stage. Alexander awoke from his chafing and peeving and yielding to find that his parent terrible was ensconced on the wrong side of the border, and the detestable Mengli-Girei, who hunted in couple with the Grand Prince, was careering unchecked through Podolia and Galicia; also the interesting champion of Christendom, who loved the Poles no better than he loved the Turks, was preparing to make a hostile incursion upon the same provinces. The Grand Duke on his part made overtures to the Order and dispatched couriers to Shikh-Akhmat, Khan of Astrakhan, and mortal enemy of Mengli.

July 1500

The superiority in warfare which had distinguished the Letts under their early princes seemed to have been lost at this juncture, and the first collision between the opposing forces—on the plain of Mit’kov, by the banks of the Vedrosh—resulted in a complete victory for the Moskovites.106 The hetman and many Lit’uanian pans were taken prisoners, and there was joy in the bulb-topped city. The position of the long-time enemies was exactly reversed; the Moskovite and Tartar armies swept all before them in the open country, but the fortified citadels of Polotzk, Smolensk, Vitebsk, and other border strongholds resisted the attacks of the invaders, as the Kreml had defied those of Olgerd and Vitovt in bygone days. In the south-west the Krim hordes, led by Mengli-Girei’s son, burnt Kremenetz, Lublin, and many other towns and gorodoks. Unable to make a respectable resistance to his enemies on either side, Alexander engaged himself in a feverish activity of negotiation. In January 1501 ambassadors from Ladislav of Hungary-Bohemia and Albert of Poland journeyed to Moskva on a fruitless errand of mediation. Urgent remonstrances were dispatched from Vilna to Moldavia, begging the Athlete du Christ to be athletic in any other direction than that of the grand duchy, while anxious endeavours were made to enlist the aid of the German Order against the victorious Moskovite. The office of Land-Master of Livland was filled at this moment by the able warrior Walter von Plettenberg, and though crippled in power and dominion since the disastrous field of Tannenberg, the knights were still a formidable fighting force. Little reason had they to love the Yagiellos, but at this moment Teutonic feeling was more inflamed against the phœnix-growth of the new Russian power that had arisen from the ashes of Mongol devastation. The Order saw the hand that armed Pskov and Izborsk against its territories; the Hansa merchants thought of the violence done to their trading rights at Novgorod; and the empire felt jealous of the rival sovereignty, owning neither Pope nor Kaiser, which threatened to make the late Emperor’s fatuous monogram more illusory than ever.107 Taking advantage of this latent hostility, Alexander was able to bring about an offensive alliance between himself and the Order, into which also entered the sovereign ecclesiastics of Riga, Revel, Dorpat, Oesel, and Pilten. This new phase of the struggle was heralded by the arrest of 200 Russian merchants at Dorpat, a belated reprisal for the affair of Novgorod. Ivan dispatched towards the Livlandish border an army of Moskovites and Pskovians, computed to have been 40,000 strong. Against this array von Plettenberg could only bring into action, at a locality 10 verstas from Izborsk, a force of 4000 knights and some irregulars. The Germans, however, were well supplied with artillery, and the noise, perhaps more than the execution, of their fire-belching implements of war caused a panic among the Russians, who fled in confusion. And here it may be remarked that the Russian warriors of that period were somewhat liable to these sudden stampedes; as a contemporary observer neatly remarks, “They make the first charge on the enemy with great impetuosity, but their valour does not seem to hold out very long, for they seem as if they would give a hint to the enemy, as much as to say, ‘if you do not flee, we must.’”108 Without straining a point it may be assumed that this liability to panic was in some measure due to the superstitious coddling of their religion, which depicted angels and saints and Bogoroditzas as ready, on suitable occasions, to interfere with effect on their behalf; consequently if the enemy stood his ground for any length of time the disheartened warriors experienced an uneasy lama sabacthani feeling that all was not well with them in the desired quarter, and demoralisation ensued. The stubbornly contested field of Koulikovo scarcely furnishes the exception which “proves the rule,” as on that occasion the Metropolitan had announced that victory would only be attained after much fighting.109

This ignominious collapse left Pskov to receive the full fury of von Plettenberg’s attack, and the citizens in desperation prepared to make a more creditable stand behind their walls than they had done in the field. But the threatened blow did not fall; a pestilence of some severity broke out among the “iron men,” and the army of the Order was obliged to return to quarters.

Another change came over the complexion of affairs. John-Albert had terminated an inglorious reign by a fit of apoplexy in the month of June, and on the 23rd October the Polish Diet elected Alexander to the vacant throne. This event did not strengthen his hands as much as might have been expected. The Polish pans and nobles were a turbulent self-seeking class, and were not likely to rush recklessly to the defence of Lit’uania while their new monarch stayed quietly at home and tampered possibly with their precious privileges. Ivan on the other hand, undeterred by the reverse near Izborsk, prosecuted the war with persistent energy. Employing the best possible method for heartening his troops against the Teutons, he sent them ravaging into Livland on the heels of the retreating army. Another victory was obtained over the Lit’uanians, while Shikh-Akhmet, who had made a diversion against Mengli on the east, was chased out of his dominions by the allied Moskovite and Krim forces. Thus darkly for Alexander closed the year 1501. Ivan had maintained his ground in every direction, and had inflicted grievous harm on the allies of Poland. His Russian and Tartar cavalry had raided unchecked round Neuhausen, Marienburg, and the cathedral lands of Dorpat, the autumn floods and consequent state of the roads preventing the heavy-armed knights and their heavier artillery from taking the field. With the first frosts the invaders withdrew across the border, followed by the indefatigable Land-Master, who at last was able to abandon his enforced inaction. His hastily gathered forces were, however, outmatched by the superior numbers of the marauders, and in an encounter at Helmet (25th November) the Germans were beaten back and 300 of the episcopal troops of Dorpat left upon the field.110

The war dragged on throughout the early months of the new year; a waiting game obviously suited Ivan’s plans and there was none to force his hand. The dread of Russian-Tartar raids made the Livlander prelates and burggreves chary of sending off their lanzknechts to the support of the Land-Master, and von Plettenberg was for a long time unable either to clear his borders of the freebooting bands, or to carry the hostilities into the enemy’s country. From Alexander came no help, only couriers with promises. The King was prodigal with his messengers and tireless in sketching plans of campaign for himself and his allies; the only detail which he allowed himself to neglect was the carrying out of his share of the preconcerted action. This omission placed his friends in awkward predicaments; Shikh-Akhmet was a miserable fugitive, von Plettenberg found himself facing the whole Moskovite fighting strength, except that detachment which was leisurely besieging Smolensk. Autumn witnessed a quickening of the situation. Still trusting to Alexander’s fly-blown promises, the Land-Master assumed the aggressive and trained his ponderous artillery against the walls of Pskov. The burghers saw their battlements and ramparts crumble away beneath the thundering cannonade of the mighty siege-pieces, and day by day weaker grew the defences which divided them from their bitterest enemies. But while no Polish troops put in an appearance, the hearts of the besieged were gladdened by the sight of the tossing manes of thousands of Tartar horses and the conical head-dress of thousands of Ivan’s warriors. The advancing Russian host was large enough to smother the slender following of von Plettenberg, but the iron-sheathed German knights and footmen were capable of offering a stout resistance to the arrows and even the trenchant sabres of their opponents. The Land-Master withdrew his force to the shores of the Smolina Lake, where, on the day of the Exaltation of the Cross (14th September) the Black Cross warriors commenced one of the most brilliant battles of their crowded annals. For three days they held the field against the stubborn attacks of the whirlwind-sweeping squadrons; “with blood and dust,” says an old chronicle, “both steed and rider were bedecked, so that none might tell the colour”; and when finally exhaustion and discouragement deterred the Russians from renewing the attack, the Iron men were able to claim the victory. But the willing horse had worked itself to a standstill; von Plettenberg was obliged to lead his scarred and weary followers homeward, and if the Moskovites were too crippled to re-commence their raids, at the same time the Livlanders were forced out of Russian territory.111

Meanwhile in another direction had fallen a long impending blow, no further to be averted by the eloquent epistles of the Complete Letter-writer. The redoubtable Hospodar, nursing against Poland the remembrance of recent wrongs, and profiting by her present embarrassments, burst suddenly into Galicia, and gleaned where the Tartars had harvested. Several towns fell with little resistance into his hands, and were annexed to his Moldavian dominions. Not in accord with Ivan was this invasion undertaken, for the question of the succession to the Moskovite throne had caused a rupture between the two princes. Mengli-Girei was, in fact, the pivot on which the anti-Polish alliance turned; the Grand Prince was not on good terms with the Hospodar, and the latter could not be considered as otherwise than hostile to the Turkish Sultan, but Mengli was the friend and ally of all three. The winter of 1502-3 found matters in much the same state as they had been twelve months earlier. The Grand Prince’s troops had been obliged to raise the siege of Smolensk, but they still retained the lands they had seized at the commencement of the war, still held their own in the Baltic districts. A candidate for the blessings traditionally allotted to the peacemaker now appeared in the person of the Pontiff, who sought to bring about an accommodation between the contending sovereigns. The splendid profligate who occupied the throne of S. Peter was not actuated by a constitutional or professional abhorrence of bloodshed—under his pontificate the Eternal City had been a shambles rather than a sheepfold,—but for the present the smiting of the Infidel seemed to him more urgent than the harrying of the Orthodox, especially as the Orthodox seemed well able to retaliate. With an uncrushed and unappeased enemy on their flank, it was clearly impossible for the kings of Hungary and Poland and the Teutonic Order to join in the crusade by which the Borgia fondly hoped to sweep the Ottoman from Europe. Hence the apparition of this very soiled dove masquerading with an olive branch in its crimson beak.

Ivan was undoubtedly master of the situation, and was able practically to dictate his own terms, which he proceeded to do notwithstanding the clamour of the crowd of envoys and ambassadors—Papal, Hungarian, Polish, Teutonic, and Livlandish—who had gathered at Moskva. In the first place, the Grand Prince would not hear of an “eternal peace,” but limited the negotiations to the arrangement of a six-years’ truce (25th March 1503 to 25th March 1509). With some slight remissions the Moskovites retained the lands they had laid hands on during the war; Tchernigov, Starodoub, Poutivl, Novgorod-Severski, Briansk, Toropetz, and others, in all nineteen towns, seventy districts, twenty-two gorodoks (townlets), and thirteen villages, were ceded by Alexander to his uncomfortable father-in-law.112 The Livlanders, who had played so important a part in the war, were left as much in the lurch by their graceless ally during the negotiations as they had been throughout the fighting, and the conditions they were obliged to accept to participate in the truce were far from favourable. The Russian merchants were to be liberated from their prisons at Dorpat; the bishop of that see was to resume payment of an old tribute of wax and honey to the Grand Prince, and a Greek church was to be erected in the town. The Livlander prisoners were not released by the Moskovites, and against these concessions and disadvantages could only be set a clause which restricted the fishery rights of the Pskovians in Lake Peipus to the east shore.113

The Khan of the Krim steppes was not directly included in the truce, though Alexander innocently supposed that Ivan’s ally was implicated in the general pacification; the Grand Prince privately took care to prevent Mengli-Girei from sharing this impression, and the Tartar hordes continued to disquiet the Lit’uanian provinces.

Short though the term of the truce was, it outlasted the two principals who within a few months of each other attained that eternal peace which in life they had been unable to compact for. Ivan, in fact, had but obtained a breathing space in which to arrange the affairs of his family and gosoudarstvo before closing his long reign of forty-three years. While the war was yet being waged he had definitely broken with the Moldavian or Dimitri party, knowing well that Stefan could neither relinquish nor Alexander forgive the loss of the towns which the former had wrested from Poland, and hence that no imprudence on his part would unite his two family connections against him. Dimitri had been stripped of his prospective title and guarded as a prisoner in his palace, while the names of himself and his mother were struck off from the prayers of the Church. This step was followed by the proclamation of Vasili as the Grand Prince’s successor. The death of Elena in 1505, and of the Hospodar a year earlier, left the youth Dimitri in a forlorn and friendless condition.

In the winter of 1505 (27th October) Ivan ended his long and remarkable reign. The sovereignty which he relinquished was scarcely to be recognised as the same which had been bequeathed to him by Vasili the Darkened. From a struggling principality it had shot up into a monarchy, struggling still, but for empire, not existence. The terrible humiliating Mongol yoke, which had been such a bitter reality when Ivan’s world was young, seemed now the almost forgotten bogey of a dimly-remembered past. A revolt of the Khan of Kazan, the last event of the old man’s reign, served only to emphasise the fact of the altered relations between Tartar and Moskovite. Perm, the regions of the Petchora, and the vast boreal territories which had belonged to the republic of Novgorod more than doubled the extent of the Grand-principality, which had been further swelled by the absorption of Tver and Viatka, and the conquest from Lit’uania of the Russian lands east of the Sojh. The standing and importance of the Moskovite State likewise had kept pace with its expansion during this long reign, and the policy of the Kreml was a matter of interest not merely to Sarai and Riazan and Vilna as heretofore, but to Buda, Constantinople, Wien, and Rome, to Krakow, Kjöbenhavn, Upsal, and Koenigsberg.

Such was the inheritance which Vasili III. Ivanovitch received from the cold hands of his father; from his mother (who had died in 1503) he derived the reflected glory which centred in the last of the Paleologi. Embarrassments too were not wanting to disquiet the opening days of the new reign. Besides the revolt of Kazan, the suspended hostilities with Poland and Livland threatened the future repose of the State. The alert and provident von Plettenberg was husbanding his resources against a renewal of the war, and was, moreover, receiving considerable Teutonic and Catholic support. A loan had been subscribed on his behalf by the cities of Lubeck and Rostock, and the Pope had diverted to his use a share of the receipts accruing from the sale of indulgences—an ingenious device which at the same time equipped the gentlemen of God against the heretics, admitted more souls to swell the triumph-song of Heaven, and, incidentally, enriched the coffers of Holy Church. Financial aid was also forthcoming from Maximilian, who granted to the Land-Master a three years’ privilege to exact tolls from all ships entering Livlandish harbours (1505).114 The policy of the Emperor at this moment halted between an angry suspicion of the house of Yagiello, which drew him towards a good understanding with Moskva, and a jealous solicitude for the German colony on the Baltic, which pulled him in the opposite direction. Alexander, relieved of the nightmare incubus of his terrible father-in-law, lost no time in resuming his plaints and proposals to the new sovereign. Would Vasili restore the filched territories to Lit’uania and peace to the two countries? To which the Grand Prince replied that he was willing to conclude peace on the condition that Kiev and Smolensk were ceded to him. Clearly the time was not yet ripe for negotiation.

In August of 1506 the King of Poland followed his great rival to the grave, cheered on his death-bed by the rare news of a victory over the Krim Tartars. Sigismund, another son of Kazimir, obtained the double election to the Polish-Lit’uanian throne.

Meanwhile Vasili was engaged in dealing with the defiant Kazanese, not with conspicuous success. The Moskovite army, led by the Grand Prince’s brother Dimitri, after having in turn been repulsed by the enemy and victorious in a second attack, was finally taken by surprise and irremediably routed, abandoning in its flight several cannon. Preparations for another expedition were countermanded owing to the submission of the Khan. This pacification was of timely service to Moskva, for relations with Poland became suddenly strained and the truce ceased to be effective. The firefly who led both parties into the uncertain issue of open hostility was a Polish pan, Mikhail Glinski, celebrated for his recent victory over the Krim horde. Of Tartar extraction and German education, this restless spirit had attached himself to the Lit’uanian Court, where his success, or the ambition ensuing therefrom, gained him many enemies. The accession of the new king brought matters to a head, and Glinski demanded justice between himself and his detractors. Sigismund procrastinated, and the aggrieved noble went over, with all his followers, to the service of Moskva, plundering and slaying as he went. Vasili took the interesting waif under his protection, and the border regions were soon well alight with the fires of war. Russian and Tartar troops followed the beck of the stark strife-kindling free-lance, who had the satisfaction of surprising in his palace near Grodno the pan Jabrzczinski, the foremost among his calumniators. “Have I found thee, O mine enemy?” With savage glee he inflicted the death penalty on his foe, and went on his way exulting. 1508In the month of June Sigismund appeared on the scene with a formidable army and chased the invaders out of his territory. The result, however, of the whole affair was favourable to Moskva; a peace was effected between the two countries which confirmed Vasili in the possession of his father’s conquests and recognised Glinski and other disaffected Lit’uanians as Moskovite subjects. The Order, as usual, was left to take care of itself, and von Plettenberg saw himself with some alarm standing single-handed against Moskva, with only a few more months of the truce to run. Vasili, however, raised no difficulty in the way of a good understanding with the Germanic knights and Livlandish prelates, whom it was to his interest to detach from the Polish alliance, and a fourteen years’ peace was concluded on mutually satisfactory grounds. 1509Thus the Grand Prince obtained a respite from the exhausting neighbour-war, which gave him the opportunity to resume the great work of consolidation within his own frontiers.

Delivered by the fourteen years’ peace from the state of insecurity which had been almost normal with them for nearly a century, the Pskovians might possibly have looked forward to a season of tranquillity and prosperity. Tranquillity they were certainly to have, but it was to be the repose of decay, not of belaurelled affluence. The Grand Prince, also delivered from the embarrassments of a foreign war, revived the designs which had long been harboured at Moskva against the independence of Pskov. Betaking himself and his Court to Novgorod in the autumn of 1509, he summoned thither the posadniks, boyarins, and notables of the city on the Peipus to give an account of their grievances against the Governor, Ivan Obolenski, who had rendered himself unpopular. Scarcely had the deputed citizens arrived than they were arrested and shut up in the famous archiepiscopal palace, which, after having furnished a prison for many a subject-ridden kniaz, now became a place of detention for those who were under the sovereign’s displeasure. Without a struggle Pskov yielded to the fate of her “elder sister” Novgorod. 1510The vetché was dissolved and the city bell borne down from the Troitza tower. Vasili was faithfully moving in the path marked out by his predecessors.

The domestic affairs of the Grand Prince’s Court were tinged, as indeed was the whole Moskovite life at this period, with a strong Asiatic leaven. Already in his father’s lifetime a bride had been chosen for him by a method which recalls the wooing of a sultan or a rajah rather than that of a Christian prince; 1500 of the most eligible damsels of the realm were gathered together for inspection, and their number gradually weeded down to ten. These were medically examined, and a “selection of the fittest” was made in the person of Solomonia, daughter of a boyarin of no very high standing. By an irony of circumstance this carefully picked consort disappointed the expectations which had been formed of her, and the prophecies and flatteries which lie in wait for the birth of a royal heir were baulked of their delivery. The absence of a successor in the direct line did not ameliorate the lot of the Grand Prince’s nephew, Dimitri. Since the accession of the new monarch the seclusion of the possible rival had become a close imprisonment, and his death was not unduly postponed. In Oriental State affairs, as indeed in those of Western Europe during the Middle Ages, it is a safe axiom that the inconvenient die young. Dimitri died. Unavoidably, the chronicles of the day suggested foul play, and he would not have been the only Russian Prince of the Blood who was conducted by an expeditious “royal road” through this vale of tears.

Owing to the renewed importance of Russia in the affairs of Christendom, and the observations handed down to posterity by the ambassadors and commercial agents who penetrated into the bleak and reputedly barbarous regions of “Muscouvie,” the appearance and life of the isolated capital in this century stands out with a hitherto unwonted clearness. Hemmed in on all sides with thick forests, from whence, down the Moskva river, was floated the timber of which the houses were mostly built, the city stood in a setting of open meadows, swarming with hares and roebuck, which were reserved for the Grand Prince’s exclusive hunting. Fields and gardens and monasteries straggled so far into the outskirts (or slobodas) that it was difficult to tell exactly where the line of demarcation lay; for besides the Moskva on one side, and the ditch-like Neglina on the other, there were “no useful defences in the shape of walls, fosses, or ramparts.”115 The Kreml, or citadel, and in time the inner quarters of the town, were however strongly fortified. As is frequently the case in cities with Oriental characteristics, squalor and magnificence were strangely jumbled together. Mean huts and booths were interspersed with cupola-crowned churches and public buildings, which, designed for the most part by Byzantine and Italian artists, presented a quaint and not unpleasing confusion of eastern and western architecture. Despite the “forty times forty churches” which were springing up all over Moskva, the cleanliness which is supposed to accompany godliness was conspicuously absent. “This city” wrote the Imperial ambassador at the Court of Vasili, “is so broad and spacious, and so very dirty, that bridges have been constructed here and there in the highways and streets and in the other more distinguished parts.” Here, then, in this straggling wood-built metropolis, this germ-cell of the Russian Empire, dwelt the Grand Princes who were slowly evolving into Great White Tzars; amid a surrounding of cathedrals and mud, holy ikons and squalid hovels, dedicated gates and buildings topped with quaint bulbous domes and cupolas, gold, blue, and silver, moved the rulers of the Moskovite state. Hedged round with dreary ceremonial, waited on by courtiers and chamberlains and servants, clad in long flowing robes that smacked more of Bagdad than of Rome or Wien, the sovereigns of “all Russia” dwelt in a world apart from outside influences, and could only measure things by their own standard.

As in a rookery at the approach of nesting-time certain early birds may be seen quietly pursuing their constructive operations amid the turmoil and racket of their less provident fellows, so all over Europe at this epoch, amid the anarchy which attended the decay of feudalism, the work of building was in full progress. The Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns in the Empire, the Valois in France, the Tudors in England, the Moskovite princes in Russia, were piecing together the foundations of what were eventually to be the five Great Powers of a transformed Europe. In the early years of the sixteenth century it seemed not improbable that the Yagiellos would create, out of the chaos of Polish, Magyar, Czech, Lettish, and West Russian lands, a personal dominion which might crystallise into an empire. But as in a rookery, to return to the simile, certain unfortunately situated nests suffer from the plundering attentions of competing builders, so the house of Yagiello was doomed to see its carefully collected materials snatched away in the predatory acquisitions of the Austrian archdukes, the Markgrafs of Brandenburg, and the Grand Princes of Moskva. And not only had the kings of Poland fallen among thieves, as it were, but their hands were more or less tied by their dependence on the most selfish of all governing classes, an anti-monarchical aristocracy.

Between Poles and Moskovites neither truce nor treaty could long be effective, and war soon broke out anew; Sigismund had at last succeeded in detaching the Krim Tartars from the Russian alliance, or, more probably, the nomads had followed their own lawless inclinations in bursting upon the rich cornlands of Riazan, “more fertile than all the other provinces of Russia.” The event served as a pretext for Vasili to march his troops into Lit’uania and besiege Smolensk. The moment was favourable for a rupture. The King of Hungary was tottering towards his grave, and two rival parties were more than anxious to constitute themselves guardians of his youthful son and his two kingdoms. In this struggle Sigismund found himself opposed to the Austrian Archduke, Maximilian, head of the Holy Roman Empire; more formidable, perhaps, in the former capacity than in the latter. Besides this embarrassment, the relations between Poland and the military Order were, to say the least, strained. The election (in 1511) of Albrecht, of the House of Brandenburg, to the office of Grand-Master, had given new vigour to the knights, who, since the disaster of Tannenberg, had been chafing against the Polish suzerainty. With the support, moral and material, of the Emperor, the Markgraf Joachim, and the Grand Prince of Moskva, it seemed possible that this over-lordship might be thrown off. Dec. 1512Under these circumstances Vasili set forth in mid-winter, attended by his brothers Urii and Dimitri, by Mikhail Glinski, and numerous boyarins, and trailing after him in sledges his unwieldy artillery, served by German gunners, to undertake the siege of Smolensk. From contemporary accounts this important border city does not appear to have been very elaborately fortified, but its defences were sufficiently strong to withstand the Grand Prince’s attack, and in March the invading army returned to Moskva to avoid the dangers and discomforts of the approaching thaw. In the summer of the same year Vasili reiterated the attempt with no better result; the Russians at this time were not particularly skilled in the arts of sieges. The question of the Hungarian regency and eventual succession still agitated the Courts of Wien and Krakow, although Ladislas had not yet joined the “quiet people,” and in February 1514 an Imperial ambassador appeared at Moskva for the purpose of clinching a treaty between Maximilian and Vasili. The reciprocal agreement which was drawn up between the two parties is important from the fact that, in the German copy, the word “Tzar” was rendered “Kaiser”—the first occasion on which the imperial title was applied to the Russian monarch.116 1514Three months later Vasili’s lieutenants at Novgorod concluded a treaty with the Hanseatic League, by which commercial relations were restored to their old footing. In June of the same year the importunate Grand Prince resumed his attack upon Smolensk, and reaped the reward of perseverance. The King of Poland, who had made no effort to succour the beleaguered city, attributed its loss to treachery, and vented his chagrin on the governor, a Bohemian named Solohoub, whom he put to death. The Russian accounts give the credit of the victory to the Moskovite artillery—which ought certainly to have got its range by that time—and to the pacific overtures of the citizens, headed by their Bishop Varsonof.117

The loss of this important place roused Sigismund to a more aggressive line of action than he had hitherto taken. Konstantin Ostrojhski was despatched against the enemy with a force of 30,000 men; a force which, though numerically far weaker than that at the disposal of Vasili, was better equipped, better provided with artillery, and, above all, better generalled. In the latter department the Moskovites sustained a severe loss by the defection of the unstable Glinski, who, disappointed in his expectation of obtaining the government of Smolensk in return for services rendered, made arrangements for deserting to the cause of his former sovereign. Sigismund was not loth to receive the strayed lamb back to his fold, but a misfortune, in the shape of a well-mounted band of the Grand Prince’s troops, overtook the transient pan before he had reached the Polish lines. Vasili rewarded his treason with rigorous imprisonment, deeming, perhaps, that he would be more valuable as a hostage than as a corpse. The two armies now faced each other from either bank of the Dniepr; the Russians were about 80,000 strong, and had, in addition to superiority of numbers, the further advantage of being on the defensive. This advantage, however, was thrown away by the inaction of the Moskovite voevodas, who stood helplessly looking on while Ostrojhski threw a bridge across the river and safely brought over his heavy artillery. 1514On the 8th September118 at Orsha, on the left bank of the Dniepr, was fought a terrific battle, in which the hordes of Moskovy went down in hopeless rout before the well-armed knights and well-served artillery of the Polish-Lit’uanian army. Allowing for exaggeration, the losses on the side of the vanquished were enormous. Sigismund, in the exultant letters he despatched to Pope, Cardinals, and the Doge of Venice, announcing the victory, estimates the Moskovite slain at 30,000, and particularises a large number of distinguished prisoners.119 The disaster to the Moskovite arms roused the spirit of the Polish faction within the walls of Smolensk. The time-serving Bishop, who had been largely instrumental in the surrender of the town to Vasili, flattered himself that he might again dispose of its destinies, and, with the connivance of several boyarins, sent an invitation to the Polish general to come and possess himself of the place. The Moskovite voevoda, a member of the princely family of Shouyskie, was not, however, a quantité négligeable in the city, and the wily ecclesiastic’s schemes were sharply checkmated. When Ostrojhski came before the gates of Smolensk he might mark a grisly row of corpses strung up on the battlements, the centre of interest for flapping bands of crows and daws; these were the bodies of his luckless co-operators, who had been seized and executed by order of the governor, with the exception of Varsonof, whose equally guilty but more holy person was secured in a prison. The Polish hetman, thwarted in his hopes of peaceable possession, was likewise unsuccessful in an attempt to carry the city by assault, and the brilliant victory of Orsha had no more substantial result than the re-occupation of a few border posts.

1515

The death of Mengli-Girei and the accession of his son Makhmet to the Krim khanate, scarcely affected the relations between Moskva and the Horde, for the new Khan’s influence had for some time been dominant. Neither Vasili nor Sigismund could count on the support or even the neutrality of the Tartar chief, who took advantage of the hostility between Lit’uania and Moskva to ravage the lands of each with perfect impartiality. Another shift in the political balance deprived the Grand Prince of a more exalted though equally unreliable ally; a new family compact had been patched up between the Kaiser and the Kings of Hungary and Poland, and Maximilian was now as anxious to compose the quarrel in the east as he previously had been to inflame it. The continued successes of the Turks could not fail to inspire uneasiness in a prince who was scheming to acquire a preponderance in the lands of south-east Europe, and the Emperor wished to engineer a powerful alliance, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Polish, against this undesirable neighbour. The idea was obviously unworkable as long as Moskva hung threateningly on the Polish flank, hence the solicitude which the Habsburg felt to bring about a peace between the two Slav powers. For this end an Imperial ambassador, one Sigismund, Baron von Herberstein, left Germany at the end of 1516 on a mission of mediation to the Moskovite Court, where he arrived in April the following year, after a heroic journey over innumerable lakes and marshes “slippery with snow and ice,” over frozen rivers, and, towards the end, across ice rendered rotten by melting snow-water; much of the “way” lying too through a country desolated by skirmishing bands of Poles and Russians. 1517The chances of successful negotiation were not improved by an autumn campaign which Ostrojhski carried on, with disastrous result, in the district of Pskov; the small burg of Opotchka, valiantly defended by Vasili Saltikov, held out for fifteen days against the vigorous assaults of Polish, Lit’uanian, and Bohemian troops, and was eventually relieved, on the 18th October, by two converging Moskovite forces which drove Ostrojhski off the field. Notwithstanding this side-play the Polish envoys had joined Herberstein at Moskva, and were seeking to arrange a peaceable understanding between the Grand Prince and their master. Each side put forward absurdly unwarranted claims—Vasili, for instance, stipulated for the cession to Moskovy of Kiev and Polotzk, among other places, while the Poles demanded, in addition to Smolensk, a half-share of Novgorod, Pskov, and Tver. The real bone of contention was Smolensk, and as neither party would bate their pretension to the possession of that city, the negotiations came to an abortive end in November.

If Herberstein’s efforts for the termination of the war were not crowned with success, his long and arduous journey was in other respects by no means barren of result. It is mainly owing to observations made on this, and on a subsequent embassy, that a picture has been preserved of the life at that gloomy Court, which was partly Asiatic, partly Archaic European.120 In the Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, Maximilian’s ambassador set forth to the western world his experiences in the remote and desolate region beginning to be known as Muscouvie, much as an explorer in a more travelled age would retail the account of his wanderings in Central Africa. The Moskva of Vasili Ivanovitch was a curious compound of primitive Russian squalor, Byzantine splendour, the rude hospitality of feudal Christendom, and the dark and tortuous restraint of an Oriental capital. The state banquets, or rather the solemn and awful occasions when the Grand Prince invited the foreign ambassadors to dine with him and his dvoryanins (courtiers), are good examples of the conglomerate of ceremonial, simplicity, and patriarchal domesticity which obtained at the Moskovite Court. The Grand Prince and his brothers with the highest boyarins sat together at one table; at another, opposite, sat the distinguished guests of the evening, while round the hall were ranged tables for the remainder of the company. Bread was solemnly served out from the Prince’s table to such as he wished to compliment, and the feast invariably opened with the consumption of brandy and roast swans. The dishes were borne in and out by servants sumptuously attired, and in addition to brandy, mead, beer, and Greek wines were served in goblets which, like all the other appointments, were of pure gold. In such ponderous dissipations, in occasional coursing matches in his hare preserves round Moskva, in watching his foreign gunners exercise their skill with the heavy uncouth field-pieces at stated periods, and of course in elaborate religious ceremonies, did the Gosoudar of all Russia fill up the round of his private existence. The coursing seems to have been as cautious and “safe” as the Moskovite state-policy. “When the hare shows herself, three, four, five, or more dogs are slipped, and set after her on all sides; and when she is taken, there is loud hallooing, as if they had taken a large wild beast.” “Moreover, about an hundred men stood in long array, one half of whom were dressed in black, and the other in yellow; not far from them stood all the other horsemen, to prevent the hares from running through and escaping.”121

While the Imperial negotiations had been dragging out their span of stately uselessness, Vasili had effected a diplomatic stroke on his own account. The Grand Master Albrecht, despairing of receiving adequate support from the Emperor, in his present frame of mind, against the aggressive policy of the Polish monarch, turned his eyes towards the schismatic heretic who was playing so large a part in the affairs of east Europe. The common bond of hostility to Sigismund drew together the interests alike of Grand Prince and Grand-Master, and the plenipotentiary of the latter, Dietrich von Schönberg, was able to conclude a close alliance between Moskva and the Prussian section of the Order. 1517Various causes contributed to delay the threatened struggle between Sigismund and the knights; chief of which was the restraining influence of the Kaiser, whose narrow family policy did not at present lend itself to a war between Teuton and Pole for the possession of the Baltic provinces. The death of Maximilian, however (January 1519), removed this obstacle, and the outbreak of hostilities was only postponed by a sudden and victorious incursion of the Krim Tartars upon Podolia and Lit’uania. The respite enabled Albrecht to enlist fresh support in men, money, and material, from several quarters. Von Plettenberg raised on his behalf a considerable number of troops and a heavy contribution to the war-chest; the King of Denmark, the Elector of Brandenburg, and the Grand Prince of Moskva helped to swell the resources of the venturesome Grand-Master, while on the other hand Sigismund knitted together all the available military force of the Yagiellos to crush the insubordination of this ambitious vassal. In the last days of the year 1519 broke “the long-threatened wild war-storm over the Order-lands.”122 The Polish monarch marched against the presumptuous warrior monks with an army “twelve miles wide,” swelled by Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian contingents. Against this formidable array the undaunted Hohenzollern—worthy scion of an illustrious House—rode forth “on New Year’s Day, a dark stormy winter’s day,” with all the following he could muster. 1520A wild and devastating war ensued, in which whole provinces were cruelly wasted, and the skill and courage of the Order knights were pitted in unequal struggle against the overwhelming might of Poland. In the open country and in the villages and unprotected towns the invaders wrought havoc unchecked, but in the fortified strongholds the Teutons made desperate resistance. Reinforcements from Denmark helped the Grand-Master to put a better complexion on the struggle; the beleaguered garrisons of Balga and Braunsberg held out stoutly, and the Order lanzknechts were able to break into Mazovia, and requite on that province the gruesome savageries which had made a desert of the bishopric of Pomesania. At this juncture Vasili undoubtedly threw away the opportunity of his lifetime. Since the breakdown of the negotiations with Poland, his troops had waged a fitful border war with varying success. (1518)The neighbourhood of Polotzk had been laid waste, but an attack on that town had failed; Moskovite armies had penetrated as far as Vilna, and hunted the Lit’uanian forces before them. (1519)Now, however, when Sigismund was experiencing an increased difficulty in coping with the opposition of the Grand-master, and dreading moreover an attack from some of the German princes, Vasili, instead of leading an army into Samogitia, concluded with his hard-pressed adversary a six months’ truce. 1520The following year a “Waffenstillstand” for four years was arranged between the German Order and the Poles, while at the same time Moskovy was drawn aside from the western war by a recurrence of the troubles with Kazan, which indeed wore a serious aspect. The Krimskie Khan, Makhmet, had displaced the Russian vassal of the Volga Horde, and established in his stead his own brother, Saip-Girei. This defiant action was followed up by an invasion of the grand principality by the Krim Khan, who crossed the Oka and defeated a hastily gathered Moskovite force under kniaz Dimitri Bielski and the Grand Prince’s brother, Andrei. The victorious Tartars were reinforced by the Kazanese, led by their new Khan, and the combined host marched upon Moskva, burning and plundering in wild unholy triumph which recalled the fearful days of the Mongol mastery. Vasili “the courageous” fled before the approaching storm. An unkind report was afterwards circulated to the effect that he hid himself under a haystack.123 Such an accusation is not to be accepted lightly, though the Russians of that period were not given to poking fun at their sovereign. Possibly the account of Moskovite panic and German staunchness which Herberstein sets forth in his commentary is not altogether uncoloured by national prejudice. One Nikolas, a native of Spire, was placed in command of the Kreml artillery and made the necessary dispositions for withstanding a siege, but the crowds of burgers and countryfolk who had rushed into that sanctuary would have rendered a protracted defence impossible. Threatened with an outbreak of pestilence at any moment—the time was midsummer and the place Moskva—the besieged were glad to buy off the Tartars with the promise of tribute from the Grand Prince to the Krim Khan; a promise which was unauthorised and need not be adhered to. The invaders withdrew, bearing with them captives computed at the almost incredible number of 800,000. A treacherous attempt upon Riazan was foiled by the alertness of another German, “one Johann Jordan, an artilleryman ... who came from the Innthal.”124 With the receding of the Tartar waters back came the affrighted hares to their feeding-grounds around Moskva, and back came Vasili Ivanovitch to his palpitating capital, to deal out judgment upon those responsible for the disaster on the Oka. A somewhat delicate matter. The kniaz Bielski had no doubt mismanaged the whole affair, but on the other hand the Grand Prince’s brother had been the first to yield to the homing instinct which sometimes asserts itself on the field of battle. Under the circumstances the only thing to do was to fasten the blame upon one who, if less responsible, was also of less exalted position, and a noble who had run a good second to Andrei Ivanovitch was accordingly thrown into prison. The matter of the haystack does not appear to have been gone into.

1522

During the greater part of the following year the Moskovite army remained in camp at Kolomna, awaiting a fresh attack from the Krimskie, who, however, remained within the shelter of their wide-stretching steppes. Negotiations were going on at the same time with Poland, and in December a truce of five years was effected, which left Smolensk still in the hands of the Grand Prince.

The strife between Poland and the Order now entered upon a new development of great historical importance. The Roman Papacy, ever glowering at the irruption of the Faithful (or the Infidel, according to Christian label), into the domains of Christendom, sought to raise enthusiasm and money among the piously disposed princes and people of the Empire and neighbouring lands, in order to float a crusade against the Ottomans. Among the expedients for obtaining the latter commodity which met with the approval of Christ’s Vicegerent, was the barter of indulgences, conducted in such wholesale manner that none but the very poor, who could not afford luxuries, were excluded from the attainment of eternal glory. Adversity and competition have an unmistakably broadening effect, and the sixteenth-century camel went through the eye of the once exclusive needle with absolute comfort, and took all its relations, dead and living, with it if so minded. The enterprising Pontiff, however, experienced the bitter perversion of fate which too often mocks the best directed efforts; not only did the traffic in souls fail in its original purpose of financing a crusade, but its injudicious prosecution among the cities of Northern Germany, where men had grown somewhat doubtful of the accumulated truths of the Church, resulted in the springing up of a new enemy, more formidable even than Islam. Without going into the dogmatical issues involved in the agitation which sprang out of the original “monks’ quarrel,” it is necessary to note that the “Reformation” owed much of its success to the secularising theories which it put forward, and which exercised a fascinating influence upon the princes and petty sovereigns of the Empire. The Houses of Wettin and Hohenzollern especially, lent favourable ear to the new doctrines, and the Grand-Master Albrecht, while roaming Germany in search of possible assistance against his ever imminent enemy, came in contact with the leaders of the anti-Catholic movement, from whom he imbibed principles which he immediately proceeded to put into practice.125 The fundamental stumbling-block to a composition with Poland was the question of homage insisted on by Sigismund as due from the Grand-Master of the Order. Albrecht had made gigantic efforts to resist this obligation, and to preserve the independence of his office, but he now saw a way by which both his own ambitions and the requirements of the King of Poland might be accommodated. This was nothing less than the secularisation of the Order-lands into a hereditary duchy, dependent on the Polish crown; Albrecht, needless to say, being the proposed Duke thereof. The suggestion, which offered a solution to what had seemed a hopeless quarrel, met with approval from Sigismund, and was embodied in the Peace of Krakow (April 1525), whereby the Grand-Master was transformed “from the head of a Catholic religious order into a Lutheran temporal prince.”126 The required oath of vassalage was tendered by Albrecht and in return the King presented him with a new blazon for his new-born duchy of Prussia; “the old Order changeth,” and the black cross is laid aside for a black eagle, crowned, beaked, and membered gold. In days to come, what time the white eagle of Poland shall droop its failing wings in feebleness, this sable eaglet which it has helped to hatch, grown lusty with maturity, shall snap its hungry beak in unison with the other birds of prey that hover round the doomed one. For the present, it is worthy of remark that the first political result of the religious schism which was to plunge the greater part of Europe, and especially the Empire, into a paroxysm of strife, was the closing of a long and bitter quarrel in the Baltic lands. As regards the immediate effect of the disappearance of the Order from Prussia, Moskva was chiefly concerned in the isolation which that event entailed upon the Teutonic colony in Livland and Estland. In return for the valuable help von Plettenberg had afforded the Grand-Master during the war, the latter had already granted him complete independence from the control of the Prussian executive; hence, when the secular revolution was effected, the knights of Livland retained their organisation and temporal possessions.127

While Sigismund had been employed in bringing East Prussia under his domination (West Prussia was already an integral part of the Polish dominion), Vasili had composed his differences with his Tartar neighbours. Makhmet-Girei had diverted his warlike tendencies towards the subjection of the khanate of Astrakhan; Kazan, after being several times overrun and almost conquered in a series of campaigns (in which the Moskovite voevodas displayed such scandalous slackness that corruption was openly hinted at), concluded a truce of five years with the Grand Prince. The latter, meanwhile, had struck an astute blow at the prosperity of Kazan by prohibiting Russian merchants from attending the great summer fair held annually at the Tartar city, and by establishing a rival fair at Makar’ev, in the province of Nijhni-Novgorod.128

At a moment when the western Church was offering a spectacle of dissension and rampant heresy, Vasili occasioned a mild scandal in the Orthodox communion by consecrating his unfruitful consort to the service of heaven, and taking unto himself another wife. Twenty years of conjugal felicity had not been crowned with the desired offspring, and the Grand Prince, weary of waiting for the overdue answer to reiterated prayers, took steps to remedy the breakdown in the succession. Solomonia was bundled off to a convent near Souzdal, where she received the veil, enforced, according to current rumour, by a whipping.129 1526Vasili then proceeded to espouse a second wife, selecting for that honour Elena, niece of the imprisoned Mikhail Glinski. This infraction of the Church’s laws was connived at by the plastic Metropolitan Daniel, though the majority of the clergy and many of the boyarins viewed the whole affair with pious reprobation. Tradition credited the inconsiderate Solomonia with the crowning offence of mistaking the nunnery for a lying-in hospital, and giving birth to a male child; the rumour certainly existed, though it is doubtful if it had any foundation in fact.130 Anxious days these for the Moskovite Court. The Grand Princess and her husband progressed wearily from shrine to shrine, invoking the good offices of various saints who were supposed to have influence in the matter, and distributing alms and donations with a lavishness wholly foreign to Moskovite finance, which suggested a conviction that heaven was open to bribery and was only standing out for its price. At length, after three years of patient expectancy, the much-prayed-for infant arrived “on the 25th August 1530, at seven in the morning,” accompanied by a rousing thunderstorm.131 The city of Moskva rejoiced with its sovereign at the birth of the heaven-sent child, to whom was given the name of Ivan. The succession was further ensured by the begetting of another son the following year.

The remainder of the reign of Vasili presented no important features beyond a recurrence of inconclusive hostilities with the Krim Tartars, and occasional diplomatic intercourse with Constantinople. While yet, comparatively speaking, in the prime of life, Vasili was attacked with a leech-baffling malady, which declared itself when he was on his way to the autumn hunting at Voloko Lamsk. 1533For reasons of state it was desirable that the sovereign’s critical condition should be kept from the knowledge of the general public, and especially from the foreign ambassadors. Therefore the suffering monarch was sledge-borne in a painful journey to Moskva, at a season when the falling snow and young ice rendered travelling laborious and unsafe. With the exception of his brothers, Urii and Andrei, Mikhail Glinski—restored to liberty and princely favour—and a few boyarins, none were admitted to the Grand Prince’s presence, but the rumour of his mortal sickness soon spread. The dying man played to the end his cold impassive game of statecraft, and his last hours were employed in arranging safeguards and regulations for the government during the minority of his successor. As the third day of December drew to a wintry close the crowds gathered in the streets and stood round the silent palace, and that night no one slept in Moskva. Dark-robed ecclesiastics emerged from their retreats and swarmed into the house of death like vultures swooping upon a dying beast. And as the huddled crowds watched and waited without, a curious scene was being enacted in the grim bed-chamber. With notable exceptions, it had been the custom for Russian Grand Princes to receive on their deathbed the tonsure, monastical habit, and a new name; this custom the Metropolitan wished to adhere to in the case of Vasili, while Prince Andrei and another layman desired that he should die, as he had lived, a sovereign and not a monk. At midnight, while prince and boyarin were endeavouring to snatch the black neophyte’s robe from the Vladuika, and while the latter solemnly and vehemently cursed them “in this world and the next,” Vasili Ivanovitch drew his last breath. It was the first time in the course of his career that he had shown any impatience. Hastily they thrust the all-important garment on the corpse, and called it Varlam; but the baptismal name had a clear minute’s start. The great bell of Moskva boomed out to the watching multitudes the news that their sovereign was dead. A new day dawned, and another reign had begun.

During the reigns of Vasili and Ivan the Great a new factor in Russian history comes into notice, and afterwards develops into no little importance. This was the appearance in two distinct localities, which may be roughly designated as the lower basins of the Dniepr and the Don respectively, of organised bands of “steppe-folk,” who were neither exactly Russian nor Tartar, nomad nor settled, and who were known under the vague appellation of Kazaks, or Kozaks. The name “has been variously derived from words meaning, in radically distinct languages, an armed man, a sabre, a rover, a goat, a promontory, a coat, a cassock, and a district in Circassia”; an equal uncertainty hangs over the origin of the race, or rather races. Perhaps the clearest account of the etymology and ethnology of the Kozak is that given by a Russian author in a history of the peoples of the Don region. “Kazak signifies alike volunteer, horseman, freebooter. Malo-Russians, mingled with remains of peoples known under the common name of Tcherni Kloboukie, under the name of Kazaks, constituted one people, who became to all intents and purposes Russian ... their fathers dwelling from the tenth century in the neighbourhood of Kiev, were themselves already almost Russian. Increasing more and more in numbers, maintaining among themselves the spirit of independence and fraternity, the western Kazaks organised a Christian republic, and established themselves between the lower basins of the Dniepr and Dniestr, building villages and fortresses.”132 The causes which drove these Slav and Turko outcasts into the wild steppe-land and scarcely accessible islands of the Dniepr, and welded them together in an origin-obliterating union, were first the Mongol invasion, and secondly the gradual establishment of irksome and far-reaching central authorities both in Moskovy and Lit’uania. The absolutism of the one monarchy, and the Catholic persecution of the other, sent men in search of liberty, to swell the ranks of those whose fathers had fled from the insecurity and degradation of a Tartar-haunted land. Similar causes—hostility to the surrounding khanates and impatience of the certain taxes and doubtful protection of the Moskovite government—were responsible for the existence of the Don Kozaks, among whom, however, there was a strong Tcherkess (Circassian) strain, while the Russian element was proportionately weaker. But the great factor in this double evolution was undoubtedly a physico-geographical one. The nature of the steppes themselves, those vast-stretching, level, grass-grown wolds, spread in seeming endlessness under the boundless sky, those solitudes where a man and his horse might lose themselves from all pursuit, called as irresistibly to the lustre after freedom as ever the Highlands of Scotland to the Saxon-hating Kelts, or the Tcherni-Gora to the unconquered Slavs of the Balkan coast. And having lured, it held, and holding, moulded. The Kozak and his wiry steed became as much a part of the fauna of the great Russian plain as the wolves, the hawks, and the steppe-eagles that hunted and roamed throughout its wide expanse.

Grand-principality of Moskva with Grand-duchy of Lithuania and Baltic Provinces.

91 Rambaud.

92 Rosebery, Pitt.

93 Mistress of a Kniaz of Galitz, and burned alive by his boyarins.

94 Le père Pierling, La Russie et l’Orient.

95 Iz Istorie Moskvui.

96 S. Solov’ev. Karamzin. Pierling.

97 Unlike their compeers in Western Europe, who attached high importance to matters heraldic, the Russian princes were somewhat “fancy-free” in the employment of armorial bearings, and their devices took more the nature of barbaric totems than of feudal blazonry. Only in the reign of Vasili the Darkened had the S. George-the-Conqueror and dragon become the fixed stamp on the seals and coins of Moskva; an earlier form of this was a simple mounted figure, similar to that borne by the Grand Dukes of Lit’uania. The coins of Dimitri Donskoi are adorned in some cases with the image of a cock, above which is portrayed a small animal, which might represent a fox, beaver, or marten. Previous to this the tokens were usually stamped with a rude representation of the reigning prince or of a local saint.

98 Le père Pierling, La Russie et l’Orient.

99 Gennad Karpov, Istoriya Bor’bui Moskovskago Gosoudarstva s’ Pol’sko-Litovskim, 1462-1508.

100 The title Tzar, formerly reproduced in West European spelling as Czar, was, on the strength of a surface resemblance, assumed to be derived from Caesar, and given the equivalent value of the German Kaiser. With the Russians Tzar simply meant king or ruler, and was indiscriminately used for the Greek Emperors, the Tartar Khans, and the Syrian and Jewish potentates mentioned in the writings of the Old Testament; Caesar was rendered Kessar. The word korol, which also signifies king in their language, was perhaps borrowed from the Magyar kiraly, the Kings of Hungary being for a long time the only monarchs so designated with whom they had any dealings. The double-headed eagle, adopted at almost the same time as the title of Tzar, although the recognised symbol of “empire,” was not originally used with that significance in Russia; the device was employed (in the same way that the lilies of France were incorporated with the English arms) to show that the Prince of Moskva had married the heiress of the eastern empire, and for a long time the eagle occupied a secondary position to the S. George and dragon cognisance of Moskva on the seals and coins of the Grand Princes. The imperial idea was a plant of foreign conception and growth, and, indeed, at the time when the title Tzar first crept into use, the style of Emperor of all the Russias might have been borne with almost as much reason by the King of Poland as by the Prince of Moskva.

101 Schiemann, Russland, Polen, u. Livland.

102 Karamzin.

103 Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen; Sartorius, Geschichte des Hanseatischen Bundes; S. Solov’ev, Istoriya Rossie.

104 A spiked iron ball attached by a flexible thong to a short staff.

105 The wolves. S. George occupies the delicate position of patron-saint of the wolves as well as of flocks and herds.

106 Karpov, Istoriya Bor’bui, etc.

107 A.E.I.O.U.

Alles Erdreich ist Oesterreich unterthan.

Austria est imperare orbi universo.

108 Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, Rerum Moscoviticorum commentarii.

109 It is hardly necessary to state that these remarks do not apply to the Russian soldier of modern history, who has displayed his best qualities under adverse circumstances.

110 Schiemann.

111 Schiemann, Karpov.

112 S. Solov’ev.

113 Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen.

114 Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen.

115 Herberstein.

116 Karamzin.

117 S. Solov’ev; Karamzin.

118 Karamzin gives the date as 8th of October. The day is fixed by Sigismund’s letter to Leo X., written on 18th September, in which he mentions the battle as taking place on “die natali beatissime virginis Marie, que erat VIII. Septembris.”

119 Acta Tomiciana, tom. III.

120 Much that appeared eastern or barbarous to outsiders was in fact only a survival of customs and costumes that had long died out in the west. Russia, cut off by many causes, already set forth, from the march of progress in occidental Europe, retained many things which had there been cast aside.

121 Herberstein.

122 Johannes Voigt, Geschichte Preussens.

123 Herberstein.

124 Herberstein.

125 Voigt.

126 Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe.

127 Schiemann; Voigt; Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen.

Note.—The German branch of the Order elected a new Grand-Master after the defection of Albrecht, and continued, at Mergentheim in Franconia, its existence as a religious organisation, till the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Napoleonic maelstrom swept it away in common with many other worn-out institutions.

128 Karamzin.

129 Herberstein.

130 Herberstein; Karamzin.

131 Karamzin.

132 V. Bronevskago, Istoriya Donskago Voyska.