The Rise of the Russian Empire Saki 1144 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Rise of the Russian
Empire
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will
have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using
this eBook.

Title: The Rise of the Russian Empire

Author: Saki

Release date: March 9, 2014 [eBook #45099]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45099

Credits: Produced by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RISE OF
THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE ***

Illustrations with borders are linked to higher-resolution images.

THE RISE OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

PUBLISHER’S ANNOUNCEMENT
Demy 8vo, Cloth, 25s.
With two coloured maps and ten specially drawn
RUSSIA IN ASIA
A RECORD AND A STUDY
1558-1899
BY
ALEXIS KRAUSSE
Author of “China in Decay”

Spectator.—“It is well that the vague alarm generally inspired in
the average Englishman by the thought of Russian successes in
Asia should be replaced by exact knowledge. Books without
number have already been written upon the several phases of the
Russian advance, but Mr. Krausse’s volume is, we think, the first
concise presentation in English of its entire history.”
London: GRANT RICHARDS
9 Henrietta St., Covent Garden, W.C.

MAP OF
RUSSIA
under the
EARLY RURIKOVITCH PRINCES

THE RISE
OF
THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
BY
HECTOR H. MUNRO

“On se flatterait en vain de connaitre la Russie actuelle, si l’on
ne
remontait plus haut dans son histoire.”—Le Père Pierling.

LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS
1900

PREFACE
With the exception of a translation of Rambaud’s somewhat disjointed
work, there is no detailed history of Russia in the English language at all
approaching modern standards. The reigns of Petr the Great and of some of
his successors down to the present day—a period covering only 200 years
—have been minutely dealt with, but the earlier history of a nation with
whom we are coming ever closer into contact is to the English reader
almost a blank. Whether the work now submitted will adequately fill the
gap remains to be seen; such is its object.
The rule observed with regard to the rendering of names of places and
persons has been to follow the spelling of the country to which they belong
as closely as possible. The spelling of Russian words employed, and
curiously distorted, by English and other historians, has been brought back
to its native forms. There is no satisfactory reason, for instance, why the
two final letters of boyarin should be dropped, or why they should reappear
tacked on to the equally Russian word Kreml. Moskva is scarcely
recognisable in its Anglicised form, and Kiev can only be rendered Kieff on
a system which would radically disturb the spelling of most English towns.
A list of works consulted is appended, arranged somewhat in the order in
which they have been found useful, precedence being given to those which
have been most largely drawn upon.
HECTOR H. MUNRO,
1899.

WORKS CONSULTED
Karamzin—Histoire de l’empire russe. 1819. (French translation by MM.
St. Thomas et de Divoff.)
S. Solov’ev—Istoriya Rossie. 1858.
Th. Schiemann—Russland, Polen und Livland. 1885.
A. Rambaud—History of Russia. 1879. (English translation.)
L. Paris (translator)—Chronique de Nestor. 1834.
N. Kostomarov—Rousskaya Istoriya v jhizneopisaniyakh eya
glavnieyshikh dieyatelen. 1874.
N. Kostomarov—Sieverno Rousskiya Narodopravstva. 1886.
Sir H. H. Howorth—History of the Mongols.
Anonymous—Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen. 1879.
Von Hammer-Purgstall—Geschichte der goldenen Horde. 1840.
„ „ Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman. (French translation.)
E. A. Freeman—Ottoman Power in Europe. 1877.
J. W. Zinkeisen—Geschichte des osmanischen Reich in Europa.
Gennad Karpov—Istoriya Bor’bui Moskovskago Gosoudarstvo s Pol’sko-
Litovskim, 1462-1508. 1867.
“V. N.”—Iz Istorie Moskvui, 1147-1703. 1896.
E. A. Solov’ev—Ivan IV. Groznie. 1893.
N. A. Polevoi—Tzarstvovanie Ioanna Groznago. 1859.
Le Père Pierling—La Russie et l’Orient. 1891.
„ „ Rome et Demetrius. 1878.

Marquis de Noailles—Henri de Valois et la Pologne en 1572. 1867.
V. B. Antonovitch—Otcherk Istorie Velikago Kniajhestva Litovskago.
1878.
N. G. Riesenkampff—Der Deutsche Hof zu Nowgorod. 1854.
Laszlo Szalay—Geschichte Ungarns. 1874.
A. N. Murav’ev—History of the Russian Church. 1842. (English translation
by R. W. Blackmore.)
A. Pember—Ivan the Terrible.
A. M. H. J. Stokvis—Manuel d’Histoire, de Généalogie, et de Chronologie,
etc. 1889.
Bar. Sigismund von Herberstein—Rerum Moscoviticorum commentarii.
1851. (English translation by R. H. Major.)

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
The Dawn of Russian History 1
CHAPTER II
The Coming of the Varangians and the Building of Kievian Russia 14
CHAPTER III
The Feuds of the House of Rurik 53
CHAPTER IV
The Coming of the Mongols 81
CHAPTER V
“The Years that the Locust hath eaten” 96
CHAPTER VI
The Growing of the Germ 122
CHAPTER VII
The Last of the Paleologi and the First of the Autocrats 149
CHAPTER VIII
Ivan Groznie 195
CHAPTER IX
The Great Boyarin 253
CHAPTER X
The Phantom Tzar 271
CHAPTER XI
“This Side the Hill” 306
I. Table of Russian Princes of the Line of Rurik, from Sviatoslav I. 327
II. House of Mstislav Vladimirovitch 328
III. House of Souzdal-Vladimir and Sub-Houses of Moskva and
329
Tver
IV. Grand Princes and Tzars of Moskovy 330
GLOSSARY 331

INDEX 332

LIST OF MAPS
Russia Frontispiece
Grand Principality of Moskva 194
Plan of Moskva 270

CHAPTER I
THE DAWN OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Russia, which is blessed with a rich variety of tribes and peoples, the
despair of the ethnographical geographer, who can scarcely find enough
distinctive colours wherewith to denote them all on his maps, is
characterised by a singular uniformity of physical conditions throughout the
greater part of its huge extent. Geographically speaking, it is difficult to
determine what are the exact limits of the region known as Russia-in-
Europe, the Oural Mountains, which look such an excellent political barrier
on paper, being really no barrier at all, certainly not what is known as a
scientific frontier. As a matter of fact they are less a range of mountains
than a chain of low table-lands, having precisely the same conditions of
soil, flora, and fauna on either side of them. Zoologically the valley of the
Irtuish forms a much stronger line of demarcation, but much of Russia west
of the Ourals coincides more nearly in physical aspect with the great Asiatic
plain than it does with the remainder of Europe. Southward and westward
from this fancy boundary stretches a vast expanse of salt, sandy, almost
barren steppe-land; this gives way in time to large tracts of more or less
fertile steppe, partaking more of the character of prairie than of desert,
bearing in spring and early summer a heavy crop of grasses, high enough in
places to conceal a horse and his rider. Merging on this in a northerly
direction is the “black-soil” belt, a magnificent wheat-growing country,
which well merits the title of the Granary of Europe. Northward again is a
region of dense forest, commencing with oaks and other deciduous trees,
and becoming more and more coniferous as it stretches towards the Arctic
circle, where pine and fir disappear, and give way to the Tundras, moss-clad
wastes, frozen nine months out of the twelve, the home of reindeer and
Samoved. Over all this wide extent the snows and frosts of the Russian
winter fall with an almost equal rigour, though for varying duration of time.
Except on the east, the country possesses strongly-marked natural
boundaries; on the south-east rises the huge pile of the Kaukasus

Mountains, flanked east and west by the Kaspian and Black Seas
respectively; on the south-west lie the Karpathians, while from north-west
to north the Baltic is almost connected by lake, swamp, and the deep fissure
of the White Sea with the Arctic Ocean. Broadly speaking, nearly the whole
area enclosed within these boundaries is one unbroken plain, intersected
and watered by several fine rivers, of which the Volga and the Dniepr are,
historically, the most important. This, then, is the theatre on which was
worked out the drama of Russian national development.
It will now be necessary to glance at the racial and political conditions
which prevailed at the period when the curtain rises on mediæval Russian
history. First as to the ethnology and distribution of the Slavs, a branch of
whom was to be the nucleus round which the empire of all the Russias was
to gather. The lore of peoples and of tongues has enabled scientists to assign
to the Slavs a place in the great Aryan family from which descended the
stocks that made their dwelling on European soil. Exactly when their
wanderings brought them into their historic home-lands it is difficult to
hazard, nor is it possible to do more than speculate as to whence they came
in that distant yesterday of human spate and eddy. At the epoch when
Russian history, in a political sense, may be said to start into existence (the
commencement of the ninth century), the distribution of the Slavs is more
easy to trace; with the exception of an offshoot in the south-east of Europe,
occupying Servia, Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia, they appear to have
been gathered in a fairly compact though decentralised mass in what may
be termed North Central Europe. Holstein, Mecklenburg, and Pomerania,
roughly speaking, formed the country of the Wends; another group, the
Czechs and Poles, inhabited Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland; while a fourth
body, destined to become the most important, was established in North-west
Russia, hemmed in by Finns on the north, Turks and Avars on the east and
south. These latter Slavs, the germ of the future Russian nation, lived in
tribal communities in the midst of the mighty forests of oak, pine, birch,
willow, etc., which stood thick around the basin-lands of the Upper Dniepr,
Dvina, and Volkhov, and the source of the Volga. These dense fastnesses
they shared with the wolf, boar, lynx, fox, bear, beaver, elk, aurochs, deer,
otter, squirrel, and marten, which latter especially furnished them with a
valuable article of commerce, the Russian marten skins being highly prized
in the fur markets of Europe. Seals abounded on their sea-coast and in Lake
Ladoga; the numerous swamps were the home of the wild goose, swan, and

crane; the eagle, hawk, raven, cuckoo, and daw were familiar to them, while
pigeons were early domesticated among their dwellings.
In their primitive state the Slavs had this obvious differentiation from their
Asiatic neighbours—though essentially pastoral they were not nomadic.
The village, as a unit of politico-social life, had arrived with them at a high
pitch of development, which involves the supposition of long-existing
contributory causes, the herding together, namely, of a permanent
community of human beings, dependent on each other for mutual
convenience, security, and general well-being. The mir, commune, or
village was in the first place the natural outcome of a patriarchal system
other than nomad, the expansion of the primitive association of members of
one or more families who had grown up together under the common
attraction of a convenient water-supply, a suitable grazing ground, or a
wood much haunted by honey-bees.[1] The development of agricultural
pursuits necessarily gave a greater measure of stability to village life, and
the peasant insensibly rooted himself to that soil in which he had sown his
crops and planted his fruit-trees. Thus far the life-story of the tribal Slavs
travelled along familiar lines, but here it came to an abrupt halt. The village
unit acquired a well-defined theory and practice of government, but it did
not germinate into the town. The few townships that were to be found in
Slavic lands owed their being for the most part not to any inward process of
accumulation, but to extraneous and exceptional circumstances. While
Teutonic peoples were raising unto themselves burgs and cities, and
banding themselves in guilds and kindred municipal associations, the Slavs
remained content with such protection as their forests and swamps afforded,
such organisation as their village institutions supplied. The reason for this
limitation in social progress was an organic one; in the Slav character the
commercial spirit, in its more active sense, was almost entirely wanting.
Trade by barter, of course, existed among them, but their medium of
exchange had not got beyond the currency of marten and sable skins. The
market, the wharf, and the storehouse were not with them institutions of
native growth.
From their earth of forest, swamp, and stream, which paled them in from an
outer world, and from the sky above, which they had in common with all
living folks, the eastern Slavs had drawn inspirations for the thought-
weaving of a comprehensive catalogue of gods. Their imaginations gave

deific being to the sun, moon, stars, wind, water, fire, and air, but most of
all they reverenced the lightning. In their dark, over-shaded forest homes it
was natural that the sun, which exercised such mystic sway in the blazing
lands of the Orient, should yield place to the swift, dread might which could
split great trees in its spasm of destruction and shake the heavens with its
attendant thunder. Accordingly the arch-god of Slavic myth was Peroun, in
whom was personified the spirit of the lightning. Under the name of
Svaroga (the different tribes probably had variant names for the same god,
and sometimes, perhaps, varying gods for a common name) he was
worshipped as the Begetter of the Fire and Sun Gods. The latter was
sometimes known as “Dajh’bog,” but in old folk-songs the Sun is
Dajh’bog’s grandchild. The Wind-God was designated “Stribog.” The
personality of these nature-deities was not left entirely to the worshippers’
fancy, Peroun at least being represented in effigy by more than one idol,
which conformed to the human pattern from which so few divinities have
been able to escape. A slightly more advanced conception of the
supernatural was embodied in the worship of Kolyada, a beneficent spirit
who was supposed to visit the farms and villages in mid-winter and bring
fertility to the pent-in herds and frost-bound seeds. The festival in honour of
Kolyada was held about the 25th of December, the date when the Sun was
supposed to triumph over the death in which Nature had gripped him and to
enter on his new span of life.
Blended with Eastern mysticism there was, no doubt, in their religious ideas
a considerable sprinkling of Northern magic. In their dark and lonely forest
dwellings there was likely to be something more than a natural dread of that
lurking prowler which stamped such an eerie impression upon the
imaginations of primitive folks in many lands. The shambling form, the
wailing howl, and the narrow eyes that gleamed wicked hunger in the
winter woods gave the wolf a reputation for uncanny powers, and the old
Slavic folk-songs clearly set forth a belief in wehr-wolf lore.
In the matter of disposing of their dead the Slavs of Eastern Europe had a
variety of customs and usages, some of which were probably local practices
of the different tribes. In general the body was burned and the bones
enclosed in a small vessel, which was placed upon a post near the roadside.
Grave-burial was also in vogue, hill-sides being chosen for that purpose.
Drinking and feasting were usual accompaniments of the funeral rites,

while the opposite extreme was sometimes exhibited by the slashing and
scratching of the mourners’ faces in token of grief.[2]
Thickly mingled with the Slav homesteads in the lake regions of Peipus,
Ladoga, and the forest country stretching eastwards, were the outlying
villages of the Finns, who seem to have lived in harmony with their alien
neighbours without at the same time showing the least tendency towards a
fusion of national characteristics. Branches of the same people, Tchouds
and Livs, occupied the lands of the Baltic sea-board on the north-west.
South of these, wedged in between the Slavs of Poland and those of the
east, in the marshy forest-lands of the Niemen basin, were the Lit’uanians, a
people of Indo-European origin, who were divided into the sub-tribes of
Lit’uanians, Letts, and Borussians (Prussians). Of doubtful affinity with the
first-named were the Yatvyags, a black-bearded race dwelling on the
extreme eastern limit of the Polish march. The Lit’uanians were even more
ill-provided with towns and strongholds than their Slav neighbours, but they
had at least a definite system of tribal government, remarkable for the
division of the sovereign power between the prince (Rikgs) and the high-
priesthood, the former having control of outside affairs, including the
important business of waging war, the latter administering matters of justice
and religion. The gods of the Lit’uanians were worshipped under the
symbolism of sacred trees, and the religious rites included the putting to
death of deformed or sickly children; this was enacted, not with the idea
that bloodshed and suffering were acceptable to the Higher Powers, but
rather because the latter were supposed to demand a standard of healthy and
physical well-being on the part of their worshippers.[3]
In the lands lying to the south and south-east, where the forests gave way
bit by bit to the open wolds of the steppe country, the Slavs had for
neighbours various tribes of nomads, for the most part of Turko-Finnish
origin, and these completed the encircling band of stranger folk by which
the primitive forest dwellers were shut in from the outside world. At this
yonder world it is now necessary to take a glimpse.
Europe towards the middle of the ninth century was still simmering in a
state of semi-chaos, out of which were shortly to be evolved many of the
national organisms which have lasted to modern times. Charles the Great,
by the supreme folly of dividing amongst his three sons the empire he had
so carefully built up, had to a great degree undone the work of his life, and

political barriers are rather difficult to trace after the partition of Verdun
(843), though in the dominions assigned to Charles II. some semblance of
the later kingdom of France may be traced. Germany was in a transition
state; the strong hand which had established dependent and responsible
dukes and counts in the various Teutonic provinces—Saxony, Franconia,
Swabia, Bavaria, and Karinthia—had been withdrawn, and as yet these
princes had not erected their fiefs into independent hereditary duchies.
Scarcely tamed and civilised themselves, the frontier districts of the east
were bordered continuously by Danes, Wends, Czechs, Avars, and
Slavonians, ever ready to make hostile incursions upon their territory.
Hamburg in those days stood as a frontier town, almost an outpost in an
enemy’s country, and formed with Paderborn and Bremen the high-water
mark of the Frankish expansion on the north-eastern marches.
In England national unification was in a more advanced stage; Wessex had
gradually absorbed the other constituents of the so-called Heptarchy, with
the exception of Mercia, which still held out a nominally separate existence.
London, at this period a wooden-built town surrounded by a wall of stone,
was beginning to be commercially important.
In Spain the Christians had established among the mountains of Asturias the
little kingdom of Leon, and were commencing the long struggle which was
eventually to drive the Moors out of the peninsula.
South of Rome and the Imperial territories in Italy, the duchy of Benevento
alone foreshadowed the crowd of principalities and commonwealths which
were to spring into existence in that country.
To the east the Byzantine Empire, pressed by the Saracens in its Asiatic
possessions, by Bulgars and Slavs on its northern boundary, severed from
Rome, Ravenna, and the Western world by divergencies of ritual and
dogma, humiliated by military reverses in various quarters, still loomed
splendid and imposing in her isolation, and the dreaded Greek fire, if no
longer “the Fire of old Rome,” helped to make her navies respected in the
Mediterranean and Black Sea.
But if she still attracted the attention of the world, civilised and barbarian, it
was scarcely by the exhibition of any grand moral qualities; her annals were
one long record of vicious luxuries, servile flatteries, intrigues, disaffection,
and cruelties, which grew like an unhealthy crop of fungi in an atmosphere

charged with the gases of theological dogmatism. Revolution succeeded
revolution, and each was followed by a dreary epilogue of torturings,
executions, blindings, and emasculations, while synods and councils
gravely discussed the amount of veneration due to pictures of the Virgin, or
the exact wording of a litany. In one respect, however, the first Christian
State approached the New Jerusalem of its aspirations, namely, in
upholstery and artificial landscape gardening, and its gilded gates and
rooms of porphyry, its jewelled trees with mechanical singing-birds, might
well challenge comparison with the golden streets and walls of precious
stones and sea of glass that adorned the Holy City of the Apocalypse.
North of what might be termed the European mainland of the Eastern
Empire, between the south bank of the Danube and the ridge of the Balkans,
was wedged in the kingdom of Bulgaria, a Turko principality whose
territory waxed and waned as its arms were successful or the contrary in the
intermittent warfare it carried on against its august neighbour. Though never
rising to the position of a considerable power, and at times being reduced to
complete subjection, it continued to give trouble to the Byzantine State for
many centuries, and the adjoining Zupanate of Servia was from time to time
brought under the alternate suzerainty of whichever factor was in the
ascendant.
Beyond the Danube the Magyars had not as yet established themselves in
Hungary, in the lands lately overrun by the Avars, and a considerable
section of that country was absorbed in the great Moravian kingdom, a
Czech state whose existence was coterminous with the ninth century, and
which also embraced within its limits the vassal duchy of Bohemia, the
latter country having, however, its separate dynasty of dukes.
Farther north, Poland had scarcely commenced to have a defined existence
in the polity of Europe. Its people, if the early annals are not merely fables
borrowed from the common stock of European folk-lore, had elevated to
the dignity of sovereign duke a peasant nicknamed Piast, from whom
sprang the family of that name who held the throne not less than 600 years.
From the fact that the Poles remained independent both of the Western
Empire and of the neighbouring Moravian power, may be deduced the
assumption that they already possessed some degree of cohesion and
organization—more perhaps than distinguished them in later stages of their
history.

On the north shore of the Black Sea the most easterly possession of the
Byzantine Empire was Kherson, a port in the Krim peninsula, and here the
territory of the Cæsars came into contact with the Empire or Khanate of the
Khazars, a Turko-Finnish race whose dominions stretched in the ninth
century from Hungary to the shores of the Kaspian, and north to the source
of the Dniepr. They appear to have attained to a comparatively high degree
of civilisation, and they kept up commercial and diplomatic relations with
Byzantium and the two Kaliphates of Bagdad and Kordova. Their national
religion was a form of paganism (subsequently they embraced Judaism), but
in spite of differences of faith and race one of their princesses became the
wife of the Emperor Constantine V. Their two principal cities were Itil, on
the Volga, and Sarkel (the White City), on the Don. Several of the Turanian
and Slavonic tribes on their north-west borders acknowledged their
authority and paid them tribute, but at the commencement of the ninth
century their power was already declining.
On their north-east frontier the Khazars had for neighbours the Bulgarians
of the Volga, an elder branch of the tribe which had settled in the Balkans.
Bolgary, “the great City,” was their capital, and a trading centre much
frequented by the merchants and dealers of the various semi-barbaric
nations in their vicinity, as well as by the more highly-civilised Khazars and
Persians.
Northward of all, in the bleak mountain regions of Skandinavia, on the roof
of Europe as it were, dwelt the Norsemen, those wild and warlike
adventurers who were to leave the impress of their hand on the history of so
many countries. In those days, when Iceland and Greenland were as yet
undiscovered, Norway, Sweden, and Finland formed a stepping-stone to
that unknown Arctic Sea which contemporary imagination peopled with
weird and grimly monsters—for the North had its magic lore as well as the
shining East. And the fierce vikings, fighting and plundering under their
enchanted Raven banner, seemed in those credulous times not far removed
from the legendary warlocks and griffons of whom they were presumed to
be the neighbours.
As has been already noticed, the Khazars were essentially a trading nation,
and much of the commerce of the farther East filtered through their hands
into Eastern Europe. According to one authority[4] the products of the East,
after crossing the Kaspian Sea, were conveyed up the Volga, and after a

short land journey reached the Baltic by way of Lake Ilmen and Lake
Ladoga. It is not easy to see why the shorter and simpler route along the
Don and the Black Sea to Constantinople and the Mediterranean was not
preferred, especially as the balance of power, and consequently of luxury
and wealth, lay rather in the south of Europe than in the north. It was this
trade, however, which built up the importance, possibly caused the birth, of
Novgorod, that fascinating city which rises out of the mists that shroud the
history of unchronicled times with the tantalising name of New Town,
suggesting the existence of a yet older one. What was the exact footing of
Novgorod in the early decades of the ninth century—whether an actual
township, with governor and council, giving a head to a loose confederation
of neighbouring Slavic tribes, or whether merely a village or camp, the
most convenient station where “the barbarians might assemble for the
occasional business of war or trade”[5]—it is difficult at this distance of
time to determine. Seated on the banks of the Volkhov some little distance
from where that river leaves Lake Ilmen’s northern shore, and connected
with the Baltic by convenient waterways, it not only tapped the trade-route
already referred to, but occupied a similar favourable position with regard
to another important channel of traffic—that between the North and
Byzantium by way of the Dniepr and Black Sea. Wax, honey, walrus teeth,
and furs went from the frozen North to the “Tzargrad,” as the Imperial city
was called by the Slavs, and in exchange came silks and spices and other
products of the South. Furs and skins, of otter, marten, wolf, and beaver
especially, were in growing demand in Europe, where, from the covering of
savages, they had been promoted to articles of luxury among the wealthy of
Christendom. With the land covered by dense forest, or infested by savage
tribes, and the seas scoured by pirate fleets, traders preferred to keep as
much as possible to the great river-routes, and the large, placidly-flowing
rivers of the Russian plain were peculiarly suited to their purposes. Thus the
early human wanderers adopted the same methods of travel, and nearly the
same lines of journey, as the birds of passage, ducks, plovers, and waders
use to this day in their annual migrations, winging their way along the
coasts and river-courses from Asia to Europe and back again.
Shut up in their own constricted world of forest, lake, and swamp, the
Novgorodski and neighbouring Slavs would get, by means of these
waterways, glimpses of other worlds, distant as the three points of a
triangle, and as varied in manners, customs, and products; news of Sarkel,

Itil, and the Great City, Bolgary, and strange countries yet farther east,
where men dwelt in tents and rode on camels and hunted the panther, whose
spotted skin was more richly marked than that of any forest lynx; visits
from mariners of perhaps their own nationality, bringing tales of northern
seas, of ice-floes, walruses, sturgeons, and whales; of Wends who preyed on
the vessels driven on to their inhospitable shore; and, more important still,
of Varangian sea-rovers who were beginning to force themselves on the
Finns and Slavs of the sea-coast; above all, tidings from bands of merchants
of the City of Wonders that guarded the entrance to the Farther Sea, with its
gates and palaces, and temples and gardens and marts, its emperor and
saints, and miracles and ceremonials, like unto nothing they had experience
of themselves.
It is just at this point that the history of the Slavs of Lake Ilmen and its
neighbourhood becomes largely conjectural. That they were brought in
some measure under the subjection of Varangian invaders appears tolerably
certain, and, favoured no doubt by the natural advantages of their position,
girt round with an intricate network of forest and swamp, or, still better,
protected perhaps by the poverty of their communities, they seem to have
freed themselves from this foreign yoke, as the Saxons of England from
time to time drove out the Danes. It was in consequence, probably, of this
common danger that the Slavs were drawn into closer confederation, with
the unfortunate result that domestic quarrels became rife among them, and
each clan or volost was at enmity with its neighbour. “Family armed itself
against family, and there was no justice.”[6] This sudden ebullition of
anarchy rather suggests that the Varangian intruders had swept away
previous institutions or elements of order, and left nothing capable of
replacing them, or else that the native Slavs were unable to grapple with the
new problems of administration on an extended scale. Evidently, too, the
vigorous Norsemen had obtained the reputation of being something more
than mere undisciplined robbers and raiders, and their domination seemed
more desirable than the turmoil and dissension attendant upon a state of
self-government. And in support of this deduction, almost the first definite
event recorded in the national chronicles is the resolve of the people of
Novgorod to call in the leaders of a tribe known as the Russ Varangians to
restore order in their land.

(Controversy has arisen among Russian historians as to the probable
nationality or extraction of these “Russ” foreigners, who, like the Angles,
gave their name to the country of their adoption, and some writers have
assumed them to have been Slavs from Rugen or the south coasts of the
Baltic, and not of Skandinavian origin. Apart, however, from the decidedly
Norse form of their leaders’ names—Rurik, Sineus, Truvor, Oleg, etc.—the
manner of their coming and their subsequent history harmonises exactly
with that of the various Skandinavian offshoots who invaded and
established themselves in Normandy, England, the Scottish islands, Ireland,
and Sicily. Under their vigorous rule the Slavic settlement around Novgorod
expanded in a few years into an extensive principality, imposing tribute on
and drawing recruits from the neighbouring tribes, and carrying the terror of
the Russian name into the Black and Kaspian Seas.)
Whether the “invitation” was genuine, emanating from the desire of the
Ilmen folk to secure for themselves the settled rule of capable leaders, or
whether the presence of the strangers had to be accepted as a disagreeable
necessity, to mitigate the humiliation of which a legendary calling-in was
subsequently invented, must remain a matter for conjecture; but with the
incoming of this new element Russian history develops suddenly in scope
and interest.[7]

CHAPTER II
THE COMING OF THE VARANGIANS AND
THE BUILDING OF KIEVIAN RUSSIA
Whatever the nature of the causes that led up to this irruption of stranger
folk, the fact and, to a certain extent, the manner of their coming is
substantially set forth in the old chronicles. Like ocean demi-gods riding
out from the sea into the ken of mortal men came three Russ-Varangian
brothers, Rurik, Sineus, and Truvor, with a mighty host of kinsfolk and
followers, steering eastward in their long, narrow-beaked boats through the
waterways that lead from the Finnish Gulf into the lake-land of the Slavs.
Separating their forces, Rurik established himself at—according to some
accounts, built—the town of Ladoga, on the banks of the Volkhov, twelve
miles from its entrance into the Lake Ladoga, thus interposing himself
between Novgorod and the sea. His brothers settled at Bielozersk and
Izborsk respectively, the latter occupying an important position near Lake
Peipus and the Liv border, the former pushing a Varangian outpost among
the Finnish tribes to the east; all three, whether from accident or design,
choosing the vicinity of an open stretch of water. The date of this
immigration is fixed by the chronicler at 862, which is regarded as the
starting-point of the Russian State. Two years later Rurik, by the death of
both his brothers, was left in sole chieftaincy of the adventurers. From his
first stronghold he soon shifted his headquarters to a point farther up the
Volkhov’s course, over against Novgorod, where he built himself a citadel;
from thence he eventually made himself master of the town, not apparently
without some opposition from the inhabitants. Henceforward the
Skandinavian chief was undisputed prince of the Slavonic people who had
invited him into their country; the neighbouring districts of Rostov and
Polotzk were brought under his authority, and Novgorod became the capital
and centre of a state which reached from Lake Peipus to the Upper Volga,
and from Ladoga to the watershed of the Dvina and Dniepr. In thus
extending and consolidating his power and welding his Skandinavian

following and the discordant Slavic elements into one smoothly-working
organisation, Rurik evinced qualities of statesmanship equal in their way to
those displayed by William the Norman in his conquest and administration
of England. The absence of any national cohesion among the Slavs, while
facilitating the Norse intrusion and settlement, increased the difficulty of
binding them in allegiance to a central authority; yet within the space of a
few crowded years the Varangian ruler enjoyed an undisputed sway in the
lands of his mastery such as few princes could in those unordered times rely
on. Not the least difficult part of Rurik’s task must have been the control of
his own wanderlusting countrymen, turned loose in an extensive and
vaguely-defined region, with rumours of wealth and plunder and fighting
beckoning them to the south. In the nature of things such temptation would
not be long resisted, especially as the Dniepr offered a convenient if
insecure passage to the desired lands, and a short time after the first Norse
settlement two Skandinavian adventurers, named Askold and Dir, broke
away from the main body with a small following, possibly with the idea of
enlisting themselves in the Varangian Guard at Byzantium. They did not
immediately pursue their journey, however, farther than Kiev, a townstead
of the Polian Slavs,[8] standing on a low bluff above the west bank of the
Dniepr. Here they established themselves as Rurik had done at Novgorod,
and, reinforced perhaps by roving bodies of their countrymen, set up a
second Russian State, without losing sight, however, of the original object
which had drawn them southwards. Consequently in the summer of 865 an
expedition of from ten to fifteen thousand men, presumably recruited from
both Slavs and Norsemen, embarked in their long, narrow war-boats and
sailed for Byzantium, plundering and burning along the coast of the Black
Sea, and finally riding into the harbour. The audacity of the attack, or
perhaps the warlike reputation of the invading host, seems to have
paralysed the inhabitants of the city, and the authorities had recourse to
supernatural invocation to deliver them from this new danger. The robe of
the Virgin was removed from its venerated shrine in the Blacherne Chapel,
escorted in solemn procession to the shores of the harbour, and dipped in
the water, whereupon arose a tempest that drove the heathen fleet in
disorder out to sea. That, at least, is the account of the transaction given by
the Byzantine chroniclers.
Whether such a command over the atmospherical forces impressed the
barbarian chiefs with the desirable qualities of so militant a religion, or

whether the glories of the Tzargrad as seen dimly from their boats had
insensibly attracted them to the worship of the “cold Christ and tangled
trinities,” which was so much a part of the Byzantine life, it was said that
Askold, shortly after the miscarriage of the expedition, professed the
Christian faith. This much at least seems certain, that the Greek patriarch
Photius was able in the year 866 to send to Kiev a priest with the title, if not
the recognition of Bishop, and that from that time there existed a small
Christian community in that town.
The Chronicle of Nestor, almost the only record of this period of Russian
history in existence, is silent on two interesting points, namely, the works
and fightings in which Rurik was presumably engaged on behalf of his
infant state, and the attitude of the Khazars towards the adventurers who
had filched Kiev and the adjoining territory from their authority.
The only further item in the Chronicle relating to Rurik is the
announcement of his death in the year 879, his child son Igor and the
governance of the country being entrusted to Oleg, a blood relation of the
late Prince. The reign of this chieftain was of great importance to the
fortunes of the germinating Russian State, and if Rurik played the part of a
William the Bastard, Oleg may not unwarrantably be compared with
Charles the Great. The rumours which had reached the North of a Varangian
power that had sprung up among the tribes of the Slavic hinterland had
attracted thither streams of roving warriors, eager to share the dangers and
divide the fruits of their kinsfolks’ enterprise. Thus both Rurik and the
Kievian adventurers had been able to maintain an easily-recruited standing
force of their own countrymen for purposes offensive and defensive. The
larger designs of Oleg, however, required a larger army, and he enlisted
under his captaincy Slavs and Finns in addition to his Varangian guards.
Having spent three years in gathering and perfecting his resources, he
advanced in 882 into the basin-land of the Dniepr and moved upon
Smolensk, the stronghold of the independent remnant of the Slav tribe of
Krivitches. By virtue, possibly, of his position as leader of an army partly
drawn from men of that tribe, he was allowed to take undisputed possession
of the place, which was henceforth incorporated in the Russ dominion. Still
following the course of the Dniepr, as Askold and Dir had followed it
before him, he entered the country of the Sieverskie Slavs and made himself
master of their head town, Lubetch.

By these successive steps Oleg had brought himself nigh upon Kiev, the
headquarters of the rival principality, which was possibly the object he had
had in view from the commencement of his southward march. For to the
rising Russ-Slavonic State Kiev was at once a menace and an injury; not
only did it offer an alternative attraction to the Norsemen pouring into the
country, the natural reinforcements of Oleg’s following, but its separate
existence cut short the expansion of the northern territory, and, above all,
hindered free intercourse with Byzantium and the south. To the sea-rovers,
reared among the rude and penurious lands that lay dark and uncivilised
between the Baltic and the Arctic Sea, Byzantium was a dazzling and
irresistible attraction; rich beyond their comprehension of riches, luxurious
to a degree unknown to them, renowned for everything except renown, she
seemed a golden harvest ripe for the steel of the valorous and enterprising.
Between this desired land and the Novgorodian principality the territory of
Askold presented a vexatious obstacle, and it was inevitable that the
sagacity of Oleg should aim at its destruction. At the same time it was
understandable that he should seek to avoid an armed conflict with his
fellow-countrymen, the Varangians of Kiev, and to effect his purpose by
stratagem rather than by force. To this end he approached the town, laid an
ambuscade on the banks of the Dniepr, and in the guise of a trader travelling
from Novgorod to Byzantium, sought speech with the Kievian rulers.
Askold and Dir came out unwittingly to see this wayfarer, and found no
man of wares and whining suppliance; found rather one whose face they
well knew, and with him a small lad whose significance was swiftly made
plain to them. “You are not of the blood of princes,” cried a voice of
triumph and boding in their ears, “but here behold the son of Rurik.” And
therewith rushed out the hidden ones and slew the unsuspecting chieftains.
And in guerdon of this stroke Oleg was accepted as sovereign by the people
of Kiev, the Russian State was solidified, and the supremacy of Rurik’s
dynasty received a valuable recognition.
The town of Kiev, advantageously situated at a pleasant elevation above the
west bank of the Dniepr, and commanding the waterway to the coveted
south, compared favourably with Novgorod, built among the flat marshes
that bordered Lake Ilmen and surrounded by the Finn-gripped coasts of
Ladoga. The advantages of the former were not lost upon its conqueror,
who saluted it with the title of “mother of all Russian cities” (so the
Chronicles), and thenceforth it became the capital of the country. It was

now necessary to secure the connection between the newly-won territory
and the districts lying to the north. West and north of Kiev dwelt the
Drevlians, a fierce and formidable Slavic tribe, whose country was fortified
by natural defences of forest and marsh. Against them Oleg turned his arms,
and once more victory went with him; the Drevlians, while retaining their
own chieftain, were reduced to the standing of vassals, and an annual
tribute of marten and sable skins was imposed upon them. Within the next
two years the Russian ruler completed the subjugation of the Sieverskie and
enthralled the remaining lands of the Krivitches, both of which tribes had
hitherto owned allegiance to the Khazars. The growing Russian dominions
were now put under a system of taxation, the sums levied being devoted in
the first place to the payment of the Varangians in the Prince’s service. The
contribution of Novgorod was assessed at the yearly value of 300 grivnas, a
token of its substantial footing at this particular period.
It was about this time that the Ougres or Magyars, the ancestors of the
modern Hungarians, squeezed out of their Asiatic home by the pressure of
the Petchenigs, burst through the Khazar and Kievian territories and settled
themselves in Moldavia and Wallachia, and finally in Hungary. Their
passage through the Dniepr basin-land would scarcely have been
undisputed, and the Magyar Chronicles speak of a victory over Oleg; the
Russian chronicler is silent on the subject. This scurrying horde of nomad
barbarians, unlike the Avars who preceded them, or the Petchenigs and
Kumans who followed in their wake, crystallised in a marvellously short
space of time into a civilised European State, and became an important
neighbour of the Russian principality.
In 903 the young Igor was mated to a Varangian maiden named Olga, who,
by one account, was born of humble parents in the town of Pskov and
attracted the Prince by her beauty. Other accounts make her, with more
probability, a near relative of the Regent, of whose strength of character she
seems to have inherited a share.
In 907 Oleg was in a position to put into practice a project which had
probably never been lost sight of, the invasion, namely, of the Byzantine
Empire, including an attack on Constantinople itself, a project dear to the
Russian mind in the tenth century as well as in later times. His footing
differed essentially from that of Askold and Dir in their attempt at a like
undertaking. No longer the leader of a mere troop of adventurers, Oleg

swayed an army inspired by a long series of successes and confident in the
sanction and prestige of the princely authority. Slavs, Finns, and Varangians
were bonded together in a representative Russian army, trained, disciplined,
and, above all, reliant on the ability of their captain. In their long, light
barques they went down the Dniepr, hauling their craft overland where the
rapids rendered navigation impossible, and thence emerged into the Black
Sea; the boats were escorted along the river-banks by a large body of
horsemen, but the Chronicle does not tell whether this branch of the
expedition made its way through Bessarabia and Bulgaria into the Imperial
territory, and probably it only served to guard the main body from the
attacks of hostile tribes in the steppe region. Arrived in the waters of the
Bosphorus the invaders landed and ravaged the country in the vicinity of
Constantinople, burning, plundering, and slaughtering without hindrance
from the Greek forces. Leo VI., “the Philosopher,” shut himself up in his
capital and confined his measures of defence to placing a chain across the
entrance of the harbour. So much had the Eastern Empire become
centralised in the city of Constantinople, that it was apparently a matter of
small concern if the very suburbs were laid waste, or else Leo was waiting
with philosophic patience for a supernatural intervention. The Virgin,
however, not obliging with another tornado, the invaders turned their
impious arms against the city itself. According to popular tradition, Oleg
dragged his boats ashore, mounted them on wheels, spread sail, and floated
across dry land towards the city walls. Possibly he attempted the exploit,
successfully carried out some five hundred years later by Sultan Mahomet
II., of hauling his vessels overland into the waters of the harbour, a labour
which would be facilitated by the lightness and toughness of the Russian
craft. At any rate the effect of the demonstration was salutary; the Emperor,
alarmed at such a display of energy, determined to come to terms with his
barbarous enemy, first, however, the Russian chronicler alleges, trying the
experiment of an offering of poisoned meats and fruits to Oleg and his
warmen.[9] A study of the history of Byzantium fully supports the likelihood
of such a stratagem, which, had it succeeded, would have been hailed as a
miraculous epidemic, sweeping the heathen away from the threatened city.
The gift was prudently declined, and the more prosaic and expensive
method of buying off the invaders had to be resorted to. The treaty which
was concluded between the Greeks and the Russians shows that the latter
were fully alive to the advantages accruing from a free commercial

intercourse with Constantinople. Besides the levy of a fixed sum for every
man in the invading fleet, contributions were exacted for Kiev and other
towns under the Russian sway, which arrangement gave to all a share in the
national victory. More solidly advantageous, under certain specified
conditions, Russian merchants were to be permitted right of free commerce
at Constantinople.
The Christian Emperor and the pagan Prince called upon their respective
deities to witness the solemn pact between them, and Oleg, having hung his
shield in triumph on the gate of the Tzargrad, returned to Kiev loaded with
presents and covered with the glory of a successful campaign. Five years
later the great Varangian, loved and honoured by his people, feared and
respected by his foes, finished his long reign of three-and-thirty years.
Tradition has it that the soothsayers foretold that his death should be caused
by his favourite horse, whereupon he had it led away and never rode it
more. Years after, learning that it was dead, he went to see the skeleton, and
placing his foot upon the skull, taunted the warlocks with their miscarried
prophecy, whereupon a snake wriggled out and inflicted a bite, of which he
died. The same legend crops up in the folk-lore of many lands.
In venturing to compare Oleg with Charles the Great, whose life-work lay
in somewhat similar lines, it may be noted of the former that his results
were obtained with comparatively little bloodshed, and that he strengthened
the position of the dynasty while forming the empire over which it was to
rule. The fairest and most fertile districts of Russia were added to the
principality during his regency, and, more important still, the peoples whom
he subjugated were permanently welded into the confederation. The Slavs
of Kiev in the later years of Oleg were essentially the “men” of the Russian
State, a rapidity of assimilation which was scarcely observable in the case
of the Bavarians and Frisians of the Frankish Empire, or the Saxons of
Norman England. In the matter of religion, too, the heathen Prince contrasts
favourably with the great Christian Emperor, and though the worshipper of
the Christ who “came not to send peace but a sword” into the world may
have butchered his nonconforming subjects with the honestest conviction of
well-doing, it is pleasanter to read of the toleration which the follower of
Peroun extended to the Christian communities within his realm.
Igor, who after a long minority succeeded to a more
912
extensive and firmly established principality than his

father had bequeathed him, was occupied at the commencement of his reign
in suppressing a revolt of the Drevlians and Ulitches, the least well affected
of the Slav tribes subject to his rule, who had refused payment of the yearly
tribute. The gathering-in of this impost was entrusted to Svenald, a
Varangian to whom Igor deputed the internal management of the realm;
after a three-years’ struggle the rebels were mastered and the amount of
their tribute increased. A new source of uneasiness arose at this juncture
from the arrival in South Russia of the Petchenigs, a Finn-Turko tribe who
migrated from the plains of Asia in the wake of the Magyars and settled in
the steppe-land on either side of the Dniepr. The city of Kiev enjoyed an
immunity from attack from their horde by reason of the strong force at hand
for its defence, and the Russians, moreover, were interested in keeping up a
good understanding with neighbours who commanded the waterway to the
south. But to the newly-erected Hungarian State the new-comers were a
veritable thorn in the flesh, and Moldavia became a debatable ground
between the two peoples. It was an act of weakness on the part of Igor and
his advisers, with a large fighting force at their disposal, to have permitted
the establishment of a dangerous enemy or doubtful ally in such undesirable
nearness to their capital, and in a position which threatened their principal
trade-route. This policy of peace was all the more ill-judged as the restless
spirit of the Varangian warmen required some outlet for its employment,
and might fittingly have been turned to the advantage of the State. Their lust
for adventure and pillage found vent instead in independent raids, and in the
year 914 a fleet of 700 Russian ships appeared, somewhat like the
proverbial fly in amber, on the waters of the Kaspian, where they plundered
along the Persian coast.[10] Another troop penetrated into Italy in the service
of the Byzantine Emperor.
If the saying, “Happy is the country that has no history” will hold good in
every case, the bulk of Igor’s reign must have been a period of prosperity,
for nothing further is heard of Russia or its Prince till the year 941, when,
like a recurring decimal, an expedition against Constantinople is recorded
by both Greek and Russian annalists. Whether difficulties had arisen in the
trading relations of the two countries, whether the rupture was forced by a
war party among the Varangians, or whether Igor was fired with the
ambition, to which old men are at times victims, of doing something which
should shed lustre on his declining years—he was now not far off seventy—
the Chronicles do not indicate, and “what was it they fought about” is lost

sight of in the details of the fighting. With a fleet variously written down at
from 1000 to 10,000 boats, Igor descended by the old waterway into the
Black Sea and ravaged and plundered along the coasts of the Bosphorus.
The Imperial fleet was absent on service against the Saracens, with the
exception of a few vessels scarcely deemed fit for action, which were lying
in the harbour. It occurred to the Greek Emperor Romanos, after many
sleepless nights, to arm these despised ships and galleys with the
redoubtable Greek fire and steer them against the hostile flotilla, a desperate
expedient which was crowned with success; the mysterious flames, which
the water itself was unable to quench, not only enwrapped the light barques
of the Russians but demoralised their crews, and a hopeless rout ensued.
The Greeks were, however, unable to follow up their advantage, and Igor
rallied his men for a descent on the coast of Asia Minor, where he consoled
himself by pillaging the surrounding country. Here he was at length
opposed by an army under the command of the patrician Bardas and forced
to make his way to Thrace, where another reverse awaited him. With the
remains of his army the baffled prince made his way back to Kiev, leaving
many of his hapless followers in the hands of the Greeks. Luitprand, Bishop
of Cremona, present at Constantinople on an embassy, saw numbers of
them put to death by torture. The Northman was not, however, at the end of
his resources; with an energy surprising for his years, he set to work to
gather an army which should turn the scale of victory against the
Byzantians, their magical fire and intimacy with the supernatural
notwithstanding. To this end he sent his henchmen into the bays and fjords
of the Baltic to call in the sea-rovers to battle and plunder under his flag.
The invitation they were not loth to accept, but many of them showed a
disinclination to bind themselves under the leadership of the Russian
Prince, and rushed instead, like a brood of ducklings breaking away from
their foster-mother, into the charmed waters of the Kaspian, where they
carried on an exuberant marauding expedition. A sufficient number,
however, followed Igor in his second campaign against the Tzargrad to
swell his ranks to a formidable host, and word was sent to the Greek capital,
from Bulgarian and Greek sources, that the waters of the Black Sea were
covered with the vessels of a Russian fleet. The Emperor did not hesitate
what course to adopt, but hastily despatched an embassy to meet the invader
with offers to pay the tribute exacted by Oleg and renew the treaty between
the two countries. The Imperial messengers fell in with Igor at the mouth of

the Danube, and their proposals were agreed to after a consultation between
the Prince and his droujhiniki,[11] who in fact gained without further
struggle as much as they could have hoped for in the event of a victory. Igor
returned to Kiev as a conqueror, loaded with presents from Romanos, who
sent thither in the following year his ambassadors with a text of the treaty.
This was sworn to by the Prince and his captains before the idol of Peroun,
except in the case of the Christian minority, who performed their oath at the
altar of S. Elias. The fact of a Christian cathedral—a designation probably
more ambitious than the building—being established at Kiev at this period
speaks much for the toleration shown to the foreign religion by the
followers of the national god.
Igor did not long enjoy the fruits of this success. Baulked of their expected
campaign, his men of war chafed at the inaction of the old man’s court, and
envied the comparative advantages thrown in the way of Svenald’s body-
guards. It was a custom of the Russian rulers to spend one-half of the year,
from November till April, in visiting the scattered districts of their
dominion, for the double purpose of keeping in touch with their widely-
sundered subjects and gathering in the revenue. This winter harvesting of
the tribute (which Igor in his declining years left in the hands of his deputed
steward) is interesting as being probably the earliest stage of Russian home
trade. For the most part the payment in kind consisted of furs and skins, the
bulk of which went from the various places of collection in boat-loads
down to Kiev, from thence eventually making its way to the sea marts of
Southern Europe. The forest country of the Drevlians, rich in its yield of
thick-coated sables and yellow-chested martens, lay in convenient
neighbourhood to Kiev, and thither the Prince’s men clamoured to be led for
the purpose of gleaning an increased tribute. In a moment of fatal weakness
Igor consented, and in the autumn of 945 set out to close his reign as he had
begun it, in a quarrel with “the tree people” over the matter of their taxing.
The armed host which accompanied the Prince overawed the resentment
bred by this stretching of the sovereign claims, but the apparent ease with
which the imposts were gathered in tempted Igor to linger behind his
returning main-guard for the purpose of exacting a further levy. The
exasperated Drevlians, hearkening to the counsel of their chieftain, Mal, “to
rise and slay the wolf who was bent on devouring their whole flock,” turned
suddenly upon the fate-blind Igor in the midst of his importunings and put
him to a hideous death. Two young trees were bent towards each other

nearly to the ground, and to them the unfortunate tyrant was bound; then the
trees were allowed to spring back to their normal position. Thus did the tree
people avenge their wrongs.
The safest standard by which to judge a reign of the inward history of
which so little can be known is the measure of stability which it leaves
behind it. The widow of the murdered Prince and his young heir Sviatoslav
came peaceably into the vacant throneship, and it is no small tribute to the
statecraft of Rurik and his successors that the grandson of the Varangian
stranger and adventurer should inherit, at a tender age and under the
guardianship of a woman, the Russian principality without opposition and
without question.
The young Kniaz,[12] notwithstanding the Slavonic name which he was the
first of his house to bear, was brought up mainly among Skandinavian
influences, his person and the domestic management of the State being
entrusted to Varangian hands. His mother Olga bore no small share of the
administration, and the vigour and energy of her doings were well worthy
of the heroic age of early Russia. The first undertaking which was called
for, alike by political necessity and the promptings of revenge, was the
chastisement of her husband’s murderers. With the idea possibly of averting
the storm by a bold stroke of diplomacy, the latter had sent messengers to
the widowed princess suggesting a connubial alliance with the implicated
chieftain Mal, a proposal which was met with a feigned acceptance. Having
lulled the apprehensions of the Drevlians, Olga marched into their country
with a large following and turned the projected festivities into a massacre,
after which she besieged the town of Korosten,[13] the scene of Igor’s death,
and the last refuge of the disconcerted rebels. The Chronicle of the monk of
Kiev gives a quaint, old-world account of the manner of the taking of
Korosten. All the summer the inhabitants defended themselves stubbornly,
and the princess at last agreed to conclude a peace on receipt of a tribute,
which was to consist of a live pigeon and three live sparrows from each
homestead. How they caught the sparrows is left to the imagination, but the
tribute was gladly paid. At the approach of evening Olga caused the birds to
be set free, each with a lighted brand fastened to its tail, whereupon their
homing instincts took them back to their dwellings in the thatched roofs and
barns of Korosten, with the result that the town was soon in a blaze, and the

inhabitants fell easy victims to the swords of the besiegers. Thus was
avenged the death of Igor, the son of Rurik.
Shortly after this exploit Olga left Kiev and went into the northern parts of
her son’s realm, fixing her court for some years at Novgorod and Pskov, and
raising the prosperity of those townships by keeping up a connection with
the Skandinavian lands. Later she turned her thoughts towards the south,
not with warlike projects, as her forerunners had done, but with peaceful
intent. Accompanied by a suitable train she journeyed, in the year 957, to
Constantinople, where she was received and entertained with due splendour
by the Emperor Constantine-born-in-the-Purple and the Patriarch
Theophylact. Here, in the metropolis of the Christian religion, surrounded
by all the splendours of ritual of which the Greeks were masters, this
surprising woman adopted the prevalent faith, received at the hands of her
Imperial host and sponsor the baptismal name of Helen, and became “the
first Russian who mounted to the heavenly kingdom”—a rather disparaging
reflection on the labours of the early Church at Kiev.
Loaded with presents from the Imperial treasury, Olga returned to her son,
whom she strove fruitlessly to detach from the gods of his fathers to the
worship of the new deities she had brought from Constantinople. The
Russian mind was not yet ripe for the mystic cult of the Greek or Latin
Church, and the conversion of the Prince’s mother made little impression on
either boyarins or people. In the year 964 Sviatoslav definitely assumed the
government of the country, and struck the key-note of his reign by
extending his sway over the Viatitches, the last Slavonic tribe who paid
tribute to the Khazars. This was only preliminary to an attack on that people
in their own country. The fate of their once powerful empire was decided in
one battle; the arms of the young Kniaz were victorious; Sarkel, the White
City, fell into his hands, the outlying possessions of the Khazars, east and
south, were subdued, and the kakhanate was reduced to a shadow of its
former glory. It would have been a wiser policy to have left untouched, for
the time being, the integrity of a State which was no longer formidable, and
which interposed a civilised barrier between the Russian lands and the
barbarian hordes of the East, and to have pursued instead a war of
extermination against the Petchenigs. Sviatoslav was himself to experience
the disastrous results of this mistake.

In the following year the centre of interest shifts from
968 the south-east to the south-west. The Greek Emperor,
Nicephorus Phocas, irritated against his vassal Peter,
King or Tzar of Bulgaria, in that he had not exerted himself against the
Magyars, who were raiding the Imperial dominions, turned for help,
according to the approved Byzantine policy, to another neighbour, and
commissioned Sviatoslav to march against Bulgaria. A large sum of Greek
gold was conveyed to Kiev by an ambassador from the Emperor, and in
return the Russian Prince set out for the Danube with a following of 60,000
men. The onset of the invaders was irresistible, and the Bulgarians scattered
and fled, leaving their capital, Péréyaslavetz, and Dristr, a strongly fortified
place on the Danube, in the hands of the conqueror. To complete the good
fortune of Sviatoslav the Tzar Peter died at this critical moment, and the
Russian Prince settled down in his newly-acquired city, undisputed master
of Bulgaria. East and west his arms had been successful, but in the very
heart of his realm he had left a dread and watchful enemy, who would not
fail to take advantage of his absence. While his army was at quarters in the
head city of the Bulgarians, his own capital was being besieged and closely
pressed by the Petchenigs, that “greedy people, devouring the bodies of
men, corrupt and impure, bloody and cruel beasts,” as the monk of Edessa
portrays them; in which certificate it is to be hoped they were over-
described. The folk in the beleaguered city, among the rest the aged Olga
and the young sons of Sviatoslav, were in straits from want of food, and
must have succumbed if one of their number had not made his way by
means of a feint through the enemy’s camp, and carried news of their
desperate condition to a boyarin named Prititch who was luckily at hand
with a small force. On his approach the Petchenigs drew off, thinking that
the Prince himself had returned with his army, and Kiev was relieved from
the straits of famine. Sviatoslav meanwhile had learned of the danger which
threatened his realm and household and hastened back from Bulgaria. Even
this narrowly staved-off disaster did not open his eyes to the menace which
these undesirable neighbours ever held over him and his, and he contented
himself with inflicting a severe defeat on them and concluding a worthless
peace. Possibly he found it hard to arouse among his followers any
enthusiasm for a campaign against an enemy who had no wealthy cities to
plunder or riches of any kind available for spoil. In any case he was bitten
with the desire, to which rulers of Russia seem to have been periodically

subject, of shifting the seat of his government to a fresh capital. Before his
mother and his boyarins he declared his project of fixing his seat at
Péréyaslavetz in preference to Kiev, and enumerated the advantages of the
former. From the Greeks came gold, fabrics, wine, and fruits; from
Bohemia and Hungary horses and silver; from Russia furs, wax, honey, and
slaves. To Olga, with the hand of death already on her, the question was not
one of great moment, and four days later she had made her last journey to a
vault in the cathedral of Kiev. A certain compassion is excited by the
contemplation of the aged queen, dying lonely in a faith that her husband
had never known, which her son had not accepted, just as the realm over
which she had ruled so actively was to be enlarged and its political centre
shifted. Her death removed the last obstacle to Sviatoslav’s design, the last
that is to say with which he reckoned. Before departing for Bulgaria the
Prince set his sons, who could not at this date (970) have been of a very
mature age, in responsible positions, Yaropalk, the elder, becoming
governor of Kiev, and Oleg prince of the Drevlians. The Novgorodskie,
who had been left for many years to the hireling care of Sviatoslav’s
deputies, demanded a son of the princely house as ruler, threatening in case
of refusal to choose one from elsewhere for themselves; here the stormy
spirit of Velikie Novgorod shows itself for the first time. Happily the supply
of sons was equal to the demand; by one of Olga’s maidens named
Malousha the Prince had become father of Vladimir, destined to play an
important part in the history of Russia, and to him, under the guardianship
of his mother’s brother Drobuinya, was confided the government of the
northern town. Having thus arranged for the present security and future
confusion of his territories by instituting the system of separate appanages,
Sviatoslav set out for his new possession beyond the Danube. “A prince
should, if possible, live in the country he has conquered,” wrote the political
codist of mediæval Italy, and the Russian monarch found that even his brief
absence had lost him much of the fruits of his victory. The Bulgarians
mustered to oppose his march with a large force, and a desperate battle
ensued, in which defeat was only staved off from the invaders by the heroic
exertions of their leader. Péréyaslavetz was retaken, and Sviatoslav again
became master of the Balkan land, permitting, however, Boris, son of the
late Tzar, to keep the gold crown, frontlet, and red buskins which were the
Bulgarian marks of royalty. The Greeks now repented their folly in having
established in their immediate neighbourhood, within a few short marches

of Constantinople, a prince who was far more dangerous to them than ever
the Bulgarian Tzars had been. John Zimisces, who had succeeded the ill-
fated Nicephorus on the precarious throne of the Eastern Empire, called
upon Sviatoslav to fulfil the engagement made with his predecessor and
evacuate the Imperial dependency. The Prince in possession
contemptuously refused to comply with this demand, and threatened instead
to march against Constantinople and drive the Greeks into Asia. Fortunately
for the Empire at this crisis her new ruler was a soldier of proved ability,
and knew also who were the right men to rely on for active support and co-
operation. On the other hand Sviatoslav prepared for the coming struggle by
enlisting the aid of the Bulgarians themselves, the Magyars, and even
roving bodies of Petchenigs. With this mixed force he burst into Thrace,
ravaging the country up to the walls of Adrianople, where the Imperial
general Bardas-Scleras, brother-in-law of Zimisces, had entrenched himself.
Here in the autumn of 970 the fierce bravery of the Russians and their allies
was matched against the Greek generalship, with the result that Sviatoslav
was forced to retire into Bulgaria. The recall of Bardas to suppress an
insurrection in Capadocia prevented him from following up his advantage,
and gave the Russians an opportunity for retiring from a position which was
no longer safe. Sviatoslav, however, either did not see his danger, or chose
to disregard it rather than return home baffled and empty-handed.
Accordingly he spent the year 971 in aimless raids into Macedonia, while
his wily enemy made the most elaborate preparations for his destruction. In
the spring of 972 Zimisces advanced with a large army into Bulgaria, while
a Greek fleet blocked the mouths of the Danube, cutting off the Russian line
of retreat. Sviatoslav with the bulk of his army was encamped at Dristr, and
here tidings came that the Emperor had crossed the Balkans and, after a
stubborn resistance, taken Péréyaslavetz—“the Town of Victory”—and
possessed himself of the person of Prince Boris. Nothing daunted,
Sviatoslav led his army against that of Zimisces, and a battle ensued which,
from the heroic valour with which it was contested and the important issues
involved, deserves to be recognised as one of the decisive battles of history.
Both leaders showed the utmost personal courage, and victory for a long
while hung doubtful, but at length the Greek forces prevailed and
Sviatoslav was driven back upon Dristr, his last stronghold in Bulgaria. This
time the Imperial success was followed up, and the town was attacked with
a vigour and determination which was only equalled by the stubbornness of

the defence. The Russians made sorties by day, retreating when
outnumbered, under the protection of their huge bucklers, to within the
walls of the town, from whence they issued at night, to burn by the light of
the moon the bodies of their fallen comrades, and sacrifice over their ashes
the prisoners they had taken. By way of propitiating their gods, or possibly
the Danube, which was covered with the boats of their enemies, they
drowned in its waters cocks and little children.[14] The Magister John, a
relation of the Emperor, having fallen into their hands in a skirmish, was
torn in pieces and his head exposed on the battlements. The besieged,
however, were daily reduced in numbers and weakened by want, and
Sviatoslav resolved on a last bid for victory. Swarming forth from behind
their battered ramparts, the men of the North met their foes in open field,
and the wager of battle was staunchly and obstinately contested. Sviatoslav
was struck off his horse and nearly killed, but the Russians did not give way
until mid-day, when a dust-storm blew into their faces and forced them to
yield the fight, leaving outside the walls of Dristr, according to the
Byzantine annalists, 15,000 slain. The monkish chroniclers, as usual,
attributed the hard-won victory to supernatural intervention, and while the
Imperial soldiers were resting from their exertions a story was circulated
throughout the camp giving the credit of the day to an apparition of S.
Theodore of Stratilat, who had appeared in the thick of the battle mounted
on a white horse. The Russian defeat, whether due to saint, army, or dust-
storm, was sufficiently decisive to bring the Prince to sue for terms, which
were readily granted by the Emperor. The Russians engaged to withdraw
from Bulgaria and to live at peace with the Eastern Empire; the Greeks on
their part engaged to permit Russian merchants free commercial intercourse
at Constantinople. More than this, the Emperor requested the Petchenigs to
allow Sviatoslav and his thinned host unmolested passage to his own
territories. Whether this was done in good faith, or whether secret
instructions were given to the contrary, is a matter of opinion, or at most of
induction; it is pleasanter to set against the general treachery of Byzantine
statecraft the fact that Zimisces was a brave man, and to give him credit for
the honour which is the usual accompaniment of courage.
The importance of this defeat cannot be over-estimated, and it is interesting
to speculate as to the possible results of a victory for Sviatoslav—a victory
which might well have changed the whole course of European history. A
powerful Slavonic principality with its headquarters in the basin of the

Danube would have attracted to itself, by the magnetism of blood, the
kindred races of Serbs, Kroats, Dalmatians, Slavonians, and Moravians, all
of which, with the exception of the first-named, were eventually absorbed
into the Germanic Empire; while Bohemia, instead of gravitating towards
the house of Habsburg, would more naturally have entered the Russian
State-organism. From Péréyaslavetz to Constantinople is a short cry, and it
is reasonable to conjecture that under these circumstances the Slav and not
the Turk would in due course have stepped into the shoes of the Paleologi.
The palace intrigues, treason, and assassination which placed John Zimisces
on the throne of the Cæsars at this critical juncture in the affairs of the
Empire had an effect on the destinies of Europe which can only be likened
in importance to the Moorish defeat on the plain of Tours at the hands of
Charles Martel.
After a meeting between the leaders of the two armies, during which the
Emperor sat his horse on the river bank while the vanquished Prince stood,
simply clad, in a boat which he himself helped to work, the latter made his
way towards Kiev with the remnant of his following. But the enemy which
his short-sighted policy had neglected to crush was waiting for him now in
the hour of his extremity; the Petchenigs held the cataracts of the Dniepr,
where the returning boats must be dragged ashore, and notwithstanding
their agreement with Zimisces, blocked the passage of the Russian army.
Sviatoslav waited at the mouth of the river till the coming of spring, when
he risked a battle with his savage enemies, and lost. Warrior to the last, he
died fighting, and tradition has it that his skull became a drinking-cup for
the chief of the Petchenigs; of the mighty host which had started out for the
conquest of Bulgaria but few made their way back to Kiev. Thus perished
Sviatoslav, in spite of his Slavonic name a thorough type of the Varangian
chieftain. Brave, active, and enduring, his chivalry was in advance of his
age, and it is told of him that he always gave his enemies fair warning of
attack, sending a messenger before him with the tidings, “I go against you.”
He was, however, more a fighter than a general, and did not display the
statesmanlike qualities of Rurik, Oleg, and Olga, while the unhappy results
of his partition of the realm between his three sons were immediately
apparent at his death. Yaropalk did not enjoy any authority over the districts
ruled by his brothers, who lived as independent princes. The inevitable
quarrels were not long in breaking out. Consequent on a hunting fray in the
wooded Drevlian country between the retainers of Oleg and Yaropalk, in

which one of the latter’s men was killed, an armed feud sprang up between
the brothers, which came to a tragic end in a fight around the town of
Oubrovtch. Oleg, worsted in the battle, was thrown
977 down by the press of his own soldiers as he was seeking
to enter the town, and trampled to death in the general
stampede. Yaropalk is said to have been plunged in remorse at this
untoward event, but the news was otherwise interpreted at Novgorod and
caused the hasty flight of the young Vladimir to Skandinavian lands,
beyond the reach of his half-brother’s malevolence. Yaropalk sent his
underlings to hold the vacant principality, and thus became for the time sole
ruler of Russia. The outcast, however, after two years of wandering in
viking lands, reappeared suddenly at Novgorod with a useful following of
Norse adventurers, and drove out his brother’s lieutenants, following up this
act of defiance by moving at the head of his men towards Kiev. On the way
he turned aside to Polotzk, then held as a dependent fief by a Varangian
named Rogvolod. This chief had a daughter, Rogneda, trothed in marriage
to Yaropalk, and Vladimir, by way of ousting his half-brother from all his
possessions, sent and demanded her hand for himself. The maiden haughtily
refused to wed the “son of a slave,” and added that she was already pledged
to Yaropalk; whereupon the headstrong lover stormed the town, slew her
father and two brothers, and bore off the unwilling bride—a wooing which
somewhat resembles that of William the Norman and Matilda of Flanders
some half-hundred years later. The despoiled rival had, on the approach of
Vladimir and his war-carles, shut himself up in Kiev, but growing doubtful
of the goodwill of the inhabitants, he suffered himself to be persuaded by
false counsellors to move into the small town of Rodnya. In consequence of
this faint-hearted desertion Kiev threw open her gates to Vladimir, who
followed up his good fortune by besieging the Prince in his new refuge.
Pressed by assault without and famine within—the miseries suffered by the
Rodnya folk have passed into a proverb—the hunted Kniaz rashly, or
perhaps despairingly, agreed to visit his peace-feigning brother at his palace
in Kiev. Yaropalk alone was allowed to enter the courtyard doors, behind
which lurked two Varangian guards, who used their blades quickly and
well, and Vladimir reigned as sole Prince of the Russians.
The early years of the new reign were devoted to
980
family-founding on a generous scale, the Prince, by his
several wives and concubines, becoming the father of

manifold sons, all of whom bore names of distinctly Slavonic resonance. By
the raped Rogneda he had Isiaslav, Mstislav, Yaroslav, Vsevolod, and two
daughters; a second wife, of Czech origin, presented him with Vouytchislav;
a third was the mother of Sviatoslav, and a fourth, of Bulgarian nationality,
was responsible for Boris and Glieb. In addition to his own ample offspring
he adopted into his family Sviatopolk, the posthumous son of Yaropalk. But
the pressure of family cares did not absorb his undivided attention. On the
western border several Russian strongholds in the district of Galitz (Galicia)
had been seized during the embarrassed reign of Yaropalk by Mscislav,
Duke of Poland, and for the recovery of these Vladimir set his armed men
in motion. Tcherven, Peremysl, and other places fell into his hands, but the
wars on the Polish march dragged on at intervals and outlasted the reigns of
both princes. This was the first clash of the two neighbour nations whose
history was to be so dramatically interblended. The Duke of Poland had his
hands so full with the intrusive affairs of Bohemia, Hungary, the Western
Empire, and the Wends, that he was obliged to content himself with a policy
of defence on his eastern border, and Vladimir was able to turn his arms in
other directions. In 982 he suppressed a revolt of the Viatitches, and in the
next year extended his authority among the Livs as far as the Baltic.
According to the Chronicle of the Icelandic annalist Sturleson, these people
paid tribute to the Russian Prince, but his sway over them could only have
lasted a while, as they certainly enjoyed independence till a much later date.
Two years later he made a successful raid into the country of the Volga-
Bulgarians, which he wisely followed up by a well-marketed peace, and
returned to Kiev not empty-handed.
At this period the Christian religion was making its final conquest of the
outlying princes and peoples of Europe. The double influence of the Holy
Roman Empire and the Papal See—the latter now free from any
dependence on the Byzantine Court—gave that religion a powerful
advertisement among the outlandish folks, and as each nation was brought
into subjection to, or enjoyed intercourse with the great central State, so the
rites and ceremonies of the prevailing worship were displayed before their
eyes with all the glamour and sanction of Imperial authority. The Saxon
annalist, Lambert of Aschaffenburg, recounts, for instance, how Easter was
kept at Quedlingburg in the year 973 by the Emperor Otho I. and his son
(afterwards Otho II.), attended by envoys from Rome, Greece, Benevento,
Italy, Hungary, Denmark, Slavonia, Bulgaria, and Russia, “with great

presents.” The feasts and devotions observed in the little town, the services
in the hill-top abbey, founded by Henry the Fowler, the processions of
chanting monks with lighted tapers—all in honour of the Man-God who had
died in a far country, but who rose triumphant to live above them in the sky
and behind the high altar—would not fail to make deep impression on the
heathen visitors. The western Prince was so much greater and richer and
more powerful than their princes, might not the western gods be greater
than their gods? Bohemia, which early in its history came into close contact
with the Empire, had already adopted Christianity, and in Poland Vladimir’s
contemporary and sometime antagonist, Mscislav, had in 966 entered the
same faith. Hungary was still pagan, though its conversion was to come in
the lifetime of the reigning Duke (Geyza), while in Norway, towards the
close of the century, the worshippers of Wodin were to be confronted with
the alternative of death or baptism.
In no country was the transition from paganism to Christianity effected in
so remarkable a manner as in Russia. Vladimir, who had shown much zeal
in erecting and ornamenting statues of Peroun at Kiev and Novgorod, grew
suddenly dissatisfied with the national worship, without at the same time
feeling special attraction towards any substitute. While contemplating a
desertion of the old religion he naturally wished to replace it with the most
reliable form of faith obtainable, and for this purpose trusty counsellors
were sent on a mission of inquiry to Rome, to Constantinople, to the Volga-
Bulgarians (who had embraced Islam), and to the Jews—probably those
dwelling among the Khazars. When the scattered envoys returned, the result
of their investigations was laid before Vladimir, and this young man in
search of a religion examined and compared the pretensions of the
competing creeds. Circumcision and abstinence from wine put the cult of
the Prophet out of court; the first of these objections applied equally to the
Jewish doctrine, and the vagabond condition of its votaries offended the
monarch’s idea of an established religion. The Romish faith was
unacceptable by reason of the claims, which her head was beginning to
assert, of supreme dominion in things spiritual and active interference in
temporal matters; moreover, her ritual, especially as the Russians may have
seen it practised in the infant churches of Bohemia, Poland, and Eastern
Germany, was overshadowed and eclipsed by the splendid ceremonial of
the Greek Church, particularly in the services of S. Sophia at
Constantinople. “The magnificence of the temple, the presence of all the

Greek clergy, the richness of the sacerdotal vestments, the ornaments of the
altar, the exquisite odour of the incense, the sweet singing of the choirs, the
silence of the people, in short, the holy and mysterious majesty of the
ceremonies, all struck the Russians with admiration.”[15] The recital of these
splendours inclined the Prince to a favourable consideration of the Greek
faith, if indeed he had not previously had leanings towards that religion, and
the finishing touch was added by an argument which appealed to his family
pride. “If the Greek religion had not been the true religion, would your
grandmother Olga, the wisest of mortals, have adopted it?” asked the
partisans of the new doctrines; and the matter was settled. But Vladimir had
a procedure of his own for the delicate process of changing his religion: not
as a humble penitent was he going to enter the true Church. For the baptism
of a sovereign prince an archbishop was an indispensable requisite, and it
did not suit his ideas of dignity to apply for the loan of such a functionary to
the Greek Emperors, who would have been only too glad to oblige him in
the matter. Vladimir chose rather to capture his archbishop. For this purpose
he engaged in one of the most extraordinary expeditions which history has
furnished. Setting out from Kiev with a large host, he made his way down
the Dniepr and along the Black Sea coast to the ancient town of Kherson, a
self-governing dependency of the Eastern Empire. Closely besieging it, he
was met with a desperate resistance, and only made himself master of the
place by cutting off the springs which supplied it with water. From this
position of vantage he sent to the brothers Basil and Constantine, who
shared the Greek Imperial throne, a request or demand for the hand of their
sister Anne. The circumstances of these princes did not admit of a refusal;
the celebrated generals Bardas Sclerus and Phocas were in active revolt
against the successors of John Zimisces, and another change of dynasty
seemed imminent; consequently Vladimir’s suggested alliance was agreed
to on the stipulation that he became a Christian and furnished the Imperial
family with some Russian auxiliaries. The Princess Anne was despatched to
join her destined husband, who was forthwith baptized by the Archbishop
of Kherson in the church of S. Basil, and the marriage ceremony followed.
The Prince returned to Kiev with his bride and a strange booty of priests,
sacred vessels, and saintly relics, having restored unfortunate Kherson, for
which he had no further use, to the Greek Emperors, and sent them the
promised succours. By this satisfactory arrangement Basil and Constantine
were able to conserve their possession of the Byzantine Empire, while

Vladimir on his part “obtained the hand of the princess and the kingdom of
heaven.”
Fantastic as this procedure of conversion may at first sight appear, there was
probably sound policy underlying it; the Russians would be reconciled to
the deposition of their wonted gods, and the acceptance of fresh ones from
their old enemies, the Greeks, by the consoling reflection that their Prince
had, at the sword’s point, “captured” the new religion from alien hands.
Priests have taught that there is but one way of entering the true faith;
Vladimir demonstrated that there are at least two.
The conversion of the people followed in due course; the wooden statue of
Peroun, with its silver face and moustache of gold, was thrown down,
flogged with whips, and hurled into the Dniepr, whose waters cast it up
again on the bank. The affrighted people rushed to worship their old god,
but the Prince’s men pushed him back into the current, and Peroun the
silver-faced was swept down the stream and vanished into the purple haze
“where the dead gods sleep.”
On the banks of the same river that had engulfed their fallen idol the
inhabitants of Kiev were mustered by command, and after the Greek priests
had consecrated its waters, into it plunged at a given signal the whole
wondering multitude, men, women, and children, and were baptized in one
batch. A like scene was enacted at Novgorod, with the substitution of the
Volkhov for the Dniepr, and throughout Russia the transition was effected in
an equally successful manner. No doubt the cult of the ancient pantheism
lingered for a while, especially in the remoter districts, but it was merged in
time in the saint worship of the new religion, and the old heathen festivals
and year-marks became, under other names, those of the Christian calendar.
The feast of Kolyada and the birthday of the Sun slid naturally into the
celebrations of the Nativity without losing aught of its festive character. In
similar fashion the institutions of the Greek Orthodox Church everywhere
took root in the country till they became part of the life of the people. Kiev
henceforth is a city of churches and shrines, with its Cathedral of S. Sofia
and its Golden Gate, in ambitious imitation of Constantinople.
The adoption of Christianity in its Greek form exercised a momentous
influence on the history of Russia. Up to this point she had been travelling
in the same direction as the growing nations around her, and seemed

destined to take her place in the European family; but by taking as her
ghostly sponsor the decaying Byzantine State, which could scarcely protect
its own territories, instead of cultivating the alliance of the all-powerful
Roman Papacy, she prepared herself for a gradual isolation from Western
civilisation and Western sympathy. For although the actual temporal power
of the Holy See did not extend much beyond the immediate neighbourhood
of the Eternal City, the moral ascendancy which the Church possessed over
some fifteen kingdoms and a crowd of lesser states gave her the disposal of
an ever-available fund of temporal support, and enabled her to extend her
protection or assistance to all the bodies politic, great or small, within her
communion. Witness, for instance, the vast armies she was able to send
careering into the “Holy Land” on behoof of Jerusalem-bound pilgrims, and
later, the troops she could raise from various parts of the Empire for the
reinforcement of the Teutonic Order in its struggles with the heathen
Prussians and Pomeranians. Russia, by her adoption of the Greek instead of
the Roman faith, put herself beyond the pale of Catholic Christendom, and
in the hour of her striving with the Mongol Horde could look for no help
from Western Europe; when she emerged from that strife she was less
European than Asiatic. In like manner the Greek Empire, two hundred years
later, fell unbefriended into the hands of the Ottomans. And in civilisation
as well as in war the dominions of the princes of Kiev suffered from their
lack of intercourse with Rome; the visits of cardinals and nuncios would
have served as a constant link between Russia and the West, and have
stimulated the growth of towns in the wild lands that led up to the Dniepr
basin. What in fact Rome did for Hungary, on the latter’s entry into the
Latin Church—raising her from the position of a semi-barbarous state to
that of an important kingdom—that might she have done under similar
circumstances for the Eastern principality. There is, of course, another side
to this reckoning; Russia, at least, was spared some of the distractions and
unhappinesses which radiated from the throne of the apostles, while her
very isolation in matters of religious polity helped to preserve for her a
strong individuality which other Slav or Magyar nations lost as the price of
their intercourse with Catholic-Teutonic Europe. Possibly her history is not
even yet sufficiently developed for a final assessment of the matter, but for
present purposes it is necessary to note a turning-point in her political
evolution—a turn towards the East.

Although Christianity was become opposed to the practice of polygamy,
Vladimir’s first act after his baptism had been to increase his connubial
establishment by marriage with the Imperial princess. Three more sons had
been added to his already ample family, and, disregarding the lesson of the
disturbances which had followed the partition of the realm between himself
and his half-brothers, the Prince resolved to parcel out his dominions
among his surviving sons and his nephew. Eight principalities were carved
out from the parent stem, and became each the share of a dependent kniaz,
to wit, Novgorod, Polotzk, Rostov, Mourom, the Drevlian country, Vladimir
(in Volhynia), Tmoutorokan, and Tourov.
In 998 the Russian arms were turned successfully against the Krovatians on
the Galician frontier, and against the ever troublesome Petchenigs, who
continued to disturb the southern borders at intervals during the reign.
Another war broke out later in the north. Vladimir had given refuge, and
possibly support, to Olaf, aspirant to the Norwegian crown, then held by
Erik, and when Olaf at last succeeded in ousting his rival, the latter, in
revenge, “came into the realm of King Vladimir,” in the vigorous words of
the Icelandic saga, and “fell a-harrying, and slew men-folk, and burnt all
before him, and laid waste the land; and he came to Aldeigia-burg[16], and
beset it till he won the stead. There he slew many folk and brake down and
burnt all the burg, and thereafter fared wide about Garth-realm[17] doing all
deeds of war.” It was four years before Vladimir was able to drive the
“spear-storm bounteous Eric” away from his northern coasts. The date of
this war is uncertain; probably it stretched into the second decade of the
new century. Vladimir, who had lost his Imperial throne-mate in 1011, was
confronted in 1014 with a domestic trouble of another nature; his son
Yaroslav, Kniaz of Novgorod, refused to continue the yearly tribute which
that principality was wont to pay into the Grand Prince’s treasury, and
declared himself independent of Kiev. Vladimir made ready to march
against his rebellious son, who on his part prepared to resist his angry
father, but the sudden failing of the old man’s powers and an inroad of the
perennial Petchenigs delayed the struggle. Vladimir’s
1015
favourite son Boris, Prince of Rostov, was put in charge
of the forces sent against the invaders, and during his
absence the monarch ended his days at Berestov (a village near Kiev),
leaving the succession to the Grand principality an open question.

The character of this Prince, to whom the Church gave the title of “Holy,”
and who was commemorated by his subjects as “the Great,” is a difficult
one for the historian to appraise. The excesses of a stormy and well-spent
youth were atoned for, in the eyes of the monkish chroniclers, by an old age
of almsgiving and other decorative virtues, and in most respects the doings
of his reign gave evidence of wise and wary management. The splitting up
of his kingdom was a flaw in his statecraft which had, however, the sanction
of custom in the times in which he lived.
The only member of the Grand Prince’s family within reach of Kiev at the
moment of his death was his nephew Sviatopalk, ruler of the province of
Tourov, in which capacity, according to the contemporary Chronicle of
Ditmar, Bishop of Merseburg, he had, at the prompting of his father-in-law
Boleslas, King of Poland, raised a rebellion against Vladimir. The attempt
was frustrated and punished by the imprisonment of the rebel and his wife,
but apparently a reconciliation had taken place between the uncle and
nephew, and Sviatopalk was at large, and, what was more important, on the
spot when the throne of Kiev became empty. The boyarins of the court, ill-
disposed towards a prince who was outside the immediate family of their
late master, tried to keep back the tidings of his death while they sent
messengers to recall Boris from his fruitless campaign against the
Petchenigs. The corpse was wrapped round in a covering, let down by ropes
from a palace window in the dead of night, and borne hurriedly to the
church of the Bogoroditza (Mother of God) at Kiev. Rumours of the
Prince’s death, however, began to fly about the city, and all precautions
were rendered abortive by the tell-tale sight of the crowds which flocked to
lament over his body. Sviatopalk proclaimed himself Grand Prince, rallied
the boyarins to his side by a timely distribution of gifts, and then proceeded
to strike, with the instinct of self-preservation, at the several kinsmen who
were within reach. Prince Boris was surprised and slain one night in his tent
near the banks of the Alta, being, the Chronicles relate, engaged in prayer at
the time of his murder. This circumstance procured for him the posthumous
honour of sainthood, and he became a national fetish in the calendar of the
Russian Church. His brother Glieb, decoyed from his principality of
Mourom by a feigned message from his defunct father, was waylaid while
travelling down the Dniepr and met the same doom—shared also in the
attendant glory of subsequent canonisation. Sviatoslav, Prince of the
Drevlian country, taking natural affright at Sviatopalk’s deeds, which

seemed to foreshadow the extinction of the sons of Vladimir, fled towards
Hungary; at the foot of the Karpathian Mountains, however, he was
overtaken and killed by the Grand Prince’s men. From this scene of
slaughter and violence there escaped a shivering fugitive, the Princess
Predslava, a daughter of the luckless house of Vladimir, who made her way
with all speed to Novgorod; there she found her brother Yaroslav red with
the blood of his subjects, shed in cold vindictiveness rather than in hot
quarrel. The hideous wrath and dole called forth by the doings of Sviatopalk
mastered all other passions, and led the Prince to throw himself on the
goodwill of his misused people; and the men of Novgorod, foregoing their
private griefs, turned their rage and their weapons against the monster of
Kiev. A thousand Varangians and fourteen thousand
1016 Russians marched southward with Yaroslav against
Sviatopalk, who on his part had got together a large
force, including a troop of Petchenigs. A battle was fought on the Dniepr
banks near Lubetch, which resulted in the overthrow of the usurper, who
fled to Poland, leaving the throne of Kiev to his triumphant rival.
Yaroslav did not remain long time in peaceable possession. Boleslas
“Khrabrie,” the warlike King of Poland, having by the Peace of Bautzen
composed his outstanding differences with the Germanic Kaiser (Heinrich
II.), burst into Russia at the head of a large army, defeated Yaroslav on the
banks of the Bug, and reimposed his son-in-law upon the people of Kiev.
The ousted prince withdrew to Novgorod, and but for the insistance of his
subjects would have sought sanctuary, as his father had done under similar
circumstances, in Skandinavian lands. The Novgorodskie, not wishing to be
left to the wrath of Sviatopalk, kept their prince with them by the simple
expedient of destroying all the boats available for his flight. Sviatopalk
himself smoothed the way for a renewal of the strife on more equal terms.
The Poles had been distributed in scattered winter quarters throughout the
province of Kiev, and Boleslas himself had established his court in the city.
Possibly the Russian Kniaz was impatient of the prolonged presence of the
Poles in his lands, and deemed that heroic measures were needed to hasten
their departure; anyhow he devised and carried out the plan of a general
massacre of the unwelcome guests. Boleslas hastily left Kiev with the
remnant of his men, bearing with him as much treasure as he could lay
hands on, and retaining in his hold the Red Russian towns on his border.
The departure of the Poles brought as a consequence the onfall of Yaroslav,

and Sviatopalk was obliged to seek support among the Petchenigs before
venturing to take the field against his cousin. The two
1019 forces met near the banks of the Alta, and there was
waged a fierce and stubborn battle, the like of which,
wrote the Kievian chronicler, had never been seen in Russia. Towards
evening Yaroslav’s men gained the victory, and Sviatopalk, half-dead with
fatigue, delirious with fear, and unable to sit his horse, was borne litter-wise
through the whispering night in wild flight across a wild country, hunted
ever by phantom foemen, and moaning ever to his bearers piteous entreaty
for added speed. The fugitive checked his spent course in the deserts of the
Bohemian border, where he died miserably, and contemporary legend,
recalling the circumstances of his birth, asserted that he was born for crime.
In which case he fulfilled his purpose.
Yaroslav was now master of Kiev and Novgorod and Grand Prince of
Russia, but the family arrangements of Vladimir’s many heirs had not yet
adjusted themselves. From Isiaslav, Kniaz of Polotzk, sprang a line of
turbulent princes who contributed a fair share to the domestic troubles of
Russia during the next hundred years.[18] Still more formidable for the time
being was Mstislav, whose family portion was Tmoutorakan, a province
bordering on the Black Sea. In conjunction with the
(1016)
Greek Imperial General Andronicus he had driven the
Khazars from the Tauride and put a finishing touch to
their existence as a European State. Other victories over the Tcherkess
tribes in his neighbourhood swelled both his ideas and his resources, and he
began to feel his remote steppe-girded province too small for him. In 1023,
while Yaroslav was away in the Souzdal country, Mstislav burst with his
warriors into the grand principality and seized upon Tchernigov in the
Sieverski plain. The harassed Grand Prince fled to Novgorod—his usual
city of refuge—and sent urgent messengers over the Baltic to call in the
ever-ready Varangians to his aid. In response came a large force, led by one
Hako (in the Russian Chronicle Yakun), who has come down to posterity as
suffering from sore eyes and wearing a bandage over them broidered with
gold—a human touch in the portrait of one of these half-mythical seeming
vikings. The avenging army came into the Tchernigov land and met their
foes on the banks of a small river, the two forces sighting one another just
as night was falling and a nasty storm creeping upon them. As the storm
broke over the Grand Prince’s host, accompanied by thunder peals and

torrents of rain, out of the night there rushed in on them the war-men of the
intrepid Mstislav, who rivalled with his wild battle-shock the tumult of the
elements. In the darkness men fought hand to hand with a foe they could
not see; the storm in the heavens rolled away, but the humans fought on,
their arms flashing in the gleam of the stars, “a combat without comparison,
murderous, terrible, and truly frightful.”[19] A charge by Mstislav and his
body-guards decided the day—or rather the night—and Yaroslav fled from
the field of this epic struggle to his haven in the North. Hakon of the sore
eyes left on the ground his gold-wrought bandage as a trophy for the
victorious Tchernigovskie. Mstislav did not push his advantage to the extent
of depriving Yaroslav of his princely dignity, and five years later a pact was
made between the brothers which left the younger in possession of the lands
he had won east of the Dniepr. Yaroslav was thus enabled to turn his
attention to the outlying regions of the realm, where his authority had
lapsed during the long civil strife. In the year 1030 Livland was again
brought under some sort of subjection, and the town of Youriev (the
German Dorpat) founded near Lake Peipus. The domestic troubles of
Poland, where Mieceslav II., son of Boleslas Khrabrie (who had died 1025),
was waging a hotly contested war with his brothers and the Kaiser Konrad
II., gave an opportunity for regaining the Red Russian towns which
perennially changed hands according to the respective strength and
weakness of the two countries. Yaroslav, in conjunction
1031
with his half-brother, invaded Poland and wrested back
the lost territory. In 1034 died Mstislav, at the end of a
day’s hunting, having shortly before lost his only son Evstaf. Of all the sons
of Vladimir this intrepid warrior “with dark face and large eyes” seems
most to have enchained the imagination of the national chronicler.
Yaroslav, freed from the disquieting possibility of trouble which Mstislav
must always have presented, made himself still more secure by seizing and
imprisoning, on pretext of disaffection, Soudislav of Pskov, another
member of the princely house. Shortly afterwards he was called upon to
defend Kiev from an attack of the Petchenigs. Near the walls of the city
Yaroslav joined issue with the barbarians, his vanguard consisting of
Varangians, flanked right and left by the men of Kiev and Novgorod. After
a battle which lasted till evening the Petchenigs broke and fled, leaving
enormous numbers of dead on the field, and losing many more in crossing
the rivers which impeded their flight. On the ground of this victory Yaroslav

founded the Cathedral of S. Sofia, extending at the same time the
boundaries of Kiev so as to include this building, and enclosing the city
with a stone wall. Well might the Kievians rejoice as they watched the new
works, which were alike the witness of their growing prosperity and a
memorial of a past danger; they had at last grasped their nettle, and the
might of the Petchenigs, which had hung so long like a menacing shadow
ready at any moment to ride out of the steppe a grim reality, was for ever
shattered. And as the new cathedral rose before them their hopes might soar
to a point which would raise the mother of Russian cities to the level of
Constantinople.
Amid their own congratulations and complacency came news of the
misfortunes of a neighbouring and rival state; possibly across the border,
through Krobatian and Drevlian lands, more probably by a less direct route,
by word of merchants from the Oder and Weichsel filtering down from
Novgorod or Polotzk, tidings would reach them of wild doings in Poland.
Mieceslav II. had “passed in battle and in storm”; and diminished though
his territories were under stress of German, Russian, and Bohemian
filchings, they were more than a handful for his widow and youthful son to
manage. Richense, daughter of Ehrenfrid, Pfalzgraf of the Rhine, tries to
play the Queen-mother with the support of a hierarchy itself not yet firmly
established; but she is no Olga, moreover she is a German. The bishops are
German too, and throne, hierarchy, new religion, and all are involved in the
whirlwind of a reaction that scatters them in all directions, Richense to the
court of the Emperor in Saxony, her son, Kazimir, to France, where he
enters the service of Mother Church as a monk of the celebrated Abbey of
Cluny. Yaroslav, taking advantage of the weakness of his western
neighbour, began in 1040 a series of campaigns against the tribes which
inhabited the dense marsh and river-sected forests lying to the north-east of
Poland, between Russia and the Baltic. The Yatvyags first occupied his
attention, though it is doubtful if he acquired more than a transient sway
over them. He next turned the weight of his arms against the Lit’uanians,
upon a section of whom at least he imposed a tribute. The year 1041 found
him actually in Polish territory, in the province or palatinate of Mazovia,
which had separated from the lands of the Polish crown—if such a
designation can be used during an interregnum—under the rule of a heathen
noble named Mazlav, from whom the province took its name. Meanwhile
the force of the reaction in Poland had spent itself, the bishops retook

possession of their dioceses, and Kazimir was fetched, with the Pope’s
permission, from the peaceful seclusion of the Burgundian monastery to the
management of a country smouldering with the embers of anarchy and
religious persecution. Yaroslav seized the opportunity to form an alliance
with the young Duke of Poland, by virtue of which the contested Galician
or Red Russian March was definitely ceded to the Grand Prince, who on his
part helped Kazimir to defeat the rebel Voevoda[20] of Mazovia and reannex
that province to his duchy. The good understanding between the princes was
cemented by the marriage of Kazimir with Mariya, sister of Yaroslav.
Russia was thus freed from the apprehension of trouble both on the Polish
frontier and on the side of the steppes, where the power of the Petchenigs
was effectively broken. A new war-cloud, however, rose in the south,
emanating from a quarrel among Greek and Russian merchants at
Constantinople, in which one of the latter was killed.
1043
Yaroslav demanded satisfaction from the Greek
Emperor, Constantine Monomachus, and not obtaining
it, he sent an army against the Greeks, confiding its direction to his eldest
son Vladimir and a boyarin named Vyatcha. Scorning the overtures for
peace which came at late moment from the frightened Emperor, the
Russians met their enemies in a naval fight, wherein the Greek fire and the
inevitable storm played their accustomed parts. Six thousand of Vladimir’s
men were forced to abandon their damaged vessels and attempt to make
good their retreat overland, led by Vyatcha, who would not desert them in
their extremity. Constantine, instead of resting content with the victory
which fortune had given him, or following it up with a vigorous pursuit,
satisfied himself with half-measures, returning in premature triumph to his
capital while he sent the remainder of his ships to hunt the Russians out of
the Bosphorus. Vladimir meanwhile had rallied his fleet and turned fiercely
at bay, destroying twenty-five of the Byzantine vessels and killing their
admiral. Consoled by this success he returned home, carrying with him
many prisoners. The division which had attempted the land passage was
less happy; overpowered by a large Greek force near Varna, the survivors
were taken captive to Constantinople, where many of them, including the
brave boyarin, were deprived of their eyesight.
This was the last of the series of expeditions made by the early rulers of
Russia against Constantinople, expeditions which suggest a parallel with

those against Rome which exercised such a fatal fascination over the Saxon
and Franconian Emperors of Germany at the same period. Not for many a
long century were the Russian arms to push again across the blue waters of
the Danube into the land of their desire. In 1046 peace was formally
concluded between the two countries, and the blinded prisoners were
allowed to return to their native land.
The remaining years of Yaroslav were years of peace and prosperity within
his realm. Allied with the Court of Poland by the double marriage of his
sister with Duke Kazimir, and of the latter’s sister with his second son
Isiaslav, he was in like manner connected with the house of Arpad by the
marriage of his youngest daughter Anastasia with Andrew I. of Hungary;
with Harold the Brave, afterwards King of Norway, who espoused his eldest
daughter Elizabeth; and with the royal family of France by the marriage of
his second daughter Anne with Henri I. And not only by court alliances was
the Russia of this period connected with the other states of Europe.
Commerce had made great strides in the last half-hundred years, and Kiev,
in the zenith of her fortunes, attracted traders from many lands; besides her
300 churches she had 8 markets, there were separate quarters for
Hungarian, Hollandish, German, and Skandinavian merchants, and the
Dniepr was constantly covered with cargo vessels. Novgorod was another
important centre of trade and foreign intercourse. A more convenient
medium of exchange, always a stimulating factor in commerce, was
gradually superseding the hides and pelts which were the earliest articles of
sale and barter; the first step had been to substitute leather tokens cut from
the skins themselves, called kounas, from kounitza, a marten (being
generally cut from a marten pelt). These were replaced, as silver grew more
plentiful in the country, by coins of that metal, stamped with rude
representations of the reigning prince.
Following the time-hallowed custom of his forbears, Yaroslav in his last
days divided the lands of his realm among his surviving sons. (Vladimir, the
eldest, had died in 1052.) Isiaslav became, after his father’s death, Grand
Prince of Kiev, his four brothers being settled respectively in the sub-
provinces of Tchernigov, Péréyaslavl, Smolensk, and Volhynia. Polotzk was
still held by the other branch of the family. Yaroslav died at Voutchigorod
on the 19th February 1054. On a winter’s day his corpse was borne in

mournful procession along the snow-clad road to Kiev, there to rest in a
marble tomb in a side chapel of the Cathedral of S. Sofia.
Under Yaroslav Russia enjoyed a prosperity and position that was lost in the
partitions and discords of his successors, and this circumstance was
probably responsible for the somewhat flattering estimate that was formed
of his character by subsequent chroniclers.[21] As patron of Kiev and
benefactor to the Church he was naturally glorious and good in the eyes of
Nestor, and by some writers he has been styled “the Russian Charlemagne,”
on account of the code of laws which he formulated for his country.
Concerning his piety, he lived in an age when much giving from the State
treasury to church or monastery counted for such, and it is recorded of him
that his dying words charged his sons to “treat each other as brothers” and
“have great tenderness” one for another. His own brother still lay in the
prison that was his living tomb for over a score of years.

CHAPTER III
THE FEUDS OF THE HOUSE OF RURIK
The history of Russia during the next two hundred years is little more than a
long chronicle of aimless and inconsequent feuds between the multiple
Princes of the Blood—“the much-too-many” of their crowded little world—
overlaid and beclouded with strange-sounding names recurring and clashing
in a luxuriant tangle of pedigree, and further embarrassed by a perpetual
shifting and reshifting of the family appanages. Here and there the figure of
some particular kniaz stands out for a space from the ravelled skein that the
old historians painstakingly wove upon the loom of their chronicles, but for
the most part the student searches in vain for glimpses of the real life-story
of Russia during this barren and over-trampled period.
The city of Kiev, carrying with it the dignity of the Grand-princedom and
the nominal authority over the whole realm, was the key-stone of the body
politic as Yaroslav left it, but the loosely-ordered theory of succession
which obtained in the Slavonic world led to a perpetual dislocation of this
local and ill-defined supremacy, and robbed the arch-throne of any chance
of making good its claimed dominion over the other units of the State.
Under Isiaslav I. and the brothers, son, and nephew who succeeded him in
promiscuous order,[22] Kiev became merely a focussing point for the
profusion of quarrels and petty revolutions which were set in perpetual
motion by the restless ambition of the neighbouring Princes of Polotzk,
Smolensk, and Tchernigov. The last-named province passed into the
possession of Oleg Sviatoslavitch[23] (nephew of Isiaslav), and from him
sprang the house of Olgovitch, which held the fief of Tchernigov for many
generations and convulsed South Russia again and again in its attempts to
grasp the throne of Kiev, this hereditary feud of the Olgovitchie with the
branch of Vsevolod being the most understandable feature of the prevailing
strife-storms of the period. A factor which might have been supposed to
make for unity and self-help among the detached Russian rulers, but which
instead frequently served to complicate the distresses of the country, was

the appearance in the south-east, shortly after the death of Yaroslav, of a
new enemy, rising phœnix-like on the ruin of the Petchenigs. The Polovtzi,
or Kumans, a nomad race of Turko origin, were even fiercer and more cruel
than the tribe they had replaced, and their fighting value was such that the
princes, though frequently banding in short-lived leagues against them,
were often tempted to invoke their aid in pressing family quarrels, and even
stooped to mate with their chieftain women—a woful falling away from the
bridal splendours of the Court of Yaroslav.
During the reigns of Isiaslav’s three immediate successors two figures stand
out prominently amid the bewildering plurality of princes, respectively
playing the part of good and evil geniuses of the country. Vladimir
Monomachus, son of Vsevolod, sometime Prince of Kiev, fulfils the former
function with commendable assiduity, righting wrongs and averting national
disasters after the most approved chivalric pattern, and ever ready to
improve the occasion by the delivery of irreproachable sentiments—if these
were not fathered upon him by the chroniclers of the time. Throughout the
turmoil which distinguishes the close of the eleventh century he hovers in
the background, like the falcon of Ser Federigo, with his air of “if anything
is wanting I am here.” The other side of the picture—and picture it
doubtless is, in a large measure, painted by the prejudice and ornamented by
the fancies of the old-time annalists—is the wayward Prince of Polotzk,[24]
ever ready to devise new troubles for his groaning country, always
managing to elude the consequences of his transgressions against the peace.
Naturally he achieves the reputation of having more than human powers;
rumour has it that he traversed the road from Kiev to Tmoutorakan in a
single night, and the unholy wight could in Kiev hear the clock of the Sofia
church at Polotzk striking the hours. The suddenness with which he would
appear before the gates of some distant town gave rise, no doubt, to the
belief that he assumed the form of a wolf on these occasions: “He sped, in
blue obscurity hidden, as a wild beast, at midnight to Bielgrad, at morning
... opened the gate of Novgorod, destroyed the glory of Yaroslav, and
hunted as a wolf from Dudutki to Nemiga.”[25] Wonders of an evil nature
were reported from his capital, where malevolent spirits rode on horseback
through the streets day and night, wounding the inhabitants. What with the
intermittent attacks of the princes of the house of Yaroslav and the eerie
enemies within the town, it must have required exceptional nerve to be a

citizen of Polotzk. In 1101 closes the eventful life of the wehr-wolf prince,
who makes his last lone journey into the “blue obscurity,” where perhaps
his “white soul” yet hies in wolf’s gallop over the eternal plains.
Four years earlier (1097) an interesting gathering had taken place of the
numerous princes of the line of Yaroslav, who were assembled together in
the town of Lubetch, “on the same carpet,” and swore on the Holy Cross to
live in peace and friendship with each other. With a limited number of fiefs
and a superabundant supply of Princes of the Blood, many of whom were
necessarily in the position of have-nots, it was scarcely likely that the public
pact would be very long-lived, but a decent lull might have been looked for
before the outbreak of new dissensions. David Igorovitch, cousin of the
Grand Prince Sviatopalk, went straight from the council of peace, from the
carpet-in-common and the bekissed cross, to stir up fresh strife in the West
Russian country, and the series of wars which ensued was remarkable for
the armed participation of Kalman, King of Hungary. The reason for this
foreign intermeddling, which ended in signal discomfiture and a hurried
retreat across the Karpathians, is not obvious. “What were the causes of this
war,” wrote a Hungarian annalist,[26] “are not to be ascertained.” It was,
however, the opening of a long chapter of western encroachments in the
affairs of the Red Russian provinces, while in the steppe-lands of the south,
Tmoutorakan and other territory slipped into the hands of the Kuman
tribesmen.
The accession of Vladimir Monomachus to the dignity
1113
of Velikie Kniaz gave Kiev for the time being greater
importance as the sovereign State, since the lands of
Péréyaslavl, Novgorod, and Souzdal were also held in the monarch’s
family. Under his son Mstislav the Novgorodskie pushed their arms into
Livland and took the town of Odenpay (bear’s head), and later these hardy
and enterprising folk swept the desolate Finnish northlands into their wide
dominion. The character of Vladimir (who died in 1125, and was succeeded
by Mstislav) exercised a lively hold on the imaginations of his countrymen,
and he is yet reckoned among those sovereigns “whose earthly diadems
beamed in anticipation of the crowns they were to receive in Paradise.” This
much may fairly be said of him, that during his career, and particularly
during his reign, Russia enjoyed a greater measure of cohesion than she
experienced under his immediate successors, and that this was in no small

measure the outcome of a carefully thought-out and scrupulously applied
policy. But the greatest monument to Vladimir’s memory is the parchment
document which he left for the guidance of his sons, and which is preserved
in the archives of his country as a precious historical relic.
“Bear in mind that a man ought always to be employed” is one of the
admonitions of this remarkable homily, though if the persons addressed
imitated the example therein displayed it was scarcely needed. “For my part
I accustomed myself to do everything that I might have ordered my servants
to do. Night and day, summer and winter, I was perpetually moving about. I
wished to see everything with my own eyes.... I made it my duty to inspect
the churches and the sacred ceremonies of religion, as well as the
management of my property, my stables, and the eagles and hawks of my
hunting establishment. I have made eighty-three campaigns and many
expeditions. I concluded nineteen treaties with the Polovtzi. I took captive
one hundred of their princes, whom I set free again; and I put two hundred
of them to death by throwing them into rivers. No one has ever travelled
more rapidly than I have done. Setting out in the morning from Tchernigov,
I have arrived at Kiev before the hour of vespers.” (A feat surpassed by the
goblin-post of the Prince of Polotzk.) “In hunting amidst the thickest
forests, how many times have I myself caught wild horses and bound them
together? How many times have I been thrown down by buffaloes,
wounded by the antlers of stags, and trodden under the feet of elks? A
furious boar rent my sword from my baldrick; my saddle was torn to pieces
by a bear; this terrible beast rushed upon my steed, whom he threw down
upon me. But the Lord protected me.”
There is a suspicion of exaggeration in the number of campaigns
enumerated, besides “many expeditions,” and the hunting reminiscences are
almost too full of incident; neither do wild horses, as a rule, inhabit the
thickest forests. Allowing for these enlargements of old age, however, the
outlines are probably true.
“Oh, my children,” the testator continues, “fear neither death nor wild
beasts. Trust in Providence; it far surpasses all human precautions.” In
order, presumably, not to risk all his eggs in one basket, he qualifies this
pious aphorism with the following excellent advice: “Never retire to rest till
you have posted your guards. Never lay aside your arms while you are

within reach of the enemy. And, to avoid being surprised, always be early
on horseback.”
With the disappearance of Vladimir Russian political life lapsed into the
distracting turmoil of family feuds, embittered now afresh by the jealousies
of the elder and younger branches of his descendants, in addition to the
existing elements of discord furnished by the houses of Tchernigov and
Galitz and the sporadic turbulence of the people of Novgorod.
It is interesting to compare and contrast the condition of the Russian State at
this period with that of the neighbouring Germanic Empire, whose
constitution and scheme of government was not widely different, and to
examine the possible causes of the decay of the Grand-princely power in
the one, and the survival of the Imperial ascendency in the other. The
Western Empire had, like Russia, her periods of internal confusion, but
however weak or unfortunate an individual Kaiser might be, his title and
office always carried a certain weight of authority, a certain glamour of
reverence with it, while in the Eastern State it is sometimes difficult to
remember who was at any given time in possession of the arch-throne of
Kiev. Probably the greater stability of German institutions was due to their
greater complexity; side by side with the oligarchy of sovereign Dukes and
Margraves there had grown up, fostered by the sagacious foresight of
successive Emperors, a crop of free cities and burghs, enjoying a large
measure of independence, while another element was introduced by the
extensive temporal possessions and powers of many of the German prelates.
These interwoven and antagonistic interests were naturally fertile of
disputes and petty conflicts, in which events appeal was sure to be made,
sooner or later, to the Emperor, whose intervention was seldom fruitless; for
where a man, or a community, had many possible enemies, it was less easy
to defy the sovereign power. If, therefore, each little fragment of the State
was a law unto itself, the final supremacy of the Emperor was always in
evidence, and in the same way some overweening vassal preparing to wage
war on his sovereign liege might have his hand stayed by the irritating
incursion of the Herrschaft of a mitred abbot or an aggrieved Burg upon his
own dominions. In the Russian Weal, on the contrary, no such delicately
adjusted conditions existed. With the exception of Velikie Novgorod,
nothing was independent besides the princes of the house of Rurik; towns,
clergy, and boyarins “went with” the various appanages to which they

belonged, and shared the fortunes of the prince who for the time being ruled
over them. Hence there was nothing beyond an empty title and the control
of an uncertain quantity of treasure to advance the Grand Prince above the
standing of his brothers and cousins. In consequence of this weakness of the
central authority it follows that there was little to bind the mass together in
a cohesive whole. Besides the kinship of the princes there were, perhaps,
only two elements which prevented a splitting asunder of the federation:
one was the physical aspect of the country, which presented no natural
divisions which might have been resolved into political ones. As certainly
as Denmark was destined to break away, in spite of artificial acts of union,
such as that of Kalmar, from the other Skandinavian lands, so certainly was
Russia likely to remain united. The wide plains, intersected by far-winding
rivers, offered no obvious barriers which might have marked off a separate
kingdom of Tchernigov or Polotzk, and each district was too dependent on
the others to become permanently estranged. The other factor which made
for unity was the bond of a common, and as regards their western
neighbours, a distinct religion. The Greek-Christian faith, with all its
attendant ceremonials and mysteries, had taken deep root among the Slavs
of Russia, and had assimilated itself with the national life of the people. The
beauties of the old cathedrals of S. Sofia at Kiev, S. John Theologus at
Rostov, and S. Dimitri at Vladimir, bore evidence of the care that was
lavished on the decoration of these temples of Christian worship. The
Metropolitan of Kiev, as Primate over all the Russian churches, served as a
link with the capital city which the Grand Prince did not always supply.
Novgorod, which has been mentioned as an exception to the state of
subserviency prevalent among the other Russian towns, derived her strength
and importance from her situation, which commanded both the Baltic and
the Russian overland trade. Although the Hansa League had not yet taken
definite shape, the elements of the later organisation were already in
existence. The commercial life of the Baltic centred in Wisby, capital of the
island of Gothland, and to this convenient meeting-place came, twice a
year, German, Swedish, Russian, Danish, and Wendish merchants to
exchange their various wares and supply the needs of their respective trade-
circles. After the Wisby markets were over many of the traders from
Lubeck, Hamburg, Bremen, etc., made their way to Novgorod, where they
early possessed a factory and a separate place of worship, even as the
Novgorodskie, since the middle of the twelfth century, had their church and

quarter at Wisby. The intercourse with enterprising merchant folk from
other lands—and merchants needed to be adventurous in those days—
infused a spirit of energy and independence into the inhabitants of
Novgorod, while the wealth at their disposal enabled them to extend their
domination far over the bleak, but by no means barren, northlands of
Russia, even to the further side of the Ourals. This extensive over-lordship,
again, gave them control of many sources of commerce, and the produce of
Arctic seas and sub-Arctic forests filtered through their hands into the
channels of Baltic trade. Walrus teeth, the blubber oil from seals, and the
down of sea-haunting birds formed the harvest of the frozen ocean; forest
and lake furnished their markets with furs, raw leather, tallow, fish, and tar;
cultivated lands yielded flax and hemp, honey and wax—the latter an
important commodity in the times when the Church kept tapers burning day
and night in thousands of shrines throughout the greater part of Europe. In
exchange for these products the merchants of Wisby and of the German
“Hof” at Novgorod bartered metal wares and manufactured goods. Of raw
metals came tin from the celebrated mines of Cornwall, copper from the
Swedish uplands, and iron from Bohemia and the Netherlands. Spanish lead
found its way through Bruges and Antwerp.[27] Thus Novgorod was the
staple of a flourishing and far-reaching trade, even though the rise of the
Italian maritime republics had in a large measure diverted the commerce of
the East from its old Russian waterway, and the wealth and importance of
this world-faring traffic took the city out of the limitations of the Russian
realm, even as Lubeck and her sister towns stood beyond the bonds of the
Empire. To the other Russian cities their respective rulers were the
mainspring of their being, and each prince might have locally adapted the
boast of the great Louis; to the Novgorodskie their prince was only an
incident in a busy existence. This spirit of liberty and impatience found
vigorous expression in the year 1138 when the citizens of Novgorod, with
those of the subject towns of Pskov and Ladoga, in Vetché assembled,
solemnly deposed their prince on the following grounds: that he had no care
for the poorer people; that he only loved pleasures, falcons, and dogs; that
he had coveted the government of Péréyaslavl; that in a battle with the
Souzdalians he had been the first to leave the field; that he had no fixed
policy, but was at times on the side of the house of Tchernigov, at times on
the side of its enemies. The citizens had a quaint and effective way of
dealing with a troublesome minority in carrying through their frequent

prince-purgings. According to an old Slavonic custom (retained in Poland
till her downfall), the decisions of the Vetché or the Diet had to be of one
voice; however, “the majority had the resource of drowning the minority in
the Volkof,”[28] and the bridge over that river was not unseldom the scene of
violent party strife. The great bell of Yaroslav would clang out the curfew of
the dethroned kniaz, who was thenceforth “shown the way” out of his
erstwhile principality. On an occasion when the Grand Prince Sviatopalk II.
wished to foist his son on the people of Novgorod, the elders of the city
grimly sent him word to keep the young prince at home, “unless he has a
head to spare.”
With the onward march of days and deeds in the stormy times of the twelfth
century two facts, indeed, begin to stand forth. One is the waning power
and import of Kiev, consequent on the many changes of masters to which
she was subject; “the Mother of Russian cities” passed into the keeping of
one prince after another, like a dainty piece of carrion dropped and snatched
and fought over by a parcel of kites or crows. Side by side with this decline
of the southern city is to be marked the silent growth of a new principality
in the lands of the north-east, where Urii “Dolgoroukie” (the Long-armed),
son of Vladimir Monomachus, had nursed the savage, forest-choked
marchland of Souzdal into a well-ordered province, enjoying from its very
remoteness and seclusion a domestic calm which was to be found nowhere
else in the wide Russian realm. Among the towns which he founded, or
advanced from the position of tribal villages, was one on the banks of the
Moskva, to which was given the name of the river that watered it, a name to
be one day of first importance in Russian history. On the death of Urii
(1157) his son Andrei, albeit one of a numerous family, succeeded him in
the undivided sovereignty of Souzdal. Turning his back on glittering but
unprofitable Kiev, with its thousand shrines and general odour of sanctity
and its unhealthy political atmosphere, he established himself at Vladimir-
on-the-Kliasma, strong in the possession of a bejewelled ikon of the Virgin,
of Greek manufacture—if it were not, as was asserted, the handiwork of the
Apostle Luke. From this vantage-ground of possession and authority the
wary kniaz proceeded to sweep away with unsparing hand the gaping brood
of his brothers and nephews, who were exiled wholesale, together with such
boyarins as were suspected of favouring a splitting-up of Andrei’s
dominion. The banished Urievitch princes retired to Constantinople, where
they were honourably received by the Greek Emperor Manuel, who, amid

the vigorous wars which he carried on with most of his neighbours,
maintained terms of friendship with the princes of Russia. Shortly after this
state-stroke the Prince of Souzdal became embroiled with the turbulent
Novgorodskie, whose newly-elected Prince Roman was son of the then
Velikie Kniaz of Kiev. Andrei was minded to show who really was master
in the Northern Russian world, and turned his arms, not upon Novgorod,
but upon Kiev. Against the devoted city gathered, in
1169 obedience to the behest of Andrei, a mighty host of
princes, with their boyarins and followers; Mstislav of
Souzdal, Roman of Smolensk, Vseslav of Polotzk, Oleg of Sieversk, the
Rostislavitches, and many another, banded themselves together, under the
leadership of the first-named, to assist at the death of a fiction. The Grand
Prince entrenched himself in his capital and defended the walls for two days
against the assaults of his enemies. On the 8th March the walls were
stormed and the “Mother of Russian cities” was given over to sack and
pillage. In one wild moment all the reverence and religious piety of the
Slavonic nature was scattered to the winds, and churches, monasteries, and
the cathedrals of S. Sofia and the Dime shared the general disaster.
Sacrilegious hands bore gleefully through the roaring streets a spoil of holy
ikons, illuminated missals, crosses, priestly robes, and all the trappings of
an outraged religion; even the bells were torn down from their campaniles
to serve as plunder for the victorious invaders.
Kiev still existed as a city, but on her Golden Gate the conquerors might
fitly have hewed the epitaph, “Ichabod. Thy glory is departed from thee.”
The Grand Prince made his escape from the toils of his enemies, and one of
the sons of Urii succeeded to what was left of the submerged dignity; but
the real centre of authority had shifted. Souzdal extended its influence over
nearly the whole of the Russian land; the Princes of Galitz and Tchernigov
and the republic of Novgorod alone maintained their independence. The
latter government, indeed, despite the internal disorders with which it was
from time to time afflicted, had risen to a power which might well cry halt
to the most ambitious potentate. Not only had it held its own against the
leagued princes of Northern Russia, but it had valiantly repelled the
onslaught of a foreign enemy. The union of the crowns of Sweden and
Gothland, the pact between the houses of Swerker and Jeswar, and the
gradual dying out of the pagan minority had given the Swedes comparative

domestic quiet, and at the same time leisure to turn their attention to attacks
on their neighbours. Hence it was that Karl VII., in the year 1164 (while
Sviatoslav yet reigned at Novgorod), invaded the Russian northlands and
besieged Ladoga, which was defended by the citizens with great spirit. The
arrival of Sviatoslav with the Posadnik Zakharie and the Novgorodskie
forces was followed by the complete defeat of the Swedish host, only a
remnant of which, according to the city Chronicles, succeeded in making
good its escape. This exploit gives some idea of the power and position of
Velikie Novgorod, which at this period matches the standing of Lubeck in
the days of the Kaiser Karl IV. Against so dangerous a rival it was
inevitable that Andrei, dreaming of autocracy 300 years before its time,
should bend the whole crushing weight of his resources and influence, and
seek to whelm Novgorod in the same humiliation that had befallen Kiev.
The inhabitants of the threatened city saw an ominous league of their
enemies gathering together; the Princes of Smolensk, Polotzk, Mourom,
and Riazan joined their forces to those of Mstislav Andreivitch, the
conqueror of Kiev, under whose banner marched the men of Souzdal,
Rostov, Vladimir, and Bielozersk. At the head of the citizens stood their
Kniaz, Roman, the Posadnik Yakun, and the Archbishop Ivan. These
prepared by every means in their power to resist the formidable army whose
skirmishers were ravaging the country for miles around and lighting the
winter sky with the fires of hundreds of blazing villages. The doubt voiced
by a poet of a later century—

Though kneeling nations watch and yearn,
Does the Primordial Purpose turn?

found no expression in the minds of these early Russians, in whose civil
discords the members of the Holy Family of heaven were supposed to take
as keen an interest as the gods of Olympus in the skirmishes round Troy.
When the attack closed in upon the city the Archbishop,
1170 attended by his clergy, carried round the ramparts,
during the thick of the fight, a standard with a
representation of the Virgin. An impious arrow struck the sainted ikon,
which thereupon turned its face towards Novgorod and let fall a shower of
tears upon the Archbishop; this was too much for the nerves of the
Souzdalians, who seemingly were near enough to witness the miracle, and a
headlong flight ensued, in which many were slain and many taken
prisoners. In the words of the Novgorodskie Chronicle, “You could get ten
Souzdalians for a grivna.” It is difficult to discern, under the mass of
legend, what was the real cause of this panic. The warriors who had laid
ruthless hands on the hallowed sanctuaries of the Russian capital were not
likely to be cowed by a provincial representation of the Virgin; had they not
their own apostle-wrought ikon of the Mother of God at Vladimir?
Whatever the cause of defeat, it gave a serious check to Andrei’s projects of
undisputed supremacy. Novgorod, however, was not secure from the enmity
of the Prince of Souzdal, from whose province she drew her supplies of
grain, and the Posadnik and Archbishop followed up their victory by timely
overtures for peace, which was effected by the dismissal of Roman and the
subsequent “free election” of a prince from the Souzdal family. Four years
later the dreaded northern Kniaz suffered the penalty of being in advance of
his times. The high hand with which he had ruled in his own province had
inspired among his boyarins and courtiers a fear which might on occasion
become dangerous. And the occasion arrived, when one
1177 summer’s evening a band of twenty conspirators,
including the chamberlain of his household, burst into
the old man’s sleeping-chamber in his palace at Bogolubov (a suburb of
Vladimir) and stabbed wildly at him in the uncertain twilight. Favoured by
the dusk and confusion, Andrei managed to crawl away into hiding; a light
was procured, and by the track of his streaming wounds he was hunted

down and the assassins finished their task. Vladimir, which he had raised to
the position of his capital over the older towns of Souzdal and Rostov,
mourned the grim fate of her patron, but throughout the rest of the province
the long-repressed feelings of the inhabitants ran riot in bloodshed and
pillage. The affrighted clergy, clad in their priestly vestments and bearing
the sacred ensigns of their religion, went in solemn processions through the
towns, invoking the assistance of the Most High God to quell a revolt which
threatened the submersion of their world. Andrei had tried to weld into a
disciplined kingdom materials that were as yet only fitted for a modified
anarchy, tempered by attachment to a loosely-ordered succession of princes;
dreaming of despotism, he had at least died the death of a despot.
And while they do to death the only prince who had shown them the way to
the safety which lay in union and centralisation, far away on the banks of
the Okon, in the desert region which borders Northern China and
Manchuria, is growing from insignificance to an overmastering weight of
supremacy the tribe, horde, locust-swarm of the swarthy Mongols.
The disorders which marked the disappearance of Andrei’s overshadowing
personality from the throne of Souzdal were soothed, after a long struggle
between his reflucted kinsfolk, by the final establishment of Vsevolod,
brother of the murdered prince, surnamed “Big-nest” in allusion to his large
family.[29] Applying himself to the ordering of his own province, he
meddled but languidly in the seething troubles of the Dniepr-watered
principalities, where the house of Olgovitch was enjoying a fitful revival of
importance. A scion of that strenuous family at this time embarked on an
enterprise which, though fruitless from a military point of view, was
crowned with a halo of glory and immortalised in an epic poem of great
beauty. “The Song of the Expedition of Igor, Prince of Sieverski,” or, more
shortly, the Song of Igor, one of the earliest Slavonic folk-songs that has
been handed down from the dead past, has been translated into many
languages, but never before into English, so that it is well worth
reproducing in part in a history of Russian development. It deals with a
campaign undertaken by Igor Sviatoslavitch, Prince of Severski, and his
brother Vsevolod, against the Polovtzi in their own country, of its disastrous
result, and the ultimate return of Igor.
Brothers, were it not well that we, after the old custom, began
the song of the unlucky campaign of Igor, the seed of

Sviatoslav? That we celebrate him in the heroic songs of our
time, and not in the manner of Bōyan? If the sage Bōyan wished
to tune to one a song, it was as if a squirrel sprang up the tree, or
a gray wolf hied along the plain, or a blue eagle soared to the
clouds....
Igor looked forth and saw that the sun had hidden his face, and a
mist had enveloped his warriors. Then spoke Igor to his army:
“Brothers and soldiers, it is better to fall in battle than to yield
one’s life; so will we mount our mettlesome horses and gain the
Blue Don by daylight.” Yearning filled the soul of the Prince,
and the wish to see the noble Don led him to forget many evil
tokens. “I will break a lance,” cried he, “on the farthest verge of
the Polovtzi land, or bow my head with you, Russians, and with
my helmet draw water from the Don.” O Bōyan, thou
nightingale of the olden days, if thou hadst inspired these
warrior-bands, alighting on the Tree of Thought and hovering in
the spirit of the clouds, thou hadst, O nightingale, united this
severed time (that which is Past with that which Is).... Not a
storm-wind drove the falcons over the wide plain, nor hurried
the flocks of daws to the glorious Don. Or thou mightest, sage
Bōyan, thus have sung: The steeds are neighing this side the
Sula, the war-song resounds in Kiev, the trumpets are crashing
in Novgorod. The standards wave in Poutivl, where awaits Igor
his loved brother Vsevolod. And to him saith the bold, war-
lusting Vsevolod, “O Igor, my only brother, my bright Sun, truly
are we twain the seed of Sviatoslav. Brother, let thy spirited war-
horses be saddled; already are mine saddled and waiting at
Koursk, and my Kourskies are right warriors, born ’neath the
blare of the trumpets, and nurtured at the point of the lance. The
roads are familiar to them; they know the passes, their bows are
strung, the quiver is open, the sabres are burnished, and they
themselves press forward, like gray wolves on the bleak wold, in
pursuit of honour and princely renown.” Then set Prince Igor his
foot in the golden stirrup and rode forth into the wide plain. The
sun blurs the way through the gloom, the night groans in storm
and wakes the birds, swells in chorus the howling of beasts, the
evil Div shrieks down from the tree-tops and summons the

strange lands to listen, from the Volga, and the sea-coast, and
along the Sula and to the Suroz and Khorsun, to the idol at
Tmoutorakan. The Polovtzi hastened by pathless ways to the
glorious Don; at midnight shrieked the wheels of their carts, as
though flight-circling swans screamed loud. Igor pressed with
his war-men to the Don. But already the bird on the oak warned
him of misfortune, the wolves set the ravines in alarm, the
eagles with loud screams called hither the beasts to the banquet,
the foxes barked at the purple shields.
O Russian band, already art thou this side the hill!
Long lasts the night, the twilight dawn not yet foretells the
coming of the Sun, darkness clothes the fields, the flute of the
nightingale is hushed, while the croaking of the daws resounds,
but the Russians have bedecked the stretching plain with their
purple shields, and strive after honour and the glory of princes.
On Friday early have our warriors defeated the war-hordes of
the Polovtzi, and they thenafter scattered with arrow-swiftness
in the plain, bearing away the lovely Polovtzi maidens, and with
them also gold and precious silken stuffs; with costly rugs, with
cloaks and vestments the Polovtzi strewed the streams, marshes,
and swamps. The golden standards with the white pennons, the
purple horse-housings and the silver staff fell to the brave
Sviatoslavitch. Oleg’s brave nest-brood slept on the field,
thenafter they are flown afar; they were not born to suffer ill,
neither from falcon, nor sparhawk, nor from these, heathen
Polovtzi, the black ravens. Gsak sped like a gray wolf, and
Kontchak followed him on the road to the glorious Don.
Right early the other morning rose a blood-red promise of the
sun, black clouds drew in from the sea, that would have
darkened four suns, and torn were they by blue flashes; there
was brewing a mighty storm of thunder, and bolts rained over
the majestic Don; then at the stream Kayala, by the mighty Don,
lances were broken and sabres blunted on Polovtzi helmets.
O Russian band, still art thou this side the hill!

There blew the Wind (Stribog’s grandchild)[30] bolts from the
sea against Igor’s brave fighters; the Earth shuddered,
mournfully flowed the rivers, dew-drops spangled the fields, the
banners rustled.
Forth from the Don, from the sea, and from all sides around
came the Polovtzi; they surrounded the Russian troop, with yells
the children of the devils filled the plain, but the brave Russians
guarded themselves behind the purple shields. Thou Wild-Bull
Vsevolod, thou art in the rank that is foremost, slinging thy
arrows at the fighters, and with thy sword of steel batterest the
helmets, and where thou chargest, there where thy golden
helmet glitters, there lie the heads of the Heathen and the Avaric
helmets, smashed by thy hardened sabre, thou Wild-Bull
Vsevolod, and there was thy grief so great at the wound of thy
brother, thou hadst both honour and life forgotten, and the town
of Tchernigov, and the throne of thy fathers, even as the caresses
of thy sweet and beauteous wife Glebovna.... So is it ever in the
time of fighting and war, but never yet has been heard of such a
battle as this; from early morn till the even, from eve to red
dawn, nought but flying arrows, and the clashing of sabres on
helmets, and steel lances splintering in the far plain of the
Polovtzi-land. The black earth under the hoofs of the horses is
with bones emplanted, which spring up from the Russian soil
watered with blood amid stress of grievous sorrow. What is the
stamping I hear? What is it I hear ringing in the morning early
before the red Dawn?...
So for a day they fought, and for two days, but on the third,
towards mid-day, sank the banner of Igor.
There on the banks of the rapid Kayala the brothers were
sundered....
The grass drooped its head in mourning and the tree bowed
sorrowfully earthward....
The war of the princes against the Heathen had ceased, for one
brother saith to another, “That belongeth to me, and this
belongeth also to me.” And of each little thing the princes say,

“A great matter,” and stir up strife with one another, while on all
sides of the Russian land the warlike heathen press forward.
But Igor’s brave war-men shall never wake again.... Loudly
weep the Russian women, “Alas! that never more can our
thoughts to our dear husbands be wafted, that our eyes shall
never, never again behold them, and gold and silver never more
be stored.” And therefore, brothers, Kiev groaneth aloud in
sorrow and Tchernigov in grief; woe streameth through the land,
and pain, in full flood, through Russia, but ever more and more
were the princes growing in hatred, while the warlike Heathen
raged through the land, and from every holding had as tribute a
squirrel pelt....
[The despairing lamentations of the saga are changed to
rejoicing over the unexpected return of Igor, who had made his
escape from the Polovtzi land.]
The Sun shines in the heaven since Prince Igor is on Russian
land. The maidens sing on the Danube, and their voices reach
over the sea to Kiev. Prince Igor rides through the Boritchev-
ford to the Holy Mother-of-God of Pirogosha. The country is
gladsome and the towns rejoice.[31]
This folk-song, apart from its intrinsic beauty, is valuable as a relic of
Russian thought and feeling at a time when the old pre-Christian ideas were
still blended with the sentiments of the newer traditions, and it is interesting
to mark how the ghosts and gods of old Slavonic myth are mixed up with
the saints and virgins of the Orthodox faith. Not unworthy of notice, too, are
the sage strictures on the political evils of the day, the perpetual quarrelling
among the Princes of the Blood, which, however, continued with unabated
vehemence despite the common bond which existed in a common enemy.
On the north and north-east the armies of Novgorod and Souzdal extended
the Russian influence in the lands of the Finns and Bulgars, but on the
south-east, south, and west occurred encroachments which the princes were
too enfeebled by internal feuds to resist. The Kuman (Polovtzi) hordes held
the banks of the Dniepr almost up to the walls of Kiev and Biel-gorod, as
the Petchenigs had done before them; amid the dense forests of Lit’uania,
on the border of Polotzk, was rising into importance the Lettish State which

was to become a formidable factor in Russian and Polish annals; and the
kings of Hungary cast greedy eyes on the fair province of Galitz, held in the
feeble and precarious grasp of Vladimir, unworthy successor of a line of
valiant Red Russian princes.
The occupant of the throne of S. Stefan was not the only interested onlooker
at the spectacle of misgovernment provided by the Prince of Galitz; his
nearest neighbour on the Russian side was Roman of Volhynia, the same
Roman who had held Novgorod against the might of Andrei, and who had
been thrown over to procure for the city a substantial peace. This prince,
whose forefathers in the direct line back to the first Igor had all been
sovereigns of Kiev, was possessed of exceptional qualities of energy and
enterprise, and saw himself fitted to replace the effete and impolitic
Vladimir in the important and Magyar-threatened principality of Galitz.
Between the warlike and strenuous efforts of this battle-loving kniaz, who
was renowned for the eagle-swoop rapidity with which he was wont to hurl
himself upon his enemies, the assiduous intrigues and invasions of Bela III.
of Hungary, and the occasional intervention of the princes of Poland, the
West Russian lands were kept in a continual ferment; in the words of the
saga, “Men’s lives were shortened by the wars of the brother princes. Then
seldom in the Russian land was heard the call of the husbandman, but often
indeed the ravens croaking as they divided the corpse among them, and the
cry of the corbies as they called to each other to come to the banquet.” Long
time the clashing factions warred and schemed, but Roman at last broke
down all opposition without and within. In dismal plight were then those
notables of Galitz who had resisted his incoming; according to Polish
accounts he treated the disaffected boyarins with a savagery unworthy of a
brave prince. The unfortunate objects of his ill-will were dismembered,
flayed, riddled with arrows, buried alive, and done to death in various other
barbarous ways.[32] “To eat a drop of honey in peace, one must first kill the
bees,” was his explanation of this severity. This prince, who, in the words of
the Russian Chronicles, “walked in the ways of God,” was soon called upon
to defend his “drop of honey” against the Princes of Tchernigov and Kiev—
a coalition brought together by jealousy and dislike of the vigorous Roman,
for whom, however, it was no match. Gathering together his Galician and
Volhynian retainers, and calling to his aid the Tchernie-Kloboukie (“Black-
caps,” a name given to the nomads of the western steppes other than the
Polovtzi), he threw himself with the famous eagle-swoop upon Kiev, the

centre-point of his enemies. In vain did its Grand Prince Rurik and the
Kniaz of Tchernigov apply themselves to repel his attack; the Kievians, who
had a trained eye for the strongest side, threw open the Podolian Gate, and
the redoubtable Roman swirled with his warriors into the lower city. His
opponents did not stay to dispute the upper quarter with him, and the
victorious Prince of Galitz was able, with the assent of Vsevolod of
Souzdal, to bestow the time-worn capital on one of his own kinsfolk. At the
request of the Metropolitan, Alexis Comnenus, and on
1202 behalf of the Greek Imperial family, the indefatigable
Roman made a diversion against the Polovtzi, who
were ravaging the Thracian border. Having successfully drawn off their
attack and destroyed their camps, he returned in triumph to Galitz. During
his absence Kiev, which had betrayed the cause of Rurik, experienced in
full measure the resentment of that prince; calling to his assistance the
Polovtzi—“children of the devils,” but useful on occasion—he let them
loose on the miserable inhabitants. The Kuman warfolk passed over the city
like a swarm of locusts over a barley field; nothing escaped their devouring
fury except the foreign merchants who defended themselves behind the
stone walls of the churches, which became veritable sanctuaries in the midst
of a blazing, blood-streaming Kiev. The cathedrals and monasteries suffered
as severely from the heathen pillagers as they had done at the hands of the
Christians at the previous sacking of the city: “They stripped the Cathedral
of S. Sofia, the Church of the Dime, and all the monasteries, monks and
nuns, priests and their wives, old and cripple, they killed, but the young and
strong they drove into captivity.”[33]
The death of Roman in battle with the Poles near Zawichwost (1205) left
Red Russia once more a prey to domestic strife and foreign inroad.
On the 14th April 1212 came to an end the thirty-seven years’ reign of
Vsevolod, the last days of which were clouded by a quarrel with his eldest
son and natural heir, Konstantin. The latter, whether from statesmanlike
motives or mere grasping ambition, refused to cede to his brother Urii the
patrimony of Rostov designed for him, in consequence of which Vsevolod
bequeathed to the injured younger son the succession to the grand
principality of Vladimir-Souzdal, which would otherwise have been the
share of Konstantin. Vsevolod, overweighted by the Russian chroniclers
with the title of “Great,” shared in his youth the exile of his brothers on the

accession of Andrei, and received his education amid Byzantine influences.
In this connection it is interesting to note that the scheme of policy unfolded
during his long reign bears some resemblance to that favoured by the Greek
Emperors. Avoiding for the most part the employment of open force against
Novgorod, he contrived, nevertheless, to be always to the fore in the affairs
of the republic, in the aspect either of a bogey or a patron, in any case a
factor to be reckoned with. Kiev he allowed to pass backwards and
forwards from one hand to another, and in this way contributed to the
decline of her importance and the consequent advancement of his own
capital as the head-town of Russia. This pacific policy gave his Souzdalian
subjects a measure of peace and tranquillity unknown to their brothers in
the other provinces, but it permitted the dangerous aggrandisement of
princes of lesser strength and more limited resources.
The Grand Prince’s Greek upbringing and possible Greek sympathies may
have influenced the Russian hierarchy in the decision they were called upon
to make during his reign between adherence to or desertion of the distressed
Church of Constantinople. For evil times had fallen upon the Orthodox
communion; since the eastern and western Christians had solemnly and
bitterly quarrelled over the merits of the respective formulas “proceeding
from the Father by the Son,” and “proceeding from the Father and the
Son,”—the celebrated controversy of the Filioque,—the two Churches had
drifted wider and wider apart, and the hatred existing between them found
expression in the massacre of the Latin or Roman Catholic inhabitants of
Constantinople in the year 1183, when young and old, sick and infirm of
both sexes were indiscriminately slaughtered; when the head of the Pope’s
Legate, severed from its legitimate body and tied to the tail of a dog, went
bumping and thudding along the public streets to the accompaniment of
hymns of praise and thanksgiving. Now (in the year 1204) it was the turn of
the Latins to revenge themselves on the stronghold and headquarters of the
rival religion; the French and Venetian Crusaders, turning aside from the
pious object of their expedition, the rescue of the “Holy Land” from the
infidels, had carried Constantinople by assault, replaced the fugitive Greek
Emperor by a Latin prince, and sacked the Tzargrad with systematic
thoroughness. The furniture and adornments of S. Sophia and other sacred
buildings became spoil for the western soldiery, and the Lion of S. Mark
waved triumphantly over the scene of pillage and desecration. Then did the
head of the Roman Church, the splendid Lotario Conti (Innocent III.),

beneath whose despotic sway chafed and trembled most of the princes of
Christendom, follow up the triumph of the Latin arms by an attempt to draw
the heretic Church of Russia into the Catholic fold. In a pastoral letter to the
prelates and clergy of the Orthodox faith he pointed out the temporal ruin
which had overtaken the heads of the schismatic religion, and invited the
Russian Christians to attach themselves to the glories and benefits of Rome.
The appeal fell on hostile ears, and the next Metropolitan was consecrated
at Nicæa, where the dispossessed Emperor had established his court.
In other quarters the zeal and activity of the Roman Church brought her into
contact with Russian “spheres of influence,” to use a modern term.
Albrecht, Bishop of the new Livlandish see of Riga,
1201 had instituted in that district the Order of the Warriors
of Christ, or Sword Brethren, whose mission was to
convert the pagan Livlanders by fire, and steel, and thong to the worship of
Jesus, and teach them the lesson of peace on earth and goodwill towards
men with which His name was associated. As the scope of their endeavours
included a temporal as well as a spiritual ascendancy over the lands they
were able to conquer, their arms soon clashed with those of Vladimir,
Prince of Polotzk, who claimed the over-lordship of Livland. Reinforced by
Danish warmen, sent to their assistance by King Waldemar at the instance
of the Pope, the knights of the Order were able to hold their own against the
Russian kniaz, and the Catholic Church scored another triumph in Europe
to make up for her disappointments in Asia Minor.
Vsevolod left to his successors the heritage of a ready-made feud, in which
the members of his family took different sides, some supporting Urii, who
held Souzdal and Vladimir, others ranging themselves with Konstantin, who
kept his grasp on Rostov. After a campaign in which neither side could
obtain a decided advantage, the brothers agreed to divide the principality
between them, Urii retaining the largest share, which included Vladimir,
Souzdal, and Moskva. Another brother, Yaroslav, became in an unlucky
hour the choice of the people of Novgorod. In course of time they
quarrelled with him, as was their wont. Yaroslav shook the dust of the
ungovernable city off his feet, and settled himself down at Torjhok to starve
it into submission. Its imports of grain were systematically cut off, supplies
of every kind were intercepted, and famine stalked through the streets of
Novgorod. Want, in its most fearful form, the starvation of an entire

populace, tamed the spirit of the proud citizens. Pine-bark and moss were
chewed in place of the bread that could not be bought for money; the bodies
of those who died of hunger lined the streets—the dogs at least were fed.
What manner of man was this who sat gloating, vampire-like, over the
misery of a province which he would neither govern nor renounce? Vainly
embassies and petitions were sent by the stricken citizens, who tendered
their submission and besought him to take up his rule over them; the
spokesmen were cast into prison and the dearth continued. Then like a god
from the blue appeared to the famishing and despairing Novgorodskie their
erstwhile prince, Mstislav of Toropetz. The bitter cry of their extremity had
reached him in Southern Russia and drawn him to their succour. After
vainly attempting to bring Yaroslav to reason, Mstislav took up arms against
him. The first-named prince could count on the support of Urii, but on the
other hand Mstislav had engaged Konstantin on his side, so that the
province of Souzdal was drawn, town against town, into this local quarrel.
The armies of the two leagues, burning with resentment against each other,
met on the plain of Lipetsk. After a desperate battle the
1216 troops of Rostov, Smolensk, and Novgorod scored a
decisive victory and hewed down their scattering foes
during an April afternoon with the fierce joy that a triumph in civil warfare
inspires. Over 9000 of the vanquished are stated to have fallen in the fight
and subsequent slaughter. Four days later the inhabitants of Vladimir,
consisting for the most part of women, children, monks, and priests, and
men too old to have marched to the war, saw in the gray distance a single
horseman making with weary speed for the city—a courier, they fondly
imagined, sent to announce their Prince’s victory. The Prince (Urii) himself
rode in through the startled crowd, the forlorn herald of the disaster which
had overwhelmed his army. The depleted province was in no plight to
withstand the victors, and the Grand Principality was practically at the
disposal of the upstart Kniaz of Toropetz. Konstantin, by his decree, became
Prince of Vladimir-Souzdal, naming Urii, however, to succeed him at his
death. Mstislav returned in triumph to Novgorod, where he was hailed with
acclamations by the citizens, to whom he had been a friend in need. It was a
bitter irony of circumstance that almost the only prince for whom they had
had a lasting affection could not find it well to stay with them. Perhaps he
was fearful of outstaying his welcome, or wished to secure for himself a
more assured possession than the government of the fickle republic, and the

foreign encroachments which disturbed Russia on her western marches
attracted his adventure-loving spirit to play the rescuer in that direction. In
Livland, Volquin von Winterstadt, Grand Master of the Sword Order, was
ever seeking to push forward his military outposts; the Lit’uanians, harassed
by Catholics on one side and Orthodox neighbours on the other, were
drawing closer together in self-defence, and becoming more formidable to
Polotzk and Pskov, while Red Russia was a prey to Hungarian domination
and Polish interference. It was by invitation of the latter power, in the
person of Duke Lesko, that Mstislav undertook to drive the Hungarians out
of Galicia, and in consequence bade an affectionate farewell to the people
of Novgorod, the tomb of his father, and the Cathedral of S. Sofia.
While foreign war flamed lurid in the west, a peaceable restoration had
been witnessed in the north-east, where Urii, on the death of his brother
Konstantin (1219), had come into possession of the Grand Principality. In
the north-west, again, important happenings were forcing themselves
disagreeably on the notice of the border princes. Many causes contributed
to complicate the struggle for mastery which was beginning to be waged in
the pagan-inhabited lands at the mouth of the western Dvina and along the
“Baltic gull-sought strand.” The institution of the Crusades and the erection
of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem had aroused a spirit of religious and
temporal colonisation and conquest, of which the seizure of Constantinople
was a symptom, while on the other hand the comparative failure of the
Asiatic expeditions and the recapture of Jerusalem by the Moslems had
modified the crusading fervour and disinclined the champions of the Cross
to seek adventures so far afield. Hence many Catholic princes and knights
were glad to avail themselves of the Papal permission to divert their pious
raids from the valley of the Jordan to the shores of the Baltic, a more
convenient locality, where they might gain, in addition to their eternal
salvation, welcome pieces of earthly territory. Danes, Swedes, the Sword
Brothers, and later (in 1230) the Teutonic Order, fought indiscriminately
with the native pagans, with the Russians, and with themselves for the
advancement of the Catholic religion and of their own interests. Estland,
Kourland, Livland, Lit’uania, and Prussia became happy hunting-grounds
for these various adventurers and military companies, and the unfortunate
inhabitants, confronted with an embarras du richesse in the way of spiritual
guides, knew not which way to turn for safety. A Tchoud notable was
hanged by the Danes for having received baptism from the Sword Order,

and the Latin and Orthodox Christians systematically destroyed each
other’s churches and settlements whenever they had the opportunity. Of the
knights of the two Orders, however, it may be said that the cruelties and
oppressions with which they sought to harry the heathen into their particular
fold were in some measure condoned by the splendid bravery and devotion
which they displayed in carrying out their self-imposed task. Moreover, it
was to these northern crusaders that the Baltic provinces owed many of
their most important towns: Riga was the creation of the Knights of Jesus;
Thorn, Kulm, and Elbing marked the rise of the Teutonic Order; Revel
sprang into existence under Danish auspices. It was during a combat in the
neighbourhood of the latter town that the Danes received “from the clouds”
the red flag blazoned with a white cross which has since remained their
national standard—a mark of Divine favour which did not, however, cause
the immediate withdrawal of their Christian competitors. The cruelties and
dissensions of the invaders moved the inhabitants of Northern Livland to
throw off the Catholic yoke and call the citizens of Novgorod to their
assistance, propitiating them with a portion of the spoil they had wrested
from the Germans and Skandinavians. Novgorod, by a curious revulsion of
feeling, had, after a succession of princes of the house of Souzdal, elected
the same Yaroslav who had treated her people with such heartless cruelty.
Possibly, in the turn affairs were taking on their west, the Novgorodskie saw
an opportunity for employing his malignant genius against their obnoxious
enemies. But the warlike efforts of the men of Lake Ilmen and their
Souzdalian prince were neutralised by the fact that the Germans, fighting
behind the walls of their towns, were more skilled in the handling of the
slings and stone-hurling engines, the rude artillery of the day; the old
Russian proverb, “Who can resist God and Velikie Novgorod?” had to be
modified in the face of such weapons of precision, and the Westerners
remained masters of the greater part of the disputed territories.
Two hundred years of unending domestic strife, carving and shredding off
into a crowd of incoherent provinces—Kiev, Tchernigov, Riazan, Souzdal,
Smolensk, Polotzk, Novgorod, Pskov, Volhynia, Galitz, and others of less
importance—had not fitted Russia to contend with the expanding powers of
Catholic Christendom, or to show a solid front against the incursion of
teeming Asiatic hordes on her east.

The Chronicles of Russian history at this period were wholly in the hands of
the monks who wrote them around the deeds of the princes or of the
luminaries of the Church; hence little can be gleaned from them of the
social life and condition of the people, who existed therein solely for the
purposes of supplying raw material for a massacre or a pestilence. The
history of Novgorod is valuable as yielding occasional glimpses of the life-
pulse that beat beneath the over-crust of court or cathedral annals, but this
city was too impregnated with outside influences to furnish a faithful
picture of the inward state of old-time Russia. Of the towns it may be
broadly stated that they were yet little more in scope than walled villages;
universities or seats of learning other than the monkish cloister there were
none, and much of the trade was in the hands of foreign merchants. The
wealthy boyarins had their houses and palaces clustered within the walls,
and often possessed in addition other houses in the sloboda, or detached
village, without, where there was more space available for gardens, etc.
Freemen as well as slaves (the latter captured in war or bought) were in
their service, but the abject poverty of the lower classes of freemen bound
them in almost servile dependence on their masters. Even more grinding
was the normal state of poverty in which the peasants eked out their
livelihood, and the name smerd applied to them was one of contempt,
something akin to our “rascallion.” For the most part the peasants tilled the
soil for the landowners under a system which allowed them a half, or other
fixed share, of the harvest produced, the freeman having this distinction
from the kholop or bondman that he was able to move from one estate to
another at will. Under these conditions of hand-to-mouth existence farm-
craft remained at a very low ebb; with axe, scythe, and plough the peasant
won precarious roothold for his crops, which might be blighted by an
untimely frost-coming or damaged by a too-late thaw, leaving him to
propitiate his appeal-court of saints by an involuntary emptiness of
stomach. With cattle-stock, horses, and horned beasts, the Russian lands, of
the north especially, were ill-provided, and possibly this was partly the
outcome of the unsettled state of the country, which discouraged the
multiplication of movable property, even the heaviest church bells being
now and again swept off in the wake of some pilfering kniaz-raid.[34]

CHAPTER IV
THE COMING OF THE MONGOLS
As an advancing tide, engulfing in its progression the stretches of ooze-land
which lie in its onward path, sends scurrying before it flights of waders and
other shore-haunting birds, driven from their feeding grounds, so the great
Mongol wave which was creeping upon Eastern Europe drove before it
disordered troops of the Polovtzi nomads, seeking among their old enemies
the safety which their desert fastnesses no longer afforded. Into the
principality of Kiev poured the fugitives, bringing with them droves of
horses, camels, cattle, and buffaloes—a wonderful and misgiving sight to
the staring Russians, who saw their fierce, untamable foes, the incarnation
to them of all that was barbarous, outlandish, and terrible, cowering and
fleeing from some unseen horror behind. That the wolf of the steppes
should come to lie down, panting and trembling, with the lamb, boded the
advent of anything but a millennium. The accounts given by the Polovtzi
khans of the Mongol hordes which had swept the tribes of Western Asia
before their advancing host, roused the Russian princes to a sense of the
danger they courted by their disunion, and gathered them together in the old
capital to deliberate on a common action in opposition to the threatened
invasion. Mstislav of Galitz, erstwhile of Toropetz, Mstislav Romanovitch
(of the house of Smolensk), Prince of Kiev, Daniel of Volhynia, Mstislav of
Tchernigov, and other princes of less importance, held high counsel
between them, and debated the means of averting the Mongol advance; and
as they paused in their deliberations to mark the unwonted caravans and
uncouth brutes of the desert that thronged the streets and approaches of
Kiev, it must have been borne in upon them that already Asia had
overflowed her limits and swept the Russian lands into her embrace. And
while, taking heart of grace from the assemblage of so many important
princes and the leadership of the redoubtable Mstislav of Galitz, they
consider how best to oppose these fearsome enemies, it will be of interest to
learn something of the history of this Mongol horde, this mushroom growth

that had over-spread the northern empire of China, made a desolate waste of
Persia, carried its arms into Hindostan, and risen to be the greatest power in
Asia, and which was now threatening to attack the outskirts of
Christendom.
In the dreary steppe-land of the Gobi desert, south of the Baikal Sea, where
flows the Onon, a tributary of the Amur, history first locates the Mongols,
in the sixth century, under the name Mongu, possibly derived from the word
“mong,” signifying bold, daring. At that period they are indicated as a sub-
tribe of the Shi-wei, who dwelt to the north-west of Manchuria, and did not
enjoy any considerable importance. This insignificance continued till the
accession, in 1175, to the Mongol Khanate, of Temudjin, known later under
the world-famous name of Jingis Khan, when the number of his subjects did
not exceed 40,000 families. A series of successful wars with the tribes in his
immediate neighbourhood paved the way for more ambitious undertakings,
and he soon carried his victorious standard, the Tuk with nine yak tails, into
the northern empire of China, which was ruled over by the Kin, or Tartar
dynasty (South China being separately governed by the Sung dynasty).
From this point Jingis carried on campaign after campaign with almost
uniform success, till the greater part of Asia grovelled beneath his yoke.
Pitilessly cruel, this “cormorant of conquest” marked each fresh advance,
whether resisted or unopposed, with wholesale massacres, which, after
allowing for Oriental exaggeration, swell to a ghastly total. “From 1211 to
1223, 18,470,000 human beings perished in China and Tangut alone at the
hands of Jingis and his followers,”[35] a record which would have turned the
early kings of Israel green with envy. The Mongolian policy was to scatter,
ruin, and, if possible, exterminate existing civilisations and communities
wherever their victorious armies passed.[36] The terror which the Mongol
cruelties inspired unnerved their opponents and disinclined nations with
whom they were at peace from combining against them, while their hardy
desert horses, light equipment, and powers of endurance enabled them to
travel enormous distances in all conditions of weather. Powerful empires
like those of China and Persia writhed beneath their yoke; lesser states, such
as Great Bulgaria and Georgia, were almost wiped out of existence. The
conquest of this latter country by a division of the Horde, under the
leadership of Chepe and Subatai, two of the Mongol chiefs, was followed
by an incursion into the land occupied by the Kumans, or Polovtzi, which

brought the destroying hosts on to the verge of the Russian dominion.
Southward the flying Kumans were pursued as far as the Krim peninsula, at
which point the Mongols first came into contact with Western civilisation,
burning Sudak, where the Genoese had a flourishing commercial station.
Now were ten ambassadors sent to the alarmed Russian princes, assuring
them that they had nothing to fear from the Horde, but warning them
against showing any support to the Polovtzi. Fear and resentment made the
princes forget the customs of civilisation, and the messengers were put to
death, an inauspicious opening for the coming struggle. Having thus defied
the gathering storm, the Russians crossed the Dniepr and marched to the
banks of the Kalka, where they prepared to meet these new foes from the
east, as they had aforetime met the Polovtzi and the Petchenigs before them.
But even at this critical moment the princes were not in complete accord;
each was jealous of the other, each fought for his own hand. Mstislav of
Galitz thought he could win the fight with his own forces and the assistance
of the Polovtzi, but the latter were unable to withstand the Mongol onset
and broke in wild confusion. The Russians fought well, but they fought
apart and without cohesion, and were only united in one overwhelming
ruin. The battle of the Kalka, on the 31st May 1224, was a terrible
catastrophe in Russian history, and fitly heralded a disastrous epoch in her
annals. An army of over 80,000 men was scattered like chaff before the
exulting Mongols, and to add to the horror of the flight the treacherous
Polovtzi, on behalf of whom the Russians had entered into the quarrel, slew
and plundered as they fled. From the fatal banks of the Kalka to those of the
Dniepr raced the broken bands of Russians, the laggards falling beneath the
lances and sabres of their grim pursuers. Six princes, many boyarins, and
thousands of soldiers were numbered among the slain. The young Daniel
Romanovitch of Volhynia escaped wounded from the woeful field, while
Mstislav of Kiev with two other princes defended themselves for three days
in a fortified camp on the bank of the Kalka. Deluded by a false promise of
security, they at length fell into the power of the Mongols, who slaughtered
the men and smothered the princes under planks, holding wild carousal over
their swollen bodies—a scene which recalls the “night of Cannae’s raging
field.” Southern Russia lay helpless at the pleasure of these merciless
enemies, who ravaged unchecked in the villages and homesteads near the
scene of their victory. Then they did a most unexpected thing; they went.
Retiring through Great Bulgaria, they vanished as suddenly as they had

come; of their arrival and departure might almost be said what was said of
their attack on Bokhara: “They came, dug, burnt, killed, robbed, went.” The
Russian lands awoke as from a nightmare to find their unwelcome guests
had departed.
In the midst of their conquests the separate Mongol bands turned as if by
common instinct back to their native haunts in the remote valley of the
Onon, where they hunted and hawked after swans and cranes, antelopes and
wild asses, in the odd moments when they were not engaged in hunting
men. Then occurred that picturesque gathering which Howorth has so
eloquently described, when the old Khan held his simple court surrounded
by his family and chieftains, a little knot of desert nomads who between
them had conquered half the known world.
The Russians meanwhile, delivered from the desolating presence of the
Mongol hosts, resumed the uneven tenor of their ways; the citizens of
Novgorod continued to displace and re-elect their princes, archbishops, and
posadniks; the boyarins of Galicia to plot and intrigue with Hungary,
Poland, and the house of Romanovitch; the princes to quarrel over the
eternal readjustment of their appanages. And here is a fit moment to review
the unfolding spectacle of national development among the Russian Slavs
since their focussing under the early princes, and examine the drift and
purpose underlying the chronicle of their doings. Frankly the result is not
edifying. It is an unpleasant accusation to hurl against a people, but in these
early centuries of their history they may be aptly likened to the “gray apes”
portrayed by Kipling’s magic pen,—always setting out to do some great
thing, never quite remembering what it was they had meant to do, holding
fast to a thing one moment, letting it go the next, restless and ambitious,
without any clear idea of what they desired, such is the character that must
reluctantly be given them. These blind devotions to the Princes of the
Blood, these aimless rebellions against their authority, these fervid
worshippings of Mother-of-God and saints, these impious plunderings of
cathedrals and monasteries, these kissings and swearings on the cross, these
shameless breaking of oaths, these holy wars against the Polovtzi, these
frequent military and matrimonial alliances with them, these sacrifices to
keep in touch with the Greek Empire and the south, this abandoning of the
south lands to Turko nomads and Italian merchants, these internal
complications, revolutions, banishments, recalls, leagues, and counter-

leagues, shifting as the sands of a river-bed, what do they bring to mind but
a family of children squabbling and loving and squabbling again in ever-
varying combinations, or, nearer still, the former simile, the gray apes.
Other countries and peoples were, it is true, going through the same period
of anarchy and disorder, but there was at least some method in their
madness. In Italy, amid the wild chaos of republics, principalities, and
imperial cities, there can plainly be discerned in the as yet scarcely named
factions of Guelph and Ghibelline the Papal power seeking to extend itself
on the one hand, and the Imperial interest striving to establish itself on the
other, and a third party playing off one against the other for the attainment
of its own independence. In Germany, Emperor, electors, prince-bishops,
free cities, and the other constituents of the commonweal are balanced one
against the other in an intricate but perfectly understandable whole, each
working to a definite and rational end. In France and England king and
barons fight out the old battle of monarchy against aristocracy, which is to
be merged one day in a conflict with a newer force—if anything is new
under the sun. But where is the aim or interest in these minutely-recorded
Russian struggles? Hidden away in the forests of Souzdal, perhaps, lies the
embryo or germ of a state policy, if it ever be hatched into life. Meanwhile
Russia is losing ground, literally and metaphorically, in many directions.
Southward, as has been noticed, a broad zone of steppe, inhabited by Turko
tribes, shuts her off from the coast cities of the Black Sea, where the
pushing Genoese have ensconced their factories. Galicia, with its
population of White Kroats, is becoming less Russian every day. Lit’uania,
no longer held under by the neighbouring provinces, threatens to expand at
their expense. The Baltic lands are drifting into Teutonic and Catholic
hands. Velikie Novgorod herself, absorbed in the details of parochial
administration, has let her magnificent foreign trade slip into the grip of
strangers. For Novgorod was not, as Howorth imagines, “a famous member
of the Hanseatic League”; the League, now beginning to play an important
part in the annals of Northern Europe, merely had a factory and station
there, as it had at London and Lisbon, and this factory speedily
monopolised the oversea trade of the great Russian emporium; “during
three centuries the Hanseatic League concentrated in her own hands all the
external commerce of Northern Russia.”[37] Finally, on the eastern marches
hovered the shadow of the late incursion, an incursion which might at any
moment be repeated.

While the war-clouds were lowering dark and ill-boding over the land, sank
in the west that day-star of Russian chivalry, Mstislav Mstislavitch, more or
less Prince of Galitz. Brave as a boar in battle, in
1228 council he was about as intelligent; “nothing is sadder
than victory, except defeat,” and with him certainly a
success was almost as expensive as a reverse could have been. His brilliant
achievements gained no advantage for his family or for Russia, and on his
death Andrew, son of the Hungarian king of that name, stepped into the
vacant sovereignty. This border province, with its involved political
conditions, had a magnetic attraction for the more adventurous spirits
among the Russian princes, and a candidate was ready to hand to dispute its
possession in the person of Daniel Romanovitch of Volhynia. Just such
another knight-errant as Mstislav, Daniel possessed more of the ability to
seize the contested throne than the address to establish himself firmly on it.
The son of an imperious and overbearing father, he had many enemies.
Vladimir Rurikovitch of Kiev, for instance, had not forgotten that Roman
had made his father assume the tonsure against his inclinations, and in
pursuance of this bequeathed quarrel formed a league against Daniel, which
included the Princes of Tchernigov and Pinsk, and of course the Polovtzi.
By detaching Kotian, the celebrated Polovtzi Khan, from this confederation,
Daniel was able to gain a complete victory over his enemies. Scarcely was
this accomplished than he whirled away, as his father had done, into the
troubled affairs of Poland, where he supported Duke Konrad of Mazovia
against the party opposed to his regency, his murdered brother, Duke Lesko
V., having left his son and heir, Boleslas V., in his charge. Elate with the
success which attended his arms in this direction, on his
1229 return he flung himself, with the hereditary eagle-
swoop, on to the city of Galitz, which fell into his
hands, together with the person of Prince Andrew. This advantage he threw
away by permitting his valuable prisoner to retire to Hungary, whither had
already fled Soudislav, one of the most active of the boyarins who favoured
the Magyar dynasty. The reward of this clemency was a new attack on
Galicia by the Hungarians, led by Prince Bela (afterwards Bela IV.) The
elements were unpropitious; torrents and floods damaged and hindered the
invading army, and contributed to its defeat, and the Hungarians recrossed
the Karpathians in evil plight. The position of Daniel was, however, too
precarious to withstand for long the resources of Hungary, the disaffection

of his subjects, and the enmity of some of his brother princes. Foremost
among the latter was his cousin and inveterate enemy, Aleksandr of Belz,
who, having been implicated in a plot which miscarried, fled to Hungary
and roused the king to a new attempt on this fair and coveted province. The
boyarins, who saw themselves, doubtless, of more authority and importance
as the courtiers of a foreign prince than under the personal rule of a
vigorous Russian kniaz, deserted to the Hungarian standard, and the young
Andrew became once more “King of Galicia.” His death in 1234 paved the
way for the restoration of the Romanovitch, and the boyarins of the Magyar
party had to seek safety beyond the mountains. Less concerned, however, in
strengthening his hold upon this slippery fief than in carrying his arms into
quarrels which did not concern him, Daniel rushed to the assistance of his
late enemy, Vladimir of Kiev, who was embroiled in a war with Mikhail of
Tchernigov. Daniel ravaged the latter province, but disaster overtook him
and Vladimir in the shape of a defeat by a Polovtzi army, led by Isiaslav,
grandson of the immortalised Igor of Severski—a strange combination.
Kiev and Galitz both fell into the hands of the victors,
1236 Mikhail establishing himself in the latter principality,
while Isiaslav held Kiev. On the departure of the
Polovtzi he was obliged to restore the city to Vladimir, who in turn ceded it
to Yaroslav Vsevolodovitch, prince and sometime persecutor of the
Novgorodskie; he, on leaving Novgorod, placed in his stead his son
Aleksandr, afterwards celebrated as “Nevski.” Daniel flitted about the
neighbouring lands like a restless ghost, seeking aid against the intruding
Olgovitch, even in Hungary, where Bela had succeeded his father Andrew
(1235), and where the exile could obtain nothing more than promises,
which were scarcely likely to be fulfilled. Nor did he receive warmer
support from Duke Konrad.
In the north-west things were in a somewhat chaotic condition; the year
1236 was marked by a disaster to the Sword Brethren, in which Volquin von
Winterstadt and a large proportion of his knights lost their lives, having
ventured rashly into the Lit’uanian country, where they were surrounded by
the enemy and cut to pieces. The following year the Order was
amalgamated with that of the Teutonic Knights, who had established
themselves in Prussia under the Grand-Mastership of Herman von Salza.
This province had been formally presented to them by the Emperor
Frederick II., by the Duke of Mazovia, and by Pope Gregory IX., finally by

Pope Innocent IV., notwithstanding which, the inhabitants of this much-
bestowed country offered a vigorous resistance to their new masters.
Out of their fools’ paradise of fancied security on their eastern border the
Russians were rudely aroused by the news that the Volga lands were being
devastated by the Mongols, that Bolgar was in ashes, that the heads of the
Tartar horses had been turned west, and that their hoofs were now scoring
broad tracks through the forests towards Riazan. On
1237 before them journeyed an eerie harbinger of ill, a
woman (described in the Chronicles as a sorceress),
with two attendants, and bearing a demand from Batu, the Mongol Khan,
for a tenth part of the princes’ treasures. Batu, nephew of Ogotai Khan, who
had ruled the Horde since the death of his father Jingis (1227), may well
have been astonished at his own moderation, since he was followed by an
army estimated at 300,000 men. But the Princes of Riazan and Mourom
refused his demand with a defiance of the true heroic ring: “When we are
dead you can have it all.” “Just as it afterwards happened,” as the old Saxon
Chronicles used to say. No aid was forthcoming from the Grand Prince Urii
in response to the urgent appeals from Riazan, and the devoted principality
received the full shock of the Mongol attack. The town was taken by assault
after six days’ incessant fighting round the walls, and a “blood bath,” to use
an appropriate German expression, ensued in the streets, houses, and
churches. The Prince of Riazan and many of his family perished in the
general slaughter. This was in the month of December, but, undeterred by
the snow which choked the forest roads and filled the valleys, Batu turned
north towards Souzdal, leaving behind him a banquet of frozen corpses for
the wolves and foxes, ravens and vultures. Moskva, Tver, Souzdal, and
Vladimir fell one by one into the power of the Mongols and experienced
their cruel fury. In the latter city perished Vsevolod and
Feb. 1238 Mstislav, sons of Urii, who had retreated to the banks of
the Sit, where he turned to bay against the ravagers of
his province. Here, on the 3rd March, was fought a battle big with
importance for Russia, the West fighting against the East, the forest-lands
against the steppe, Christianity against Shamanism. Urii had deferred the
decisive moment too long, and paid with his life the penalty of his mistake;
his disheartened soldiers broke before the overwhelming numbers of the
Mongols, and left them undisputed masters of the Grand Principality. The
East had won. Not for many a long century, if ever, would Russia shake off

the Oriental influences which the Mongol victory imposed upon her. From
her history the shadow of the Horde, one is tempted to forebode, in the
words of Poe, “shall be lifted nevermore.”
The Bishop of Rostov, haunting the scene of desolation, found the headless
body of the Grand Prince, and conveyed it to the church of the Virgin at that
town, where it was afterwards joined by its recovered head and interred,
together with the corpse of Vassilko Konstantinovitch, who also fell on that
fatal field. The triumphant Mongol host marched towards Novgorod, but
turned aside on seeing the fastnesses of swamp and lakelet with which that
town was girdled, and to which it owed its safety. Less fortunate were
Volok-Lamskie, Torjhok, and Kozelsk, which drooped one by one before
the blight of conquest and devastation. To the latter town, which resisted the
enemy for two months and slew of them four thousand, the Mongols gave
the name of “the evil city.” Vasili, its defending kniaz, fighting to the last,
was said to have been drowned in blood—an end worthy of the war-lusting
vikings of the twilight past.
Careful not to leave a foe behind him, Batu withdrew his forces to the basin
of the Don, to hunt out the Kumans once more from their hiding-places, and
to rest his warriors and their horses in the steppe-lands to which they were
accustomed. Yaroslav seized this opportunity to hasten from Kiev to the
evacuated Souzdalian province, of which desolated region he was now
sovereign. To him fell the task of restoring order to a distracted country and
courage to an affrighted people. Despite the terror which loomed in the
deserts near the Don, he was able to give his attention to the succour of
Smolensk, over-run by the Lit’uanians, whom he brilliantly defeated. In the
south, far from making common cause against the national enemy, or
seeking to revenge the cruelties which had been meted out to so many of
the Russian cities and towns, the Romanovitch and Olgovitch princes
renewed their private feuds and fief-grabbings. Mikhail of Tchernigov and
Galitz left the latter province in the keeping of his son Rostislav, while he
seized on Kiev, vacated by the new Prince of Souzdal-Vladimir. While
Rostislav and his boyarins were absent on an expedition against the
Lit’uanians, the ever-imminent Daniel made the inevitable eagle-pounce on
Galitz, and despite the opposition of its bishop, was received with
acclamation by the people, who buzzed around him, in the words of the
Chronicle, “as bees swarm about their queen.”

Meanwhile, in the deserts of Astrakhan, Kotian, the old Polovtzi Khan, had
been defeated by the Mongols, and fled, he and his, along the wild steppe
country till he came to the Karpathian range and sought refuge in the
Hungarian kingdom. Russia no longer offered a safe retreat. Swiftly and
remorselessly the death-dealing Horde bore down on the middle provinces,
and throughout the length and breadth of the land bishops and priests and
people knelt in agonised supplication to their all-powerful God to deliver
them from their savage enemies. From cathedral, church, and roadside
shrine wails the pitiful litany, “Save us from the infidels!” Candles burn and
incense swings, and anguish-stricken hearts yearn out their prayer, “Save us
from the infidels!” Call Him louder. Perchance He sleepeth.
Tchernigov and Péréyaslavl experienced the common fate, the general ruin;
town and country alike suffered the affliction of fire and sword and rapine.
Shuddering villagers, lying awake around their flickering hearths at night,
would hear the uneasy barking of their watch-dogs, scenting or seeing
something not yet palpable to human senses; and later the house-pigeons
would fly far and wildly over a landscape lit up by a glow that was not the
dawn.
After a short respite, while the destroyers had turned aside again to the
deserts of the Don, Central Russia once more became the scene of their
ravaging. It was now the turn of Kiev to become the miserable victim of
their attentions. Around the mother of Russian cities (a very Niobe under
present circumstances), the sacred site of the tombs and relics of the grand
old princes, the resting-place of “all the glories,” gathered a host that
blackened the face of the country for miles round. Batu himself, Mengu and
Kujuk, sons of Ogatai (the Grand Khan), and five other princes of the
family of Jingis, came to help the city on the Dniepr to its doom. Mikhail of
Tchernigov fled to Hungary on the approach of the enemy, and even the
daring Daniel Romanovitch preferred not to shut himself up like a trapped
rat in Kiev or Galitz, and sought refuge with King Bela, leaving, however,
in the former town his voevoda Dimitri to direct the defence. Happy had it
been for the inhabitants had they all fled from the death-trap. Within the
walls men could scarce hear themselves speak for the floating din of
creaking carts, bellowing oxen, groaning camels, neighing and stamping
horses, and yelling Mongols which resounded on all sides. Against the
Polish gate day and night the battering-rams crashed and splintered, till a

breach was effected by which the besiegers entered. S.
1240 Sofia had become the last refuge of the defenders, but
the roof, crowded with fugitives, gave way beneath the
pressure, and forestalled the vengeance of the Mongols. Men, women, and
infants, houses, churches, tombs, and shrines became a prey to the children
of the desert, a vast hecatomb to grace the funeral pyre of the old Russia.
The famous monastery of Petcherski, where the monk Nestor wrote his
Chronicle, shared the general destruction, and from amid its crashing ruins
the pagans seized the massive gold cross which had adorned its cupola.
From this victory the Horde pressed on through Volhynia and Galicia;
Vladimir, Galitz, and other Red Russian towns fell beneath their attack, and
then the conquering host branched off into two divisions; one, under the
command of Batu, invaded Hungary; the other, led by Baidar and Kaidu
(sons of Jagatai), carried desolation into the Polish provinces. The storm,
sack, and burning of Lublin, Zawikhost, Sendomir, and Krakow, and the
ravaging of the province of Breslau led up to the pitched battle of Liegnitz,
where the might of Poland measured itself in desperate struggle with the
Mongol wave. On the Christian side stood Duke Henry II. of Silesia;
Boleslav, son of the Markgraf of Moravia; Miecislav, Duke of Ratibor; and
Poppon d’Osterna, Provincial Master (in Prussia) of the Teutonic Order.
Outnumbered by the Mongols, the Poles fought valiantly and with effect,
till at last their spirit failed them; the great Tuk banner, lurid with flaring
naphtha, and decorated with two gleaming sheep bones, transversely
crossed, seemed to reproduce, amid unholy goblin flames, their own mystic
symbol. The powers of darkness and the seething masses of human foes
were too formidable a combination to fight against, and the chivalry of
Poland broke and fled. Duke Henry on that awful night fought savagely as
he fled, but was torn down at length by his untiring pursuers. Many a count
and palatine shared his fate; from every corpse the savage victors cut an ear,
and nine sacks full were sent to the Grand Khan, together with the head of
Duke Henry, as a record of the slain.[38] In tracing the Mongol march of
devastation through Silesia, Moravia, and Transylvania into Hungary, it is
only necessary to observe that wholesale slaughter, destruction, and
sweeping victory continued to characterise the advance of the Horde.[39] In
Hungary men had awaited with cold and anxious hearts the onfall of the
Mongols. Had they not heard with sorrow and foreboding at Christmas-tide

last year the doleful intelligence of the fall of Kiev? And the wild stories of
each fresh batch of fugitives—Kumans, Russians, Poles, Silesians—
increased the terror of the Mongol name and brought their armies nearer.
The King rallied his nobles round him (none too well-affected though they
were) in a determined effort to stem this swarthy torrent that threatened to
submerge the country. The prelates of the realm, good old fighting
churchmen as they were, led their vassals in person to the fight. On the field
of Mohi (name strangely like that of the other fatal battle in their history),
on the banks of the Sajó, the cross of S. Stefan went down before the yak-
tailed Tuk, and the nomad warriors triumphed over the Magyar chivalry.
Hemmed in on all sides, the Hungarians were powerless; “it was not a
battle, but a butchery.”[40] Bela fled to the Karpathians, thence to Austria;
his brother Kalman reached Kroatia, where he died of his wounds. Among
the slain were the Archbishops Mathias of Gran and Ugolin of Kalocza, the
Bishops of Raab, Neutra, and Siebenbürgen, and counts and nobles galore,
the flower of Hungarian aristocracy. Surely not to be reckoned as “the weak
and the false,” “the fool and the knave.” Bela, betrayed by the Duke of
Austria and hunted from one refuge to another by the remorseless enemy,
took ship from the Dalmatian coast and left his kingdom in the hands of
Batu. Southern Hungary, Servia, Dalmatia, and parts of Bulgaria were
ravaged by detachments of the Horde, but south of Albania and west of
Austria they do not appear to have penetrated. The news of the death of the
Grand Khan Ogatai, and possibly the increasing difficulty of supporting so
large a body of men in a devastated country, determined Batu to withdraw
his hosts from the scene of their conquests, and the Mongol swarms melted
away from the erstwhile fertile lands which they had turned into a howling
wilderness. Bela returned to take possession of his stricken kingdom,
confronted on all sides by evidences of the great calamity; “the highways
were grown with grass, the fields were white with bones, and here and there
for more than a day’s journey round, no living soul.”[41] In distant corners
of Europe men shuddered at the tales that were told of these fearsome sons
of the desert; in marvel-loving Constantinople it was gravely averred that
they had the heads of dogs and fed upon human flesh, and the dread of their
coming kept the fishermen of Sweden and Friesland from attending the
herring-market on the English coast, thereby demoralising prices.[42]

CHAPTER V
“THE YEARS THAT THE LOCUST HATH
EATEN”
While the Golden Horde was dealing out death and destruction in the
neighbouring western kingdoms, Russia was exerting her powers of
recuperation to regain some of the life that had been crushed out of her.
Like unscathed pheasants stealing back one by one to the coverts from
which the beaters had sent them whirring forth, the fugitive princes returned
to the wrecks of their provinces. Daniel re-established himself at Galitz,
Mikhail at Kiev; Tchernigov was still infested by roving bodies of Mongols.
Meanwhile the Novgorodskie, in their own little world in the North,
pursued as usual a political existence isolated from that of Central and
Eastern Russia. On the top of their quarrels with the German knights they
became involved in a question of frontier lands with the crown of Sweden.
Under the command of the Skandinavian Prince Birger, an army of Swedes,
Norwegians, and Finns disembarked at the mouth of the Ijhora, an affluent
of the Neva, and threatened an attack upon Ladoga.
1240 Aleksandr Yaroslavitch, the young Prince of Novgorod,
gathering together the few men at his disposal, flung
himself on the Swedish camp and gained a brilliant victory, wounding
Birger himself in the face with his lance. In honour of which battle he ever
after bore the added name of Nevski (“of the Neva”).
While the young Yaroslavitch waged brilliant, if not particularly fruitful,
campaigns against German and Lit’uanian enemies, matters were settling
down in gloomy mould in the other Russian provinces. The great Mongol
inundation, which had submerged the Palearctic region (no less
comprehensive definition is adequate), from the basin of the Amur to the
Dalmatian sea-board, had receded so far as to leave the Polish, Hungarian,
and Bulgarian lands high and dry, though strewn with the wreckage of its
violence. But here the shrinkage stopped. The conqueror Batu halted his

retiring hordes in the steppe-land of the lower Volga, on the left bank of
which river he established his camp-city, Sarai. From here he was able to
maintain the ascendancy which his arms had won him over the Russian
princes, and to guard the supremacy of the great Mongol Empire in the
western portions of its extensive territory. And now comes perhaps the
saddest period of Russian history—certainly the meanest. The locust-plague
that had swept through the land had blighted the fair promise of its growth;
Russia was no longer free, and her princes ruled, not by the grace of God,
but by favour of the Grand Khan, Kuyuk, last heard of before the crumbling
walls of Kiev. To the peasantry, perhaps, it mattered little in whose name
they were taxed or pillaged, whether they beat the forehead to Russian
kniaz or Mongol khan; but to the Princes of the Blood, proud of their
heirship of the throne of Rurik, treasuring their religion as a personal glory-
reflecting possession, jealous of their standing with the royal houses of
Europe, it was a terrible and bitter humiliation to have to own allegiance to
this desert chief, this Asiatic barbarian, as he must have been in their eyes,
this pagan sun-worshipper, who derived his authority neither from the keys
of S. Peter nor from the sceptre of the Cæsars. Yet, so adaptable to altered
circumstances is nature, that even this galling yoke ceased after a while to
deaden the political energies of its wearers, which found vent, unhappily,
not in struggles towards emancipation, but in a renewal of the old miserable
squabbles between prince and prince. In this internal strife the power of the
Khan was even invoked to overwhelm an opponent, a state of things which,
however degrading it may appear, is not unique in the history of peoples,
and proud peoples moreover. The Jewish factions in the days of Josephus,
groaning under the abhorred dominion of Rome, expended their energies in
fighting each other with any weapon that came to hand, including the
Gentile-wielded authority, and in this same thirteenth century the Scottish
nobles did not scruple to turn the English suzerainty to account in their
party schemes and feuds.
The first to tender his submission at the Court of the
1244
Mongol chief was Yaroslav, Grand Prince of Souzdal,
whom Batu confirmed in his principality and added
thereto that of Kiev. Two years later, however, Yaroslav was required to
present himself at the headquarters of the Grand Khan, in the Amur valley,
where he bowed the knee before his Mongol master and obtained
permission to return to his province, dying, however, before the weary

homeward journey was accomplished. Mikhail of Tchernigov, forced to
undertake the same humiliating pilgrimage, died at the hands of the Mongol
priests, a martyr to his religion. His son Rostislav, a voluntary exile in
Hungary, became Ban of Sclavonia and of Makhov in Bosnia.[43] Daniel of
Galitz, farthest removed from the power of the Khan, was one of the last to
surrender his independence and journey across Russia to the tent of Batu,
who received him with more consideration than had been shown to the
other princes. Little indeed might such humouring avail to gild the bitter
pill, that the proud Romanovitch, whose favour had been sought by princes
and Pope, should go forth from the Mongol presence wearing the title,
“Servant of the Grand Khan.” The enormous fighting-strength at the
disposal of the conquerors, the rapidity with which it could be put in
motion, and the terror inspired by a long succession of victories and
attendant cruelties, helped to uphold their authority as it had contributed to
the ease of their conquests. “In Asia and Eastern Europe scarcely a dog
might bark without Mongol leave, from the borders of Poland and the coast
of Cilicia to the Amur and the Yellow Sea.”[44] Even the hero of the battle
of the Neva found it expedient to toil through some thousand miles of desert
to the habitation of the Grand Khan, and pay the same distasteful homage to
the great barbarian. In his absence important events were happening at
Souzdal. His uncle, Sviatoslav, who had succeeded to
1248 the Grand Principality on the death of Yaroslav, was
chased out of this dignity by Mikhail, Aleksandr’s
younger brother. The same winter Mikhail lost his life in battle with the
Lit’uanians. His place was filled by Andrei, another brother, who had just
returned with Aleksandr from the eastern pilgrimage. While the greater part
of Russia was passing into the hands of the Souzdal family, Daniel was
leaning more and more towards Western Europe and dallying openly with
the Pope. No stone was left unturned by the strenuous Pontiff (Innocent IV.)
to tempt the Galician Prince into the Roman communion, and Daniel
certainly nibbled at the bait. Russia had become a province of Tartary;
Constantinople no longer harboured the Orthodox faith; only in Catholic
Europe did the worship of Jesus and the glory of princes go hand in hand.
Hence it is not to be wondered at that a Russian prince should lose heart in
the faith of his fathers, and seek for support against the Mongols in an
alliance with the Holy See and neighbouring Catholic powers. In 1254
matters had so far progressed in this direction that, after much beating about

the bush on both sides, the Abbot of Messina, in the capacity of Papal
Legate, placed on Daniel’s head a royal crown and hailed him King of
Galicia. Innocent followed this up by an appeal to the sovereign Princes of
Bohemia, Poland, etc., to unite with Daniel in a crusade against the
Mongols; but Catholic Christendom was at that moment too divided against
itself, in the strife of the Papacy with the Hohenstaufen emperors, to show a
united front to any enemy. The Russian Prince, who had not definitely
committed himself to a change of creed, saw that he was not likely to obtain
any substantial support from the western princes, and broke off relations
with Rome.[45] In the north Aleksandr was seeking to conserve his power
and that of his family by a different policy—by cultivating a good
understanding, namely, with the rulers of the Horde. Had he chosen the
more heroic line of resistance, and sacrificed his religious scruples to the
Latin Pope rather than to the Mongol Khan, he might, with the alliance of
the Swedes and Teutons, have defied the armies of the desert from behind
the swampy forests which girdled Novgorod. This would have meant,
however, abandoning Kiev and Souzdal as well as the Orthodox faith,
possessions which he was able to retain by acquiescing in the Mongol
supremacy. His less subservient, or less tactful brother,
(1252)
Andrei, had found it necessary to depart hurriedly from
the Grand Principality, before the advent of the Horde’s
agents, sent to punish him for insubordination to the Grand Khan;
Aleksandr, by a friendly visit to Sardak (son of Batu), obtained the
reversion of the escheated fiefs, and thereby sealed his obligation to his
Tartar masters.[46] Five years later he had to acquiesce in another
humiliation, the numbering and taxing of his provinces by the agents of the
new Khan Berke. This was followed in due course by a command that
Novgorod should submit to the same operation, and Aleksandr, who had
defended that city against all comers, had now to undertake the unpleasant
task of reconciling the citizens to this indignity. Velikie Novgorod hummed
like a hive at the shameful proposal. Alone of all the Russian lands she had
kept her liberty; she had checked the encroachments of Sweden and the
missionary efforts of the German military Orders; had kept the House of
Souzdal on its good behaviour, and dismissed princes, posadniks, and
archbishops with a prodigality of independence; and now, at the hands of
her well-beloved Nevski, this hateful thing was thrust upon her. No wonder
the “proud city of the waters” throbbed with indignation, and the great bell

of Yaroslav echoed the popular tumult. But the
1259 insistence of the Khan, coupled with the Grand Prince’s
influence, wore down the noisy opposition, and the
Novgorodskie, spent with fury, admitted the Mongol assessors into their
houses, and became the tributaries of the Golden Horde.
While Aleksandr had been employed in linking the northern province on to
the Mongol chain, Daniel had been making tentative experiments in the
direction of freedom, which brought a considerable detachment of the
Horde galloping into his territory. The Galician Prince averted the storm by
a hasty submission, and had the satisfaction of seeing the monster he had
called up vent its fury on his doubtful allies, the Lit’uanians. But the
conquest of a people who had no towns worth speaking
(1258) of, and who were adepts in the art of eluding pursuit,
did not exhaust the Mongol craving for loot and
slaughter, and the following year found them still on the war-path, this time
in Polish territory. “From Lublin they circled round to Zavikhvost, passed
across the Vistula, captured Sendomir and the town of Listz.”[47] Then,
having given Daniel an object-lesson in obedience, the Horde melted away
into the steppe—and the Lit’uanians issued anew from their fastnesses and
renewed their border warfare in the surrounding lands. The attack of the
Mongols adds another item to the long list of enemies against whom these
irrepressible people had to battle for their liberty and their existence.
Livlandish knights, the citizens of Pskov and Novgorod, the Princes of
Polotzk, Souzdal, and Galitz, the palatines of Mazovia, and now the nomads
of the desert, battered and smote perseveringly upon this pre-eminently
“buffer State,” whose security lay partly in the nature of its physical
conformation, partly in the disunion of its enemies. In the fierce struggle for
life and growth which was going on in this corner of Europe the result
would necessarily be a survival of the fittest, and which that fittest was
(under the conditions then obtaining) a glance at a graduated political map
of the region will demonstrate.[48] The very stress of external attack which
bore upon them from all sides, drove the Lit’uanians into closer fusion and
welded them together under the leadership of a single chief. In the person of
Mindovg appears the first historically reliable Duke of Lit’uania, and under
his auspices spring up the towns, or strongholds, of Kernov and Grodno. A
few years later his nephew Tovtivl is installed, whether by conquest or

election is not clear, in the neighbouring Russian kniazdom of Polotzk. In
1262 occurs the first recorded aggressive alliance between the Russians and
Lit’uanians; during one of Aleksandr Nevski’s frequent pilgrimages to the
Mongol headquarters, his son Dimitri and his brother Yaroslav (Prince of
Tver), in conjunction with Mindovg and Tovtivl, banded their forces
together in an attack on Uriev, called by the Germans Dorpat. This town,
which had long been a bone of contention between the Knights of Jesus and
the north Russian princes, and had experienced more than once the fate of a
border burg, suffered considerably on this occasion, and its blazing
outworks lit home the booty-laden raiders—roused also to vengeance,
according to some accounts, the Landmaster Werner von Breithausen, who
led his knights, burning and plundering, into Russian land till failing
strength constrained him to return homewards.[49]
The return of Aleksandr from Sarai, where he had for several months been
the guest—or prisoner—of the Khan, was soon followed by his death, in
November 1263—an event which, according to some of the older Russian
historians, was universally wept and deplored by his bereaved subjects. The
people of Novgorod, with whom he should have been especially popular,
seem to have successfully dissembled their grief, and marked their
attachment to his memory by expelling his son Dimitri, killing Mikhail
Stefanovitch, the posadnik of his choosing, and electing to that office
Mikhail Thedorovitch, a boyarin opposed to the late Prince’s interests.
Having thus thoroughly broken “off with the old love,”
1264
they dispatched their new posadnik and a deputation of
citizens to offer their allegiance to Yaroslav, who had
succeeded, with the consent of the Khan, to the grand princedom; Andrei,
who lay under the displeasure of the Horde, having further disqualified
himself by dying a few months after his brother. The terms of the deed by
which Yaroslav was invited to assume the sovereignty of Novgorod are
interesting as throwing valuable light on the position occupied by the city at
that period. The Prince was to swear by the cross to govern Novgorod
“conformably to her ancient laws”; to content himself with presents from
the country districts and dependencies, in place of levying tribute; to govern
them only by Novgorodian magistrates, chosen with the assent of the
posadnik; he was only permitted to visit the vassal town of Staraia Rousa in
the autumn, while Ladoga was out of bounds for himself or any member of
his household, except his fisherman and brewer; his judicial and domestic

officials were to pay “with money” for the use of horses on their travels, but
the military couriers were permitted to impress what they wanted in this
respect for their service; on the other hand, it was engaged that
Novgorodian merchants journeying in the Grand Principality were to pay
“two squirrel-skins for boat, cart, and measure of flax or hops.” “In
consequence, and for guarantee that you execute these conditions, kiss you
the holy cross in presence of the ambassadors of Novgorod: on that, Prince,
we salute you.” This document, which was made out in
1265 the name of the Archbishop, posadnik, boyarins, and
people of Novgorod, “from the oldest to the youngest”
(a Russian equivalent for high and low, or great and small), was subscribed
to by Yaroslav, who thereon became Prince of Novgorod. Among other
things to be gleaned from this covenant is the fact that the Prince was
supposed to be supported “by voluntary contributions”; that minute fiscal
and domestic regulations (similar in nature to those existing in some of the
Swiss cantons in the Middle Ages) were enforced in the lands of the
republic and in relation with other Russian provinces; and that fur-pelts had
not yet been wholly displaced, as a medium of payment, by the circulation
of money. The petty and irritating nature of some of these restrictions may
have been the effect, rather than the cause, of the long series of quarrels
between princes and citizens, but they could hardly fail to produce friction
under the most favourable circumstances. Yaroslav soon had proof of the
independent dispositions of his northern subjects, who peremptorily
thwarted his design for a campaign against the sister republic of Pskov,
which had elected a Lit’uanian chief as its ruler without consulting the
Grand Prince. The latter soon after returned to the more congenial
atmosphere of Vladimir, leaving as his representative his nephew, Urii
Andreievitch. Relieved of the presence of the Velikie-kniaz, the
Novgorodskie, allied with Dovmont, the aforesaid Prince of Pskov,
marched with an army 30,000 strong, furnished with battering-rams and
other siege engines, into the charmed region of the Baltic provinces, where
German knights, the Archbishops of Riga, Danes, Swedes, Lit’uanians, and
Russians disputed over and over again, with never-flagging zest, every
corner of that most debatable land. The objective of the Russ-Lit’uanian
army (with which marched Dimitri, the whilom Prince of Novgorod), was
the Dane-held town of Rakovor (Wesenberg), in Estland; as they
approached the town, however, the Russians found themselves confronted

by a strong force of “the gentlemen of God” (as they magnanimously, or
satirically, styled the Teutonic knights), under the command of their
Landmaster, von Rodenstein—the last people they were anxious to meet.
The dark winter day (18th February 1268) was all too short to decide the
furious combat which ensued, and many a noted leader, many a thousand
men-at-arms, fell on either side without the issue being settled one way or
the other. The Novgorodskie lost their posadnik and the tisyaszhnik[50]
Kodrat, while on the other side Alexander, Bishop of Dorpat, was among
the slain. Better armed and better disciplined, it is probable that the knights
of the Order inflicted the heavier loss on their opponents, and the Russians
had to abandon their projected attack on Rakovor. The spring of the next
year brought von Rodenstein and his pied-mantled warriors into the
territory of Pskov, where they burnt Izborsk, the old pre-Rurikian town on
the Lake Peipus, and stormed Pskov itself. Its Lit’uanian Prince was a
match for the Teutons, and for ten days steel and iron and stone clashed and
hurtled round the tottering ramparts. Dovmont himself wounded the
Landmaster, and held the enemy at bay till the bear-blazoned standard of
Velikie Novgorod waved in the distance and warned the knights to retire
beyond the border. The Order, however, by a treaty with the powerful Hanse
city of Lubeck, was able to strike Novgorod in a more vulnerable spot than
the shores of Lake Peipus, and a combination directed against her shipping
caused her to conclude a peace with her German neighbours.[51]
This war, in which both sides had lost heavily in men, while neither had
gained any distinct advantage, had been sustained by Novgorod without the
assistance and without the sanction of the Grand Prince, and now that it had
come to a lame conclusion mutual recriminations were indulged in by the
citizens and by Yaroslav. The sins of the father were
1270
visited on the child, so to speak, and Urii, like so many
of his forerunners, was “shown the way” out of the city,
and the old quarrel between the Princes of Souzdal and the great republic
broke out anew. In all the misery and humiliation of their subject position
the Russians clung to the luxury of their private feuds, as a fate-cursed man
takes to a soothing narcotic. Yaroslav even rose to the brilliantly despicable
idea of turning the national misfortune to account by employing the Mongol
hordes to bear upon the defensive array of the turbulent city. A boyarin sent
by him to Sarai depicted the attitude of the citizens as one of revolt against

the Grand Prince and the authority of the Horde, and invoked the aid of the
Khan to quench this dangerous disaffection. Fortunately for the men of
Novgorod they had a friend at court in the person of Vasili, the Grand
Prince’s youngest brother, who stated their side of the case and obtained the
recall of the punitive force which had been dispatched against them.[52] The
credit of restoring good relations between the proud republic and the
irritated Prince rests with the Metropolitan Kirill, who was ever ready to
exert the influence of his office in the interests of peace.
While these events had been passing in the north, Daniel Romanovitch had
quietly slipped out of existence, the date of his death being vaguely fixed
“between 1264-1266.”[53] Taking into consideration the very open question
which the possession of his province had been when he first enforced his
claims upon it, the scant notice which his death attracted was rather a
compliment to his statecraft. “King of Galitz,” where his forerunners had
been simply princes, he was probably the only sovereign in Europe who had
outwitted Innocent IV., and swallowed unconcernedly the bait which was to
have lured him into the Catholic fold. Of his four sons, Roman (who had
been successively dazzled, utilised, and disillusioned by Bela IV. in the
expectation of the reversion of the contested Austrian lands) had died before
him, and the remaining three—Lev, Mstislav, and Shvarn—were
established at Pérémysl, Loutzk, and Galitz respectively, while their uncle
Vassilko reigned at Vladimir. The influence of the latter, who had loyally
supported his brother in all his vicissitudes, prevented the province from
falling to pieces, and an unlooked-for event gave Galicia new importance.
Voeshelk, son of Mindovg, who had succeeded to a reduced share of his
father’s dominions and authority, had adopted the Christian religion, and
displayed from time to time the uncomfortable zeal of a convert; already he
had tasted the sweets of monastic retirement, and after the short interval of
a rule which was not remarkable for over much mercy towards his subjects,
he wished again for the solitude of the cloister. It was necessary to appoint a
successor, and as a Christian prince was preferred in that capacity, his
choice fell upon Shvarn Danielovitch, who possessed the further
recommendation of having married the Lit’uanian chief’s daughter. Thus
Galitz and the greater part of Lit’uania became united under one ruler, and
it seemed possible that in this direction was to be looked for the building up
of a Russian monarchy—a development from the West rather than from the

East. The union of the States, however, was followed by a dark and ill-
omened deed, when the Prince of Pérémysl, incensed by the preference
shown to his youngest brother, murdered the monk-prince Voeshelk after a
banquet in the city of Vladimir. The sudden death of Shvarn (1270) ended
the union so inauspiciously inaugurated; Lev succeeded to the fief of Galitz,
and Lit’uania was wrested from Russia and Christianity by the heathen
Prince Troiden.
Two years after this event died Yaroslav-Yaroslavitch,
1272
Grand Prince of Souzdal-Vladimir and Prince of
Novgorod. In the former province he was succeeded
peaceably by his brother Vasili; at Novgorod, naturally, affairs did not pass
off so smoothly. Dimitri Aleksandrovitch was chosen by the posadnik and
many of the citizens in opposition to Vasili, and another contest between
Novgorod and Souzdal seemed imminent. The peace party in the former
province averted the threatened rupture by out-voting the adherents of
Dimitri, and Novgorod was once more united with the Grand Principality. It
is interesting to note that the rulers of the republic were being chosen more
and more exclusively from the reigning family of Souzdal-Vladimir, and
here may be seen for the first time since the death of Vladimir the Holy a
reliable hint of the germ-growth of “all the Russias.” With Pskov and
Polotzk in Lit’uanian hands, Kiev and the steppes little more than Mongol
outposts, and Tchernigov enjoying but a shadow of its former importance,
Novgorod, Souzdal, and Galitz between them make up very nearly the total
of the Russian-ruled lands; and of these three provinces the two largest have
settled down under one family. Like the acorn-seed, Russia had to decay
and shrivel to a certain extent before she could begin to grow; but the
process of decomposition and denudation was not yet arrested.
Again did the Russian Princes of Galicia, Volhynia, and Smolensk call in
the aid of the Mongols—this time against the Lit’uanians, who were
becoming more and more uncomfortable neighbours. In two campaigns the
latter held their own against the combined Tartar-Russian attack, and the
idolaters of Grodno and Novgorodek successfully resisted the forces of
Christianity and Islam—to which latter creed the Mongols had a few years
previously been converted.
In 1276 Vasili Yaroslavitch was gathered to his fathers, and Dimitri came in,
as peacefully as the proverbial lamb, to the possession of the Grand

Principality and of Velikie Novgorod. Not long had he been on the throne
ere the wildest anarchy broke out in his dominions; scarcely had the
inevitable quarrel with Novgorod been smoothed over than civil war
desolated the grand province. Andrei Aleksandrovitch, kniaz of the
appanage of Gorodetz on the Volga, was brother to Dimitri—by the
accident of birth a younger brother; an accident which he proposed to
correct with the assistance of the Horde. In league with these formidable
warriors and with his uncles Thedor and Mikhail, Andrei let slip the dogs of
war on the unhappy province, and drove Dimitri from the field. After the
Mongols had worked their will on the wretched inhabitants, and established
Andrei as Grand Prince of a ravaged and depopulated territory, they retired
with their booty and captives and left the two princes to fight out their own
quarrels. Andrei soon had to call them in again, and
1283 Dimitri, not to be outdone, played Mongol against
Mongol, and secured the support of Nogai, the almost
independent Khan of the Oukrain steppes. The people, as usual, suffered
heavily at the hands of the nomad squadrons: the “Scourge of God” has a
way of falling on the most innocent shoulders. The condition of the Russian
peasant and tiller of the soil was at this time deplorable. Debarred from
exercising his labour on the fertile, but robber-haunted lands of the south,
he was obliged to struggle patiently with the mighty forces of the northern
forests, like the Indian ryot fighting against the encroachments of the
jungle; only in place of elephant, boar, and sambur, which ruin from time to
time the fruits of the latter’s toil, the former had periodically to bewail the
devastations of Kuman, Mongol, and, not seldom, Russian raiders.
With intervals of exhaustion, the war of the brothers dragged on for many
years, kept alive, now by intrigues at the Mongol Courts, now by raid and
rapine in the lands of Souzdal and Péréyaslavl. Out of this seething
incoherent dust-storm rises one tangible fact, the independence of the
province of Tver; born of anarchy, this little principality shall contribute its
quota to the red page of Russian history ere it sinks back into obscurity.
Under its young Prince, Mikhail Yaroslavitch, it has taken advantage of the
weakness and embarrassments of Dimitri to secure for itself a separate
existence, and to impair the solidity of the grand province. The
Novgorodians, but languidly attached to the interests of the rival princes,
started a domestic war of their own, one of those vigorous, exuberant
burgh-strifes peculiar to the free cities of Northern Europe in the Middle

Ages—a strife in which the whole population took part, from the
Archbishop, posadnik, and boyarins, down to the “youngest people”; a
strife which has been handed down blurred and sketchy, devoid of meaning
and purpose, if it ever had any, but still instinct with life and movement.
Wild crowds skirling through narrow streets, hunting the posadnik into the
protection of the Archbishop, hammering on the closed door of the
sanctuary, the Cathedral of S. Sofia; tumultuous gatherings in the great
square, angry dooming of citizens, hurlings of struggling victims from the
bridge into the Volkhov; and above all these scenes of disorder, the great
bell of Yaroslav clanging and dinning, like some evil spirit of unrest
prisoned in its owl-tower. The picture lives.
Western Russia also had its own troubles, or rather it had become involved
in those of Poland, where, the scruples of Boleslas “the Chaste” having
prevented him from reproducing his species, his death in 1279 was
followed by a scramble for his throne. Where there is no heir there are
many, may not be a proverb, but it has all the qualifications for one. The
Dukes of Mazovia, Krakow, Silesia, and Kujavia put forward their interests,
and the cousins Lev of Galitz and Vladimir of Volhynia entered into the fray
without any more substantial claim than a backing of Mongol horsemen,
borrowed from the Horde. Even this powerful argument broke down when
the supporters of the new Duke, Lesko the Black, defeated the Russ-
Mongol army near Sendomir with great slaughter (1280). The following
year Galicia and Volhynia received return visits from the Poles, but the
dissensions which soon after broke out in the palatinate of Mazovia again
gave the Red Russian princes the opportunity of interesting themselves in
Polish affairs.
In Eastern Russia Andrei had practically established his authority in the
Grand Principality; the Tartar-hunted, fate-cursed Dimitri, driven even from
his beloved domain of Péréyaslavl, was compelled at last to seek refuge
with his cousin and erstwhile enemy, Mikhail of Tver, and renounce his
claim to the grand province, stipulating only for the possession of his
hereditary fief. This was conceded him, and the wanderer turned his weary
steps towards his burnt and plundered Péréyaslavl, which he was not to see.

The dead man rode through the autumn day
To visit his love again.

On the road to Volok died Dimitri Aleksandrovitch, and
1294 Ivan his son reigned at Péréyaslavl in his stead.
Andrei’s position as Grand Prince was more than ever assured, but the long
struggle had sapped the authority formerly attaching to that dignity in the
lands of Souzdal; not only Tver, but Moskva and Péréyaslavl had taken unto
themselves a greater measure of independence—apart, that is to say, from
their subjection to the Horde. Unable to overawe this dangerous coalition
by superior force, Andrei laid his griefs at the feet of the Khan, hoping to
establish his ascendancy by the same means with which he had overthrown
his brother’s. The result of this move was a renewal of
1296 the old “council on the carpet”; most of the princes
interested, with the Bishops of Vladimir and Sarai,
gathered at the former city in obedience to the summons of the Khan’s
deputy, who presided with Oriental gravity over their somewhat heated
deliberations. Even this significant reminder of their servitude could not
depress the princes into the decencies of debate; angry words flashed out,
and swords leapt from their scabbards, and had not the Vladuika[54] Simeon,
Bishop of Vladimir, parted the combatants, the blood of Rurik might have
been squandered on the carpet. In the end Andrei had to accommodate
himself with the vassal princes, who were too strong for him to subdue, and
a peace was effected in 1304 between the two parties. Two years previously
Ivan Dmitrovitch, dying without issue, had bequeathed his province of
Péréyaslavl to his uncle, Daniel of Moskva—a circumstance which added
considerably to the importance of the latter principality.
Thus drew to a close a century which had witnessed a vital dislocation in
the course of Russian history, which had been fraught with important
changes in Europe generally. The House of Hohenstaufen, which had
played so bold a part in the affairs of Germany, Italy, and Palestine, had
gone down in the death-struggle with the Papacy, and out of the ashes of its
ruin had risen, phœnix-like, the House of Habsburg, which one day was to
prove the surest bulwark against the enemies of the Holy See; in Rudolf,
petty Count of Habsburg and Kyburg, the Empire had found the strongest
master it had known since the death of its founder. In that other Empire,
whose luxurious capital seemed to enervate and paralyse the manhood of its
rulers, the Catholic dynasty had drooped and shrivelled, and when the trade
jealousies of Genoa led her to strike with the Greeks against the Latin allies

of her hated rival, Venice, the end was at hand; the House of Courtenay
gave way to that of Paleologus, and the formula “proceeding from the
Father by the Son” re-echoed once more in the high places of S. Sofia. In
Hungary died out with the century the male line of the princely House of
Arpad, which had given sovereigns to that country since the first erection of
the Magyar State; from this point the crown of S. Stefan became the
ambition and prize of the surrounding princes, a fate similar to that which
overtook the neighbouring kingdom of Bohemia a year or two later. The
Livlandish debatable lands still seethed and bubbled with the wars of the
rival immigrants. The gentlemen of God maintained a vigorous contest with
the See of Dorpat, with the city and Archbishop of Riga, and with the
Lit’uanians. In Riga the burghers burnt the church and chapel of the Order
and killed sixty of the convent brothers (1297). On the other hand their
Archbishop, Johann of Schwerin, was besieged in his castle of Treiden and
taken prisoner by the Order, to the scandal of Pope Boniface VIII. The
heathen Lit’uanians, headed by their Prince, Viten, and allied with the
Church troops of Riga and Dorpat, fought against the knights “in eighteen
months nine bloody battles.” In 1298 they won a decisive victory over the
Landmaster Bruno, in which the latter and many of his knights lost their
lives. The Komthur Berthold, with reinforcements from Prussia, wiped out
this reverse by a victory at Neuermühlen, and later the new Landmaster
ravaged the archiepiscopal territory. Ultimately the release and withdrawal
of the militant Archbishop and the appointment of Isarnus Tacconi, the
Pope’s chaplain, to the See of Riga, relieved the situation and gave some
measure of peace to this over-apostleised land.[55]
In 1300 the Novgorodians witnessed a descent of the Swedes upon the
banks of the Neva, where they built the fortress of Landskron, which
position was promptly attacked and destroyed by the troops of the republic,
supported by those of the Grand Prince. Four years later
1304
the death of Andrei involved Northern Russia in a
contest between Mikhail of Tver and Urii Danielovitch
of Moskva for the vacant sovereignty. Novgorod and the greater number of
the Souzdalskie boyarins declared for the former, but both candidates
hastened to put their respective cases before the tribunal of the Khan,
leaving their followers meanwhile to fight the matter out between
themselves. A march of the Tverskie boyarins against Péréyaslavl was
intercepted by Ivan, brother of the Prince of Moskva, and their voevoda

Akinf (Hyacinth) perished in the battle which ensued. The decision of the
Khan in favour of Mikhail did not end the contest. The town of Moskva
twice repelled the attack of the Prince of Tver, who was, however,
successful in establishing his authority in the remaining portions of the
grand province and at Novgorod. The accession of a new Khan, by name
Usbek, necessitated the departure of Mikhail to Sarai, where he remained
long enough to lose the affections of the Novgorodskie, who transferred
their allegiance to the Prince of Moskva, grandson of their champion
Nevski. This readjustment of the political balance enabled Urii to reopen
the contest with the Grand Prince; long time the struggle dragged on,
indefinitely protracted by the shifting policy of the Khan. For the practice of
appealing to Sarai to reverse the decisions of Souzdal had become with the
Russian princes a habit, confirmed, like opium smoking, by constant
indulgence. Both candidates for the Grand Principality were constantly to
be found at the Court of the Khan, or devastating their opponent’s provinces
with Tartar troops; Urii even contracted a matrimonial alliance with the
sister of Usbek. Nor were the princes the only competitors for the Mongol
favour; the Metropolitan Petr, in 1313, sought and obtained from the Khan
an exemption from taxes for the priests and monks, and a confirmation of
the clerical privileges,—concessions which would seem to indicate that the
Mongols united with their Mohametanism the toleration which
distinguished their early Shamanism—or did the wily Khan gauge the
measure of Holy Church, and conciliate her on her most susceptible side?
Whatever the clergy might gain by the Mongol patronage, to the princes it
brought nothing but disaster. Mikhail himself was
1319 destroyed by the agency he had invoked, and Urii had
the miserable triumph of seeing his rival stabbed to
death by the officers of the Khan. Six years later Dimitri Mikhailovitch
avenged his father’s death by spitting Urii on his sword in the Tartar camp,
an affront which was punished by the strangulation of the offender.
Aleksandr, another son of the ill-fated Mikhail, succeeded to the
principality of Tver and to the dignity of Grand Prince, but a mad act of
fear-impelled violence drew down on himself, his family, and province the
consuming fury of the Khan. A harmless, or at any rate customary, visit
from a Mongol envoy to the city of Tver, roused the apprehensions of
Prince and people, who feared that an attempt was to be made to convert
them forcibly to Islam. Taking courage from the fact that the stranger had

but a feeble escort—a circumstance which should have confuted his
suspicions—Aleksandr roused his subjects, (gathered in great numbers at
Tver for the Feast of the Assumption), to fall upon and annihilate the
Mongol band. The Russians can scarcely be condemned
1327 for an act of treachery towards an enemy who had
never shown a scrupulous regard for honour and good
faith, but the deed was one of criminal folly, and even its heroic aspect is
blighted by the fact that Aleksandr had remained subservient to the Khan
despite the murder of his father and brother, and was only roused to
rebellion by an alarm of personal danger. The vengeance of Usbek took a
cynical turn; instead of sending his hordes killing and harrying into the
devoted province, he entrusted the vindication of his outraged majesty to a
Russian prince and Russian troops. Ivan Danielovitch of Moskva, with his
own forces and those of Souzdal, reinforced by a strong detachment of
Mongols, marched, nothing loth, into the domains of his rival, and scattered
desolation around him with a thoroughness which left the Khan nothing to
complain of. The Prince of Tver did not wait to share
1328 with his people the chastisement he had drawn down
upon them, and Ivan obtained permission to assume the
well-earned title of Grand Prince.
So completely had the centre of Russian interests shifted eastwards towards
the valley of the upper Volga, that the lands of the Dniepr basin, Kiev,
Volhynia, Galitz, etc., once the heart of the confederation, were now
scarcely to be ranked as outlying members of it. The influences which were
responsible for this gradual alienation from the main body, and for the
apathy with which the Grand Princes regarded this rounding-off of their
dominions, may probably have arisen from the same cause, namely, the
Mongol over-mastery. On the one hand, so bound up had the East Russian
princes become with the neighbouring khanates, that intercourse with
Souzdal meant intercourse with Sarai, and all its attendant humiliations; on
the other, the rivalries which existed in the Grand Principality and the
necessity its rulers found for frequent and prolonged visits to the Mongol
Court, precluded them from giving much attention to the affairs of the
western provinces. Thus it fell out that, failing the arising of an
exceptionally vigorous local prince, a Roman or a Mstislav, these fertile
Russian lands were at the mercy of the boldest bidder. The exceptional
personality was at hand, but he was not a Russian. Gedimin, Prince of

Lit’uania, whom the early historians depicted as having risen from the
position of a court official to that of prince by the murder of his sovereign
and master, attained that dignity by the more prosaic and respectable
method of hereditary succession, being son of Lutouvier (1282-93) and
brother of Viten (1293-1316).[56] Under the latter the Lit’uanians had been
united in large and well-disciplined armies, as the Poles and the Order
knights knew well, and in the direction of both these neighbours their
frontier had remained intact. This in itself was no small achievement,
considering how the kindred lands of Prussia, Kourland, Livland, Estland,
etc., had fallen beneath the persistent proselytising and colonising attacks of
the western invaders. By Gedimin was carried into operation a policy of
expansion in the detached Russian lands to the south and east,—a policy
effected, like that of the Angevin kings of England in France, and of the
Habsburgs in Austria, Bohemia, Karinthia, and the Tyrol, by a combination
of conquest and matrimonial alliances. But it was not only by the absorption
of neighbouring territory that Gedimin signalised his reign; he lifted the
land which he had inherited from the position of an obscure chieftaincy to
that of a formidable State. At war nearly the whole of his reign with the
German knights, he nevertheless did not permit himself to be influenced by
the cruelty and treachery which accompanied their religious zeal, but
displayed on his part a toleration for different creeds and nationalities which
might have been imitated with advantage by other European princes. From
his stronghold at Vilna, where the ruins of his castle still mantle the heights
above the town, he sent letters to Lubeck, Stettin, Rostok, and other cities of
the Hansa league, offering the rights and privileges of that organisation and
of the town of Riga, to all artisans, mechanics, and traders who should care
to settle in his principality—an invitation which was eagerly responded to.
In the wars waged by him against the Order, both in Prussia and Livland,
one figure is very conspicuous—that of David, starosta of Grodno, who
appears in the Teutonic Chronicles under the picturesque title of Castellan
von Garthen. It was this boyarin who held the troubled border against the
incessant attacks of the Knights of Mary, and led many a foray into their
territory.[57] One of the most notable of these was in the winter of 1322-23,
when the cold was so severe that even the forest trees were nearly killed,
and men erected inns on the ice of the Baltic Sea for the travellers to and
from Germany and the nearest Skandinavian lands—this self-same winter
came the Lit’uanians following hard on a raid-march of the Cross Brethren,

burning and wasting from Dorpat to Memel, and returning through the
bleak and frozen march-lands with great spoil of cattle and 5000 prisoners.
Truly a winter to be remembered.[58] Victory did not blind Gedimin to the
advantages of a durable peace with the Order, to secure which he was even
ready to adopt the faith of the foes he had so often conquered. Accordingly,
at his initiative, a peace was compacted between the
1323
various units which existed side by side in the East sea
provinces; the Archbishop of Riga, the Bishop of Oesel,
the towns of Riga, Revel, and Dorpat, the Teutonic Order, and the
principality of Lit’uania, entered into a religious, territorial, and commercial
treaty one with another, and Gedimin wrote to the Pope (John XXII.), to
inform him that he was ready to become a Christian and to recognise the
supremacy of the Holy See. Gladly did the French Pontiff prepare to receive
this important lamb into the Catholic fold, and at the same time put a limit
to the Teutonic conquests in the Baltic lands, and two legates (the Bishop of
Alais and the Abbot of Puy) were dispatched forthwith to Vilna. But in the
meanwhile Gedimin had had a lesson as to the value of “the true faith of a
Christian,” and informed the disconcerted churchmen that he intended to
die in the beliefs of his fathers, and would have none of their religion or
their Pope. “Where,” he demanded, “will you find more crime, more
injustice, violence, corruption and usury, than with the Christians,
particularly with the priesthood and the Knights of the Cross?” Travel is
said to enlarge and educate the mind, but it was scarcely necessary to come
all the way from Avignon to learn that. The Order had
1324
not considered itself bound by a compact with a pagan,
and, in alliance with the unwilling Bishops of Oesel and
Dorpat, had burst into the Lit’uanian lands and plundered the capital, Vilna;
in return for which treachery, or elasticity of honour, Gedimin sacked the
town of Rositter and renounced the creed of the Christmen.[59] Catholic
Europe was angry at this backsliding, if one may judge by the epithets
showered on the half-saved soul; a depth of sorrowing wrath is revealed in
the expressions “double-headed monster, abominable mockery of nature,
precursor of Antichrist.” Much mud might they throw, bitterly might they
anathematise in those far-off days, yet not thus does history remember the
grand old pagan whose castle ruins crown the heights above the Vilia.

In the year of Gedimin’s accession (1316) died Urii Lvovitch, of Galitz and
Volhynia, who was succeeded in those fiefs by his sons Andrei and Lev
respectively. Colourless princes, these latter representatives of the Roman-
Mstislavitch family, known only to history by the alliance which the instinct
of preservation led them to make with the Teutonic Order. That they both
died in the year 1324 appears from a letter of the Polish King Ladislas to
Pope John, in which that fact is mentioned; the two provinces devolved
upon Urii Andreievitch, the last Russian Prince of Galicia, the last for many
a hundred years who ruled Volhynia. His death (about 1336) ended the male
line of his family, and left as heiress of Galitz his sister Mariya, who
married the Polish prince, Troiden of Tchersk. By the marriage of another
heiress, the daughter of Lev of Volhynia, with Loubart, a son of Gedimin,
that province was brought into the Lit’uanian dominion, which was further
extended by the succession of Olgerd (Gedimin’s eldest son) to the fief of
his wife’s father the Prince of Vitebsk.[60] The annexation of Kiev,
attributed by many historians to Gedimin, was undoubtably of a later date,
as the Chronicles make mention of a Russian Prince Thedor, ruling in that
city under Mongol supervision, as late as 1361.[61] Even so, the Russian
lands owning the sovereignty of Gedimin—Polotzk, Pinsk, Tourov,
Volhynia, Loutzk, and Vitebsk sufficiently justify his title, rex Letwinorum
et multorum Ruthenorum, and the Grand-duchy of Lit’uania might claim to
be more Russian than the Grand Principality of Souzdal, with its Slav-Finn-
Turko population.
But here, under the fostering care of Ivan Danielovitch, the new Russia, the
Russia of the East, was germinating amid the decay of shedded provinces
and lost liberties. Pocketing his pride and leaving outlying lands to take care
of themselves, the Grand Prince sought to secure for his family and for his
capital a preponderance over the other Souzdalian fiefs. His first step was to
secure the Church, in the person of the Metropolitan, to grace with its
presence the city of Moskva; lured thither from the now unfashionable
Vladimir by the erection of a magnificent new church of the Assumption
(fit dedication, for had not Tver wrought her ruin on the date of that
festival?) the sainted Petr not only lived, but died and was buried in the
budding capital; where also the succeeding Metropolitan, Theognost, took
up his residence. In cultivating the good graces of the Khan Ivan was
equally successful, but he had to work hard for the attainment of his object.

Konstantin Mikhailovitch had been recognised by all parties as Prince of
Tver, but Usbek was anxious to possess himself of the person of Andrei,
and the Grand Prince had to go seek at the Khan’s behest, and bring the
wanderer home. Andrei preferred to remain at Pskov rather than visit Sarai,
to which place the princes of Tver, like the animals who ventured into the
lion’s den of the fable, went oftener than they returned. The burghers of
Pskov refused to give up the fugitive, and Russia beheld the spectacle of the
Grand Prince, the Archbishop Moses of Novgorod, and the Metropolitan
Theognost, hurling threats, reproaches, and excommunication at the defiant
republic on behalf of the Mongol Khan,—the latter weapon all the more
terrifying in that it was here used for the first time. Yet the result of all this
chiding and banning was not commensurate with the energy expended;
Andrei sheltered himself in Lit’uania, and again at Pskov, and not till ten
years later did the homing instinct lead him to submit to the pleasure of the
Khan, and receive at his hands pardon and restoration (1338). In the
absence of his rival, Ivan had steadily and placidly pursued his fixed policy
of Moskovite aggrandisement, and gradually established his authority over
the neighbouring Princes of Souzdal, Rostov, and Riazan. With Novgorod
he had the usual differences, unavoidable between a prince with high ideas
of authority and a people with wide views of independence, but the restless
citizens grew tired of quarrelling with a man who was always dangerous yet
never struck; also they had an absorbing feud on hand with the Pskovitchi,
who presumed to have a bishop of their own, instead of depending for
spiritual guidance upon Novgorod. On this account the Archbishop of the
latter city, the strenuous Vasili, was able to effect a reconciliation between
prince and people. Thus things worked smoothly with the smoothly-
working kniaz, Ivan Kalita, as they called him, from the kalita (bag or
pouch) which he carried at his girdle, and from which he was wont to
distribute alms to the needy. Some have unkindly suggested that the bag
was intended for receipts rather than disbursements, in which case, if
parsimony is to be added to his piety, superstition, and unscrupulous
politics, he may well pass for a Russian edition of Louis XI.
The return of the exile Andrei, restored to his principality and to the favour
of the Khan, was a disagreeable interlude in the harmony of Kalita’s reign.
Following an instinctive habit, he went to Sarai. Shortly after his return to
Moskva, his cousin of Tver was summoned to present himself at the Horde.
It did not need the pale faces of his courtiers and family, nor the ill-boding

presages which their fancy conjured up, to warn the doomed prince of his
impending fate; down the broad current of the Volga he drifted, to “Sarra, in
the Londe of Tartarie,” where “dwelt a king that werried Russie.”[62] The
judgment of Usbek removed the source of disquietude
1339
from Ivan’s path, and the headless corpses of Andrei
and his son Thedor, arrived at Tver one winter’s day,
grim flotsam of a perished freedom. To complete the object-lesson of their
subjection, the citizens beheld the great bell of Tver removed from their
cathedral and transferred to Moskva. Not long,
1341
however, did its iron-throated music soothe the pride of
Ivan-with-the-money-bag, whose death-knell it tolled
some twelve months later. And while they conduct the dead prince to his
rest, with aid of chant and litany, wailing dirge and gleaming taper, and
invocations to saints, archangels, and all the glorious host of Heaven, in
different wise are they helping that other master-builder of kingdoms into
the Unknown; with pagan rite, with blazing pyre, favourite horse and
faithful henchman, goes great Gedimin to his fathers, to his dreamt
hereafter, where “on the distant plain the warrior grasps his steed again.”
Each to his own; at any rate both are dead, and whether they ride over a
boundless plain or stand by a tideless sea, in “blue obscurity” or in a “great
white light,” their place knows them not, and Lit’uania and Moskva must
have new masters.
In both countries the drift towards cohesion and centralisation is strong, but
custom is stronger; Gedimin’s realm is for the present parcelled out among
his seven sons and his brother Voin; the lands of Moskva are divided
between the three surviving sons of Kalita, Simeon, the eldest, having the
capital city and the title of Grand Prince subject, of course, to the consent of
the Khan. It was a critical moment in the fortunes of the House of Moskva,
when the young prince presented himself for approval at Sarai, with a
respectful appeal for a renewal of past favours. The news of the death of
Ivan had sent more than one kniaz in eager haste across Russia to the
picturesque city on the Volga’s shore; the two Konstantins (of Tver and
Souzdal) hoped to undermine the Mongol support which propped up the
ascendancy of Simeon, and ruin their rival by the same means with which
his father had kept them under. But the Prince of Moskva, with the treasures
of the Grand Principality and the tribute of Velikie Novgorod at his
disposal, was able to put his case in the most favourable light before the

Khan and his officers, and the inherited instinct of almsgiving helped him
no doubt to retain the hereditary dignities.

CHAPTER VI
THE GROWING OF THE GERM
Never since the overthrow on the Sit had a Russian ruler been as
emphatically and unquestionably Grand Prince as was Simeon Ivanovitch,
yclept “the Proud.” Some of the most valuable provinces had indeed fallen
away from the realm, but if the title Prince “of all the Russias,” which
Simeon was the first to adopt, was little justified by the facts, at least he
was, among his compeers, master of what remained. The very qualification
of his powers which the over-lordship of the Khan implied, was in fact an
added source of authority, for the Russian mind had come to accept the
Mongol dominion with the same submissiveness, if with less enthusiasm,
that it displayed towards the paternal tyranny of the Church. Supported by
the double certificate of Heaven and Sarai, with the iarlikh[63] of Usbek in
his hands and his compliant Metropolitan at his side, the Grand Prince stood
head and shoulders above his brother princes and would-be competitors.
And here may be noted an advantage which the builders of the Russian
Empire possessed over the continuators of the Germanic one, and indeed
over most of the princes of Catholic Europe. The Church “went with” the
secular authority. In western Christendom the popes, after having entreated
the services of emperors and kings as their surest agency for the destruction
of the heathen religions, kicked down the ladder by which they had climbed
to their high position, and convulsed Europe for many centuries by a bitter
strife with the temporal sovereignties; till the up-springing of a new enemy,
questioning the Divine authority of tiara and crown alike, drew Pontiff,
Kaiser, and absolute monarchs together, like cattle herding in a storm. In
Russia no such schism endangered the sanctity of the ruling forces, possibly
because no such prosperity had been attained by either. “The palace rubbed
shoulders with the Church and the monastery, and was scarcely
distinguishable from them.”[64] The Grand Prince was holy and Orthodox,
the Church was national and official. Ban and interdict, those bogies of
mediæval west Europe, were here familiar sprites which worked at the

bidding of the Grand Prince against his enemies. As the worship of the old
Slavonic gods Peroun and Volos, Daszhbog, Stribog, etc. gave way by
degrees to that of the One-in-Three and the dependent galaxy of saints, so
did the old veneration for a crowd of Rurik-descended princes merge
gradually into awe of one Heaven-born sovereign and a satellite-band of his
officials, amongst whom were the hierarchy of the national Church. And in
another respect the Russian rulers had their task simplified for them,
namely, in the long-suffering docility of the bulk of their subjects. Here
were no defiant goat-herds such as chased the might of the Habsburgs from
the Graubunden Alps, no Bauernkriegern kindling the fires of civil war
throughout an empire, no Jacquerie distracting an already distraught
kingdom. The Slav peasant took all the added ills of life, droughts, famines,
Polovtzi, Mongols, grasshoppers, and pestilences, tithes and taxes, with a
fatalism he had brought with him from the East, a stoicism learnt possibly
from the camel in his nomad days. A man who, in addition to the privations
incidental to his poverty, will at the bidding of his Church fast “during the
seven weeks of Lent, during two or three weeks in June, from the beginning
of November till Christmas, and on all Wednesdays and Fridays during the
year,”[65] can have little of the bread-rioter or throne-shaker in his
constitution. The very placidity, however, with which he received the
dispensations of Providence in whatever shape they chose to assume,
rendered his allegiance a matter of circumstance rather than principle. He
would accept the mastery of the Lit’uanians, for instance, as he had
accepted the Mongols, as he had accepted the Varangians; like a dog of too
accommodating disposition, he wagged his tail to whichever master shouted
loudest, and just now the Lit’uanian princes were shouting loud indeed.
Chiefly as yet among themselves. The death of Gedimin had left his country
in a position which required skilful handling, while at the same time the
division of the State into eight portions precluded any one prince from
having a controlling voice in the direction of affairs—an arrangement which
could only lead to disaster. Fortunately for Lit’uania the political foresight
and energy of her defunct Grand Duke had descended in full measure upon
one at least of his sons, Olgerd of Vitebsk. He, while engaged in ravaging
the Order territories in Livland, watching for an attack from across the
Polish border, or casting his eyes over the tempting Russian provinces ready
to fall into his clutches, saw clearly that to live and expand, to prey and not
be preyed upon, Lit’uania must have a guiding hand, one head instead of

many. In order to attain his eagle-soaring ambition he borrowed the habits
of the cuckoo, and ousted his brothers unceremoniously from the hereditary
nest. An exception was wisely made in favour of Kestout, who equalled him
in energy and military achievement, and without whose help the coup d’etat
could scarcely have been effected. Acting in concert, the brothers seized on
the capital, Vilna, and re-established the grand-dukedom; by a happy
division of labour Kestout became warden of the Polish and Order-land
marches, leaving Olgerd to pursue his conquests and acquisitions in the
south-east—an arrangement which enabled the Grand Duke to add Briansk,
Seversk, Kiev, and the surrounding district to his possessions, and to retain
Volhynia against the King of Poland.[66] With the Prince of Moskva
pursuing a policy of cautious inaction, the only safe course open to him
under the circumstances, Olgerd was able not only to stretch his dominion
from a foothold on the Baltic coast to the shores of the Black Sea, but to
obtain a solid influence over the governments of Smolensk, Pskov, and
Velikie Novgorod. As early as 1346 he appears to have had a hold on the
councils of the latter city; the posadnik Evstaf (Eustace) had spoken
unwisely and not well of the great Lit’uanian,—had in fact called him a
dog. The indiscreet expression reached the ears of Olgerd, who demanded
the death of the offending dignitary. The Vetché armed the city in defence of
the posadnik, reconsidered the matter, and ended by sacrificing Evstaf to the
resentment of the Grand Duke.[67] An action so opposed to the traditional
temper of the proud republic that it is only to be explained by a strong
motive of political expediency. And in fact an alliance with Lit’uania was
valuable to Pskov and Novgorod, both as a bulwark against German
aggression and as a counterpoise to the encroaching power of Moskva. In
the former relation, the resisting power of the leagued principalities of the
North was severely tested by the warrior monks of the Order; able to draw
unfailing supplies of men and marks from the States of the Empire, the
knights had bought Estland from the King of Denmark (1347), had inflicted
a severe defeat on the Lit’uanian army (1348), and later carried war and
desolation into the lands of Polotzk, Pskov, and Novgorod (1367). With the
help of Olgerd the Russians were able to make a diversion upon Dorpat,
and peace was at length effected with the Order in 1371.[68] From this it will
be seen that the Grand Duke of Lit’uania was a far more prominent figure
in the land than the Grand Prince “of all the Russias.” But of the policy of
these two contrasted state-workers it may be said that while Olgerd built,

the son of Kalita dug. Intrenching himself around the unit of Moskva, the
last-named silently and persistently undermined the power of the
neighbouring princes, and established his own authority on a sure
foundation. Novgorod might wait; Lit’uania might wait; the Horde might
wait. Thus delving and waiting ruled Simeon, so quaintly named “the
Proud,” till death swept him into his cherished cathedral—a victim,
possibly, to the terrible Black Pestilence which was then desolating Russia.
The succeeding Grand Prince, Ivan Ivanovitch, who
1353-1359
found favour in the sight of the new Khan Tchanibek,
displayed all his brother’s patience without any of his
policy. His weakly pacific reign marked a partial thaw in the iron frost of
Moskovite supremacy, which had bound North-east Russia in its grip under
the rule of his three immediate predecessors. Souzdal, Riazan, and Tver
blossomed anew into independence, and enjoyed a S. Luke’s summer of
importance and anarchy. The Novgorodians, who had exerted themselves to
obtain the election of Konstantin of Souzdal to the grand princedom, only
recognised Ivan on the death of the former (1354), and were little troubled
by the interference of their sovereign.[69] Their own domestic affairs were
sufficiently exciting to absorb their attention; the election of a posadnik in
the spring of 1359 gave rise to a fierce quarrel between the inhabitants of
the Slavonic quarter and those of the Sofia ward, and for three days the
hostile factions fought around the famous bridge, and were only separated
by the intervention of their Archbishop and ex-Archbishop, whose
combined exhortations at length restored peace to the agitated city.[70]
If Novgorod owed much to the well-directed influence of her prelates, the
House of Moskva was even more indebted to the exertions and services of
the Metropolitan Aleksis, who loyally supported its interests under the most
discouraging circumstances. When the weary Ivan had closed his inglorious
reign, when “having failed in many things,” he had “achieved to die,” the
foundations painfully hewn out by his forerunners were almost swept away;
a new Khan had arisen who knew not Moskva, and Dimitri
Konstantinovitch of Souzdal entered Vladimir in triumph, with the iarlikh
in his hand. Souzdal, Riazan, Tver, and Velikie Novgorod exulted in the
downfall of their ambitious neighbour, and the work of generations seemed
undone. Then was it that Vladuika Aleksis, seeing in Dimitri Ivanovitch
more promising material than had existed in his father, took advantage of

the chaos existing at the Horde—where Khan succeeded Khan in a
whirlwind of revolutions—to obtain a counter-iarlikh for the young Prince
of Moskva. Thus Dimitri was opposed by Dimitri, each boasting the favour
of Sarai, but the Moskovite enjoying the support of Holy Church. New
intrigues gave the Souzdal kniaz once more the countenance of the Horde,
but Dimitri Ivanovitch dared to disregard the displeasure of a Khan who
was here to-day and might be gone to-morrow; riding forth at the head of
his boyarins and followers, long accustomed to be uppermost in the land, he
drove his rival from Vladimir and carried the war into the province of
Souzdal, besieging the capital. The Konstantinovitch submitted, and the
grand princely dignity returned to the House of Moskva. Well had Aleksis
earned his subsequent canonisation.
1362
A few years later the Black Death, brought into the
district of Nijhnie-Novgorod by travelling merchants, recommenced its
ravages throughout Central Russia. Its victims were counted by thousands,
and though the account of its sweeping effect at Smolensk, in which city
there were said to remain but five survivors,[71] is probably an exaggeration,
an idea can be formed of its destructive nature by the number of princes
who were stricken down in a single year. The Grand
1365
Prince’s brother Ivan, Konstantin of Rostov, Andrei,
brother of the Prince of Souzdal, and four of the
Tverskie family, were victims of the dread pestilence, more wholesale even
in its work than the Mongols in the first fury of their invasion.[72] In its
wake sprang up a crop of quarrels, the result of such a legacy of vacant
fiefs. Boris of Souzdal having seized on his deceased brother’s appanage
(Nijhnie-Novgorod), to the despite of his elder, Dimitri, the latter was
driven to throw himself into the hands of his namesake and rival, the Grand
Prince of Moskva, who forced the supplanter to disgorge his prey. In Tver,
likewise, the death of Simeon had brought his brother Ieremiya, his uncle
Vasili, and his cousin Mikhail, into competition for his territorial
possessions. The last-named was pursuing in Tver the same policy of
aggrandisement and centralisation that had obtained such successful results
for Moskva; naturally his proceedings were watched with jealous eyes by
Dimitri, the Metropolitan, and the Moskovite boyarins, who took up the
cause of Mikhail’s opponents and drove him more than once from his
province. Mikhail invoked the aid of his wife’s father, Olgerd. The great

Lit’uanian, whose arms had checked the tide of
1369 Teutonic conquest and driven the Tartars from the
Western steppes, who had wasted the outskirts of Revel
and laid classic Kherson in ashes, marched now against the might of
Moskva, his rival in the Russian lands. With him came his loyal brother
Kestout, and, because he must, the Kniaz of Smolensk. The might of
Moskva contracted within the high stone battlements of its Kreml, which, in
the depth of winter, was too strong a hold for the Lit’uanians to attack.
Olgerd contented himself with sacking the surrounding country, and carried
back a spoil of cattle and church furniture as witness of his triumph. The
following year, however, Mikhail, again driven from his
1370 hereditary dominions, again appealed to Olgerd for
assistance, and with the first November snows came the
Lit’uanian-Smolenskie host against Moskva. History repeated itself; a
second time the Kreml, rising fair and glittering in its sheen of white stone
and silvery frost, above the blackened ruins that lay around it, defied the
force that gathered against its walls. Olgerd hovered in vain around the
impregnable obstacle to his crowning triumph. Russian troops, under
Vladimir Andrevitch, the Grand Prince’s cousin, were gathering on his
flank, those pied crows, the Knights of Mary, were croaking ominously on
his northern frontier, while an early thaw threatened to impede his line of
retreat through the snow-banked forests. Under these circumstances the old
warrior slacked the rigour of his onslaught and made an honourable peace
with the enemy whom he could not crush. The
1371 indomitable Mikhail continued, nevertheless, to wage a
fitful war with his hereditary foe, now invoking the
support of Mamai Khan, the new master of the Golden Horde, now calling
in the Lit’uanians, till at length, hotly besieged in his city of Tver, he was
obliged to submit to the victorious Dimitri and recognise the supremacy of
the House of Moskva. Secure in his own dominions, the
1375 Grand Prince was able to turn his attention to the
hostile forces which weighed on him on either side. In
the West the crushing pressure of the Lettish power was for a time relaxed.
The Grand Duke Olgerd, “one of the greatest statesmen
1377
of the Middle Ages,”[73] the clangour of whose arms
had vibrated round Polish castle and Order keep, had roused the echoes of
the Moskva Kreml, and startled the pirates of the Black Sea coast, was now

among “the quiet people”;[74] of his many sons, Yagiello succeeded him in
the Grand Ducal dignity. Hampered by a large circle of brothers, half-
brothers, cousins, and other inconvenient relatives, he set to work
vigorously to weed out his superfluous kinsfolk; the aged Kestout, the
companion-in-arms and faithful supporter of Olgerd, was one of the first
victims of the son’s purging operations. Lured into his power, he was
immured within the castle of Kreva, where he was found one day strangled;
his son Vitovt escaped the same fate by a flight into the Order territory,
while Andrei Olgerdovitch, Prince of Polotzk, sought at Moskva shelter
from his half-brother’s hostility. Dimitri had the satisfaction of lending his
support to this malcontent, as Olgerd had aided the Prince of Tver. But
while Moskovite troops ravaged the Russian territories of Yagiello, Dimitri
from his capital was watching the storm-clouds that had been slowly piling
in the East. Nursed into their position of authority by the favour and support
of the Horde, the Princes of Moskva had become too important and too
exalted to continue their former humble attitude towards the Khans; like a
wasp entangled in a spider-web, the Velikie Kniaz was over-big a captive to
be held comfortably in the meshes of a degrading thraldom. Hence the
altered relations between Moskva and Sarai, which had resulted in a series
of desultory engagements, not openly avowed at the headquarters of either
side, but tending steadily towards a more pronounced rupture. Nijhnie-
Novgorod had twice suffered the fate of a border town in troublous times,
and been laid in ashes by the Mongols; Riazan had experienced the like
misfortune. On the other hand a more important collision had taken place
on the banks of the Vodjha, where Dimitri had repulsed an army of raiders
sent against Riazan by the Khan himself (1377). For three years the
vengeance of Mamai had loomed, black and menacing, on the eastern
horizon, like a slowly gathering storm that gains added horror from the
unmeasurable approach of its outburst; at Moskva men watched for the
horsemen who should one day ride out from the forest and clatter into the
city with the news that the Hordes were coming. In the summer of 1380 the
storm burst; Dimitri learned that the Khan was moving against them with a
large army, that Yagiello, “who had small cause to love the Moskva Prince,”
was in league with the Mongol, and that Oleg of Riazan was secretly
preparing to throw in his lot with the invaders.[75] Was this to be the end of
all the delving and striving? Was Moskva to lie in ruins, like another Kiev, a
victim to her own renown? At least she should fall fighting. The Velikie

Kniaz gathered under his standard the princes and soldiery of such Russian
lands as he could command. From Bielozero, Rostov, Mourom, Souzdal,
Vladimir, and other quarters, came pouring in the fractions of the first
national army that had assembled in Russia since the old wars with the
Polovtzi. Beneath the towers of the stately Kreml they mustered, 150,000
strong, to hail the birth of the new Empire, or, who knew, to share its ruin.
Deep-mouthed clanged the bells of Moskva over the humming city, palely
burned a thousand tapers before the shrines of good S. George and Mikhail
the archangel; even the holy Sergie, founder of the famed Troitza lavra,[76]
left his beaver-haunted solitudes to give his blessing on the high enterprise.
Forth to the banks of the Don rode Dimitri Ivanovitch with his mighty
army; before him went a sable banner, from whose folds gleamed the wan
white Christ of Calvary; behind him came serried ranks of princes, the
descendants of Rurik, save two who were the sons of dead Olgerd. On the
wide plain of Koulikovo, the field “of the woodcocks,” by the blue waters
of the Don, the might of Moskovite Russia crashed headlong against the
strength of the Golden Horde, and fought through the red September day till
wounds and weariness numbed their failing arms. Then through their ranks
flashed the unpent reserves, led by young Vladimir Andreievitch, whirled
the wild charge into the Mongol hosts, swept into rout the swarthy
horsemen of Asia, swelled the hoarse shouts for S. George, for S. Glieb, and
S. Boris, drowning the pealing war-yells for Allah; they break, they are
killed, they are conquered, the God of the Christians has wakened, the
Prince of the Russias has won a new title for ever, Dimitri Ivanovitch
Donskoi! Dimitri of the Don.
Possibly the result of the battle was not so one-sided as the glowing
accounts of the Russian historians painted it, but the immediate effect gave
fair hope for the future. Yagiello withdrew his forces into Lit’uania, and
thither fled the traitorous Oleg of Riazan; the Mongols vanished across the
Oka, and the enemies of Dimitri seemed melted like snow before the
summer of his victory. The Russians dreamed that they were free. Not so
lightly were they to be rid of these dusky wolf-eyed warriors, who teemed
in the wide, arid plain-land of Asia like rats on an old threshing-floor. In the
East had arisen a new star of battle to lead them in the footsteps of the
mighty Jingis, Timur the Lame, “conqueror of the two Bokharas, of
Hindostan, of Iran, and of Asia Minor.”[77] At the Golden Horde appeared

one of his captains, Tokhtamitch, who routed and hunted to death the ill-
starred Mamai, and seized upon his khanate. Following on this revolution
came a message from the new Khan to the Russian princes, couched in
friendly terms, but requiring their presence at his Court. This was too much
for the Grand Prince and his proud Moskovites to stomach, and Dimitri
returned an answer befitting the victor of Koulikovo. But the defiance of the
capital found no echo in the other Russian lands; not a second time did they
care to face in doubtful conflict foes who were so terrible in victory, so
easily recruited after defeat. Too many brave boyarins and bold spearmen
had perished on the field of the woodcocks, too many gaps had been made
in their ranks which could not be filled at such scant notice. Dimitri of
Souzdal sent his two sons to the Horde; Oleg, pardoned and restored to his
province, intrigued once more with the enemies of Moskva. Against that
city marched the Khan with his Tartar army, guided
1382 thither by the traitorous Kniaz of Riazan, and bearing in
his train the young princes of Souzdal. Dimitri took the
prudent, if unheroic part of leaving his capital to defend itself, and seeking
meanwhile to gather an army capable of threatening the Mongol flank. The
flight of the Metropolitan, Syprien (successor of S. Aleksis), was not open
to so favourable an interpretation. The Kreml, ably defended by its garrison,
under the command of Ostey, called in the Chronicles a grandson of Olgerd,
held the enemy at bay for three days; on the fourth the defenders weakly
opened the gates to a ruse of the wily Khan, and the capital of the new
Russia received a baptism of blood. When the invaders withdrew, bearing
with them all that was worth removing, it was a silent city that they left
behind them—a city peopled by 24,000 corpses, meet gathering ground for
wehr-wolf, ghoul, and vampire, a wild Walpurgis Nacht for the Yaga-Babas
of Slavonic lore. Nor was Moskva alone in her desolation; Vladimir,
Zvenigorod, and other towns were sacked and burnt by detachments of the
Mongol army. The defeat of one of these bands by a Russian force under
Vladimir of Moskva checked the ravages of the invaders, and Tokhtamitch
led his hordes back across the Oka, leaving Dimitri to repair as best he
might the woes of his province, and to revenge himself on those who had
betrayed or deserted him in the hour of his need. If his kingdom was in
ruins, at least he was master of what remained; the Metropolitan was
deposed, Oleg was forced to fly, and his fief, already ravaged by the
Mongols, was harried anew by the Grand Prince’s followers. Burning with

indignation against the enemy whom he had thought crushed for ever on the
banks of the Don, Dimitri had yet to realise that he must return to the policy
of his fathers, and wear again the yoke he had thrown so proudly off.
Mikhail of Tver, who bore him an undying hatred, had shared neither in
Moskva’s triumph nor in her distress, and now was plotting openly to obtain
for himself the Grand Principality. With all his losses Dimitri was still the
wealthiest of the Russian princes, and a timely submission enabled him to
find grace in the eyes of the Khan. A new impost was
1384 exacted throughout the land, and the young princes—
Vasili of Moskva, Aleksandr of Tver, Vasili and Simeon
of Souzdal—were held as hostages at Sarai. Russia awoke from her dream
of liberty to find that her God still slept.
While mourning their relapse into a state of dependence, and involved in a
quarrel with the troublesome republic of the north, the Moskovites learned a
disquieting piece of intelligence; Yagiello, their formidable neighbour on
the west, who held more Russian lands almost than did Dimitri, had added
the kingdom of Poland to his possessions. The long
1386 succession of princes of the House of Piast had come to
an end, in its direct line, with Kazimir the Great, who
since 1370 had lain in a side chapel of the Cathedral at Krakow, where his
effigy in red brown marble yet reclines under its fretted canopy. Louis, the
Angevin King of Hungary, who succeeded him on the Polish throne, had
died in the year 1382, leaving a daughter, Yadviga, to uphold her right as
best she could in a country already marked by the intractability of the crown
vassals. Yadviga only obtained the support of the Diet (composed of the
nobles and higher clergy of the realm) by leaving in its hands the selection
of her husband and consort. The choice of the assembly fell upon the Grand
Duke of Lit’uania, whose election would at the same time remove a
possible enemy from their eastern border, and furnish them with a protector
against the hated Teutonic Order on their north. For this monster of their
own creation (a Polish duke had been the first to give the knights a foothold
in Prussia) was gradually squeezing them out from touch with the Baltic
and displacing their authority in Eastern Pomerania. One of the
indispensable conditions attached to the betrothal and election of Yagiello
was that he should adopt Christianity of the Roman Catholic pattern; “no
cross, no crown.” The prospect of a peaceable accession to the Polish throne
effected what all the endeavours, spiritual, diplomatic, and militant, of

priests, popes, and grand masters had been unable to accomplish; Yagiello
became the apostle prince of Lit’uania, and Catholic sovereign of Poland.
[78]
In his new character of a zealous son of the Church, the Grand Duke set
to work to bring Lit’uania within the pale of the official religion; the pagan
groves were cut down, the sacred fires that burned in the castle of Vilna
extinguished, the mystic serpents killed, and the people baptized by
battalions. According to a Russian historian, those who already professed
the Greek faith were forcibly converted, and two boyarins who clung
obstinately to Orthodoxy were put to death by tortures.[79]
If Rome swept this valuable State into her fold, the Russian Church, despite
the rather depressing circumstance of a confused succession to the
Metropolitan office, was not without the triumph of extending her rites over
heathen lands. A monk of Moskva carried the light of the Gospel into the
lorn and benighted lands of the Permians, a Finn tribe which dwelt in the
northern valley of the Kama, beneath the shadow of the Ourals. Supported
by the authority of the Grand Prince, he overthrew the worship of the Old
Golden Woman, a stone figure with two infants in her arms, before whose
shrine reindeer were annually sacrificed; had she been more restricted in her
family arrangements she might have been quietly incorporated in the new
religion.
In 1389 Moskva mourned her prince, Dimitri Donskoi, who died while yet
in his prime. A variant from the type of cold, stern princes who had built up
the power of his house, Dimitri was a throw-back to the old light-hearted
Slavonic kniaz, before the Norse blood had died out of his veins, or ever
that of Turko or Mongol had crept in. And if he gained no fresh ground for
Moskva, and left Tver and Souzdal and Riazan still under independent
masters, at least he gave Russia a spasm of liberty and renown in an age of
gloom and bondage, and obtained for his eldest son the undisputed
succession to the Grand Principality.
Vasili Dmitrievitch Moskovskie, to give him his distinguishing title (since
1383 there had reigned a Vasili Dmitrievitch at Souzdal), ascended the
throne under more favourable circumstances than had a few years earlier
seemed probable. On the west, Vitovt, son of the murdered Kestout, had
placed himself at the head of the Lit’uanian malcontents in opposition to the
King of Poland, who in cultivating the goodwill of his new subjects had lost
that of his old ones. Thus in that direction the threateners of Moskva’s

existence were at strife among themselves. In the east Tokhtamitch was
contemplating a rebellion against the authority of his lord and protector,
Timur, a circumstance which lifted the position of the young Prince of
Moskva at the Horde from that of a humble vassal to that of a desired ally.
His father would probably have taken advantage of this fact to sever once
more his dependence on the Khan; Vasili turned it to a more practical use.
With costly presents, and probably promises of future
1391 support, the Grand Prince bought an iarlikh which gave
him possession of Nijhnie-Novgorod, a fief long since
granted to Boris of the House of Souzdal.[80] Vasili was received with
acclaim by the inhabitants, and Boris, deserted on all sides, had to bow to
the decree of fate, represented in this instance by the iarlikh from Sarai. On
the death of the ousted prince his nephews, Vasili and
1394
Simeon of Souzdal, attempted to reunite Nijhnie-
Novgorod with their hereditary appanage, with the
result that Vasili of Moskva seized on both provinces and drove his cousins
into exile. Many and fruitless were the efforts made by the brothers to
recover their lost principalities; Vasili had developed a Habsburgian
tenacity in holding to whatsoever he acquired, and the ex-princes of
Souzdal had in the end to acquiesce in their spoliation. Events in the West
meanwhile had taken an unforeseen and not altogether favourable turn. The
Teutonic Order had been placed in an awkward position by the wholesale
entrance of the Lit’uanians into the bosom of the Church, which event left
the crusaders no more heathen to convert; hence the joy which they shared
with the angels over the salvation of their long recalcitrant brothers was
tinged with resentment towards the Poles, and especially towards Yagiello.
The Grand Master sulkily refused to stand sponsor to the latter at his
baptism,[81] and the Order prepared, from motives of self-defence, to give
active support to the pretender Vitovt, who was enabled with its assistance
to continually harry the domains of his royal kinsman, till at length
Yagiello, set upon by Catholics, Orthodox, and pagans alike, ceded to him
the grand duchy, under the direct suzerainty of the Polish Crown (1392),[82]
an arrangement which did not bring repose either to the Order or to
Moskovy. The Grand Duke Vitovt was another edition of his uncle and
grandfather; his arms swept far beyond the ample limits of his principality,
and under his vigorous rule Lit’uania attained her greatest extent, and
perhaps her greatest power. Father-in-law to Vasili, he did not hesitate to

continue the slow absorption of Russian territory commenced by his
predecessors; Smolensk dropped from the feeble hands of its hereditary
princes into the actual possession of the Grand Duke, who thus brought his
dominions into contact with the principality of Tver, long the hatching-
ground of disaffection to the supremacy of Moskva. Vitovt would probably
have accomplished even more in the way of conquest and annexation if his
ambition had not given too wide a scope to his efforts. While Vasili watched
anxiously for the next move of this exciting father-in-law new troubles
sprang up in the East; it seemed, indeed, as if Moskva was to reap no
advantage from the dissensions of her neighbours. The vengeance of Timur
the Lame had at length overtaken his o’erweening vassal, and Tokhtamitch
had fled before the storm which his imprudence had raised. The conqueror
did not seem disposed to confine his destroying wrath to the actual
territories of the Golden Horde, but crossed the Volga and commenced to
devastate the easternmost Russian lands. Moskovy quaked before the
coming of another Batu; the churches were filled with wailing crowds, and
the celebrated Mother-of-God of Vladimir was removed from thence to the
capital. By a train of reasoning not easy to follow, to
1395 this change of quarters was attributed the sudden
turning aside of Timur Khan, who diverted his
destructive abilities to the razing of Sarai, Astrakhan, and Azov, and left the
Russian lands without further hurt. By modern historians this retreat has
been set down to other causes than the translation of the Bogoroditza;
“accustomed to the rich booty of Bokhara and Hindostan, and dreaming of
Constantinople and Egypt, they found, no doubt, that the desert steppes and
deep forests only offered a very meagre prey.”[83] However, the credit of the
affair remained with the Bogoroditza, and what was more to the point, this
respectable and extremely valuable ikon remained at Moskva—no mean
asset, for that time and place, in the political importance of a city.
The enfeeblement of the Golden Horde seemed to the Lit’uanian Grand
Duke a favourable opportunity to extend his influence in the Tartar steppes
and constitute himself the heir of the dying sovereignty. Concluding for the
moment a perpetual peace with the Order, against whom he had scarcely
ceased to fight since his accession to the Grand Duchy, he mustered a
formidable army to support him in this mighty enterprise. Poles,
Lit’uanians, and Russians marched under his banner against the Tartars, and
Konrad von Jungingen, as a guarantee of good faith, sent five hundred of

his knights to do battle against the infidels. On the
1399 banks of the Vorskla (a tributary of the Dniepr), Vitovt
came in contact with the lieutenant of Timur and
suffered a disastrous overthrow, losing two-thirds of his army and seriously
damaging his military reputation. Notwithstanding this victory the new
master of the Horde, Koutluk Khan, had his power disputed by more than
one competitor, and Vasili took advantage of this fact to discontinue
payment of the annual tribute. The temerity of his
1408 action, overlooked for many years, brought on him at
last the chastisement of the Mongols, who, under the
leadership of Ediger, the victor of the Vorskla, made a sudden inroad upon
Russian territory. Vasili imitated the tactics of his father on a similar
occasion; leaving Moskva with a strong garrison to defend the Kreml, he
betook himself to the northern districts of his realm to raise what forces he
might against the invaders. The assault on Moskva was weakened by the
want of siege engines (cannon were just beginning to be used by the
Russians and Lit’uanians), and Ivan Mikhailovitch, Prince of Tver, was
summoned to support the Khan with his artillery. For once hereditary hatred
gave way to patriotic instincts, and Ivan withheld the demanded assistance.
The troops of Ediger ravaged and burnt far and wide over the Russian plain,
and sacked many a town and village in the Grand Principality, but they
could neither force Vasili into a combat nor make an impression on the
walls and towers of the Kreml. A threatened revolution at the Horde made
the Khan anxious to retreat, and his offer of withdrawal on receipt of a war
levy was gladly accepted by the Moskovites, who were dreading a famine;
3000 roubles purchased the departure of the Mongol army, and the Velikie
Kniaz was able to return to his rejoicing capital.
Hemmed in on east and west by two powerful and aggressive neighbours,
with the slumbering volcanoes of Tver and Riazan ready to burst into
activity at any moment within his own dominions, the politic Vasili could
do little more than assert from time to time his authority over Novgorod.
The republic, indeed, was at the height of its independence, and played its
own game in the shifting balance of Order and Hansa, Grand Duchy, Grand
Principality, and Golden Horde, which made up the round of its political
compass. In 1392 it had closed a period of commercial strife by a treaty[84]
with the towns of Lubeck, Wisby, Revel, Dorpat, and Riga, compacted in
the border burgh of Izborsk, where “ys gekomen her Johan Neibur van

Lubeke, her Hynrik van Vlanderen unde her Godeke Cur von Godlande,
van overze,[85] van Rige her Tydeman van der Nienbrugge, van Darpte her
Hermen Kegheller unde her Wynold Clychrode, van Revale her Gerd
Witte,” and “hebben gesproken myt dem borchgreven van Nougarden,”—the
posadnik of Novgorod—and so on in quaint old low-German wording that
brings to the mind a glimpse of red gabled roofs, narrow streets and quays,
a whiff of salted herrings, pine timbers, and pungent stoppered drams. This
treaty, concluded without reference to the Grand Prince, had been a source
of friction between him and the Novgorodskie, and a further grievance was
that the Archbishop and clergy of the northern city chose to be a law unto
themselves rather than show a proper dependence upon the Metropolitan of
Moskva. Yet another matter for complaint was the depredations of bands of
free-lances from Novgorod and her offshoot settlement Viatka (an
independent territory lying to the north of Great Bulgaria), who, under the
name of “Good Companions,” carried on a series of freebooting and
piratical campaigns in the Volga valley. More than once these points of
dispute led to open rupture between Vasili and his intractable subjects, but
Great Novgorod was able to hold her own against the hampered efforts of
the Velikie Kniaz.
Eighteen months after Ediger’s winter campaign against Moskva the eyes of
all Russia were turned towards the impending struggle between the rival
powers of the Baltic lands, the Order and the dual Polish-Lit’uanian State.
Vitovt, recovered from his reverse at the hands of the Tartars, was moving
again, and had set his lance against the black cross shield of the German
knights. A dispute anent the Order province of Samogitia furnished a
pretext for a recourse to arms, and both sides gathered their hosts to fight
out the deadly quarrel. No hole and corner combat was to decide the
mastery of the Baltic basin; 163,000 men marched in the train of Vitovt and
Yagiello, 83,000 rallied round Ulrich von Jungingen. At the famous battle
of Tannenberg (15th July 1410) the iron-mailed knights of Mary went down
in splendid ruin before the unstayable onset of the Slavic warriors; the
White Eagle of Poland and the Charging Horseman of Lit’uania gleamed on
their blood-red standards over the stark and gory corpses of the Grand
Master and the flower of his chivalry, 600 knights and 40,000 men-at-arms;
the sun went down on the hard-fought field, where Ulrich von Jungingen
and his staunch comrades held their last pale Chapter, and the might of the
Black Cross Order faded into the shadows of the past. The Peace of Thorn,

by yielding to the conquerors all they demanded, gave a
1411 temporary respite to the Teutons, but their power was
broken for evermore.[86]
The latter years of the reign of Vasili Dmitrievitch are distinguished by a
dexterous peace with the several items which threatened at every moment to
combine against and crush his struggling principality. The ambition of his
father-in-law, the frowardness of Novgorod, the dissatisfaction of Tver, the
exacting arrogance of the Horde, were successfully ignored or adroitly
played one against the other. In like manner the Grand Prince’s brothers
were studiously kept in the background, and the boyarins of Moskva and
the allied fiefs were taught to look upon Vasili’s surviving son, who bore his
father’s name, as future head of the State. Thus
1425
scheming and contriving went the Prince of Moskva on
his way, till one winter’s day the bells knelled for his
passing soul, and Vasili Vasilievitch reigned in his stead.
The late prince had guided the flood of monarchical principles and
hereditary right in the desired direction; his successor had to struggle for the
greater part of his reign with the back-wash of reaction. Moskva had been
placed by persistent effort high above the position of her neighbours, but
the elements of discord and disunion lay among her own princes, and it was
inevitable that the surviving sons of Dimitri should seek to annul an order
of succession which passed them over in favour of a mere boy. Nor had the
young Vasili the support of a strong Metropolitan to sustain him in the
stormy days that were coming. The Greek Photius who held that office did
not exercise in the State the same influence as his forerunners Theognost
and Aleksis had done, and even in his own department his authority was not
undisputed. For Grand Duke Vitovt, an amateur dabbler in religions, had
established at Kiev a Metropolitan of his own, and the faithful in the Russ-
Lit’uanian lands paid their homage, and what was worse, their tithes, to this
unauthorised rival. Hence Vasili had to depend on the protection of the
Horde and the affections of his Moskovite subjects to defend him against
the ambition of his uncle Urii. The death of his
1430 powerful relative, the Lit’uanian Grand Duke, removed
another possible supporter, and two years later the
young prince had to appeal to the decision of the Khan Makhmet against the
pretensions of his rival. By a grovelling affectation of submissiveness Vasili

was able to emerge triumphant from the contest, and on his return was
solemnly crowned at Moskva—the first coronation of a grand prince that
had taken place in that city.[87]
The iarlikh of the Khan possessed, however, none of its old finality, and
Vasili had to sustain a civil war against his uncle, and after his death (1434)
with his sons, Vasili the Squinting, Dimitri Shemiaka, and Dimitri the Red.
Although, apparently, not wanting in courage or energy (both of which
deficiencies have been freely attributed to him), he possessed little skill in
utilising his resources, and again and again suffered defeat, deposition, and
imprisonment. The loyalty of Moskva brought him through many
vicissitudes, and the tables were turned more than once upon his hostile
relatives. Repulsing an attack made upon the capital by
1436
Vasili the Squinting, the Grand Prince secured the
person of that rebel, and supplemented the defect
bestowed by nature by blinding the eyes of his hapless prisoner. The
leadership of the disaffected party devolved henceforth upon Shemiaka,
who became the implacable enemy of the Grand Prince, and roused for
many a long year the fires of discord in the land. Meanwhile the bosom of
the Church was heaving with agitation as profound as that which disturbed
the State. The new Metropolitan, Isidor of Salonika,
1437
had scarcely entered into his new duties when he was
obliged to set off, by way of Novgorod, Riga, Lubeck,
Braunschweig, Nurnberg, and the Tyrol, to attend the great Council which
was to be held at Ferrara—subsequently at Florence—to unite the two
Christian Churches in one communion. The immediate cause of this
drawing together of the Latin and Greek rivals was the danger which was
threatening the headquarters of the latter sect at the hands of the Infidel
Turk. The Ottoman dynasty, rising upon the ruins of the Seljuk Empire, had
slowly but steadily engorged the provinces which made up the dominion of
the eastern Cæsars. Asia Minor, Bulgaria, Thessaly, Thrace, had been
assimilated one by one, and now there remained but Constantinople, “a
head without a body,” to resist the hitherto irresistible invader. Without
substantial and speedy aid from Catholic Europe there was little probability
that the city could long maintain its defence against the Ottoman armies,
and Catholic Europe could not be expected to interest itself in the fate of a
community which differed from itself in so many vital points of doctrine.
The sole hope for Constantinople lay in the possibility of a reunion with the

dominant factor of Christendom. This was the motive
1438 power which had drawn to the Italian town men from
Moskva, Trebizond, and the isles of the Adriatic, to
discuss the vexed question of the genesis of the Holy Ghost, the exact
degree of bliss and torment allotted to the souls of the departed, whether it
was permissible to use leavened bread in the sacrament, and whether Pope
or Patriarch should occupy the chiefest seat at feasts. These were the main
points which separated the Churches, and on each of them the Greek
prelates (Mark of Ephesos excepted) gave way—not that the arguments of
the Latins had become suddenly convincing, but the looming vision of the
Turk inclined the minds of the Orthodox to surrender. “Ils ne croyaient pas,
mais ils craignaient.”
Foremost among the complaisant Greeks was the Metropolitan Isidor;
already, before leaving Russia, he had shown a “scandalous predilection for
the Latin faith”—had he not at Dorpat kissed the Catholic cross before
saluting the Greek ikons? Hence on his return to
1440 Moskva prince and prelates assembled in gloomy
suspicion to receive him in the Church of the Virgin,
and hear the result of the council’s deliberations. The Roman cross
demurely preceding the Metropolitan, and the Pope’s name cropping up in
the prayers, prepared them for the surrender set forth in the Act of Council.
When Isidor had finished reading the unpalatable document there was an
ominous silence, amid which Vasili rose to his feet and commenced to hurl
invectives at the disconcerted Vladuika. Heretic, false shepherd, corrupter
of souls, the mercenary of Rome, were among the epithets applied to the
would-be reformer, who was promptly bundled off to a monastery, from
which he was glad to escape back to Rome. John Paleologus might, for
pressing reasons of his own, tolerate this accursed change of dogmas, but
the Velikie Kniaz of Moskva would have none of it, and hastened, after the
example of Vitovt, to consecrate a Metropolitan on his own responsibility,
without reference to the tainted source of Constantinople. Jonas, Bishop of
Riazan, was chosen for the post, but was not formally consecrated till 1448.
[88]

The energy and reckless daring of the Prince’s character showed itself soon
after in a struggle with a new enemy. On the ruins of the Great Bulgarian
State had sprung up the Tartar khanate of Kazan, independent of the Golden

Horde, and a source of uneasiness for Eastern Russia. In an attempt to repel
an invasion of the province of Souzdal by the forces of this upstart power,
Vasili, deserted by his cousin Shemiaka, could only muster 1500 men, a
shadow of the mighty hosts that had followed the banner of Moskva
aforetime. With this handful, however, he joined battle with the Kazanese,
and fell, covered with wounds, into their hands. At the news of this disaster
the enemies of the Grand Prince raised their heads throughout the land;
Boris of Tver raided the possessions of the Moskovite merchants at
Torjhok, Shemiaka stretched out his hand for the vacant princedom. The
sudden release of Vasili by the Khan Makhmet sorely embarrassed the
position of the would-be supplanter, and Shemiaka was driven to make a
bold bid for the mastery. A sudden move put the Kreml
1446 in his hands, and the hapless Grand Prince, while
returning thanks in the Troitza monastery for his
deliverance from the hands of the Infidels, experienced the worse fate of
falling into the clutches of his Christian cousin, who put his eyes out. Thus
after ten years came home to roost the wrong inflicted on Vasili the
Squinting, and the Grand Prince was thenceforth Vasili the Blind. This
barbarous requital of an “unhappy far-off” deed was perpetrated in the
names of Shemiaka, Ivan Aleksandreivitch, and Boris of Tver, and in their
hands remained the person of Vasili and the possessions of the Grand
Principality. The first-named usurped the Moskovite throne and enjoyed for
a space the power of Grand Prince without being able to gain the affections
of the people. In the darkness which had descended on
1447 Vasili Vasilievitch the loyalty of boyarins, town-folk,
and clergy still burned bravely for the captive prince;
the popular clamour and the representations of the Metropolitan forced
Shemiaka to restore him to liberty and bestow on him the town of Vologda
as a residence, and not many months had passed ere the exile came
marching back in triumph to his beloved and faithful Moskva—whose
dazzling walls, indeed, he might never again behold, but whose pealing
bells and hoarse-shouting populace spoke music to his darkened soul.
Scarred and mutilated in the long struggle, in which he had tasted the
bitterness of defeats, imprisonment, banishment, blinding, the Grand Prince
had triumphed over all his misfortunes, had wearied down all opponents,
had won. A final victory dispelled the power of Shemiaka (1450), and three
years later he died at Novgorod, not without suspicion of poisoning. From

this turning-point Vasili the Darkened reigned peaceably and prosperously
on the throne he had laboured so hard to retain.
As the Moskovites settled down to their long-estranged placidity, rumours
reached them of the terrible thing which had befallen the city of the
Caesars; rumours which soon grew into creditable news and made them
doubt but that the bottom of their world had fallen out.
Little fruit had been born of the vaunted Council of Florence; the Churches
were as far apart as ever. In vain might the Byzantine Emperor and the
Greek hierarchy conform with the decisions of the act of union; the lower
clergy and the bulk of the populace would have no dealings with the unholy
ordinance. “Better Turkish than Papish,” the motto of the Water-Beggars in
a later age, would fitly have described the sentiments of the people of
Constantinople at this period. Thus they fought and squabbled over their
beloved dogmas, while the enemy was slowly gathering his toils around the
doomed city. The Pope, mortified at the miscarriage of his plans, sent no
legions rolling across Europe to the assistance of the last of the
Constantines; his legate, indeed, was on the scene, arguing and
expostulating, with the rhetoric which gained him applause in the council-
chamber at Florence, but failed him in the cold, grim Church of the Virgin
in the Kreml—for this plausible Roman cardinal is no other than Isidor,
sometime Metropolitan of Moskva. But while the Pope hesitates the Sultan
acts. On every side the city is beset by an army that blackens the face of the
earth. Cannon and ram and scaling-ladder are plied against the massive
walls and heavy gates. Day after day the assault is urged; the city is bravely
defended, for the most part by foreigners—for the greater proportion of the
citizens are in the churches praying for deliverance from the unbelievers.
But the wonder-working Virgin, weary of well-doing,
1453 or recognising the superior insistency of the attackers,
makes no move to save the holy city; the faltering wail
of “kyrie eleison” is drowned by the fierce roar of “Il Allah illah Allah,” the
scarlet banner of the Yeni-Tscheri[89] waves in the breach at the Gate of
Romanos, the young Sultan Mahomet II. bursts in upon his prey, and
Constantine Paleologus, wounded and trampled on in the rush of the
victors, dies amid the ruin of his empire. The purple and gold of old
Byzantium are lost in the pall of night, and the rising moon salutes another
crescent that gleams forth upon the dome of S. Sophia. The cry of the

muezzins peals through the startled city; the eternal speculations upon the
economy of self-begetting Trinities dies away before the new dogma,
“There is one God and Mahomet is His prophet.” This is the end of the
Crusades; this is the fall of the Tzargrad.[90]
After the first feeling of stupefaction and regret produced by these doleful
tidings had passed away, the Moskovites might gather some little
satisfaction from the overthrow of their spiritual headquarters, their one link
with southern Europe. More than ever isolated, the Russian principality
gained in importance by becoming the sole resting-place of the official
Greek religion and of Greek ideas. Not at once did Moskva realise, or
invent, the pleasing idea that she had succeeded to the heritage of the
Caesars; yet to her, still struggling with the competition of other cities, with
Tver, and Vladimir, even with faded Kiev, it was no small gain to have her
churches and high places adorned by the art and sanctified by the presence
of the Greek monks and artists, sages and artificers, who sought refuge
within her gates. And the last years of her Prince, the evening of his stormy
day, were ones of great progress for the white city, and for the monarchy
which was rising around this corner-stone. The forces of reaction seemed
for the moment to have spent their fury on the person of Vasili, and his
unbroken spirit might now pursue its way unquestioned. Novgorod, long
the resort and refuge of his enemies, had at last to
1456
reckon with the armed expression of his resentment; its
messengers were refused hearing, its army of 5000
mail-clad knights was routed near Rousa, its posadnik was a captive in the
Grand Prince’s hands, his forces occupied Torjhok. Peace had to be bought
by the disbursement of 8500 roubles, by submission to a princely levy, and
by other sacrifices of pride and pelf. The same year died Ivan Thedorovitch
of Riazan, leaving his infant son Vasili to the guardianship of the Grand
Prince, who took good care of the orphan—and of his province. Viatka, that
turbulent colony, which outdid its parent Novgorod in rebellion and
disorder, was forced to pay a tribute to the Prince of Moskva and to respect
his arms. Pskov, long time but a Lit’uanian outpost,
1459
received his second son Urii as governor. Thus the
grand principality, at peace once more within itself, was
beginning to quicken its dormant authority in the farthest limits of its
extent. In the year 1460 Vasili paid a long and gracious visit to Velikie
Novgorod, to set the seal of his sovereignty on his northernmost city and

dazzle the proud republicans with his imposing retinue.
1460 Much might they marvel at this grim groping figure,
who had buffeted his way through so many storms, who
had wrested victory from defeat, had thwarted the designs of Pope and
Council, had taught the bells of S. Sofia Novgorodskie to jangle in his
honour, had made Moskva mistress over long-resisting provinces. Scarred
and worn with the traces of his life-struggle, Vasili the Darkened was a meet
type of the Russia he ruled over, but just beginning to grope its way into the
paths of unity and dominion. When in 1462 he went to his well-earned rest,
he left his son Ivan in assured possession of the sovereignty in which he had
been already for some time associated. The old mad folly of dividing the
hardly-cemented territories between the dead Prince’s sons was still
persisted in—Vasili’s eyes had not been opened even by being put out—but
Ivan was emphatically Grand Prince of Moskva.

CHAPTER VII
THE LAST OF THE PALEOLOGI AND THE
FIRST OF THE AUTOCRATS
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 Galitz[93] 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.
Bitter were the terms to which the Novgorodskie had to
1471
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] From the moment that Sophie Paleologus
1472
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. As
Gosoudar Ivan entered the humbled city the sovereign
1477 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. Kazimir
1452 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. The
little principality, which had been for centuries a thorn
1485
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. The small
1487
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. The hostilities in Hungary were, however, cut
1491 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. Subsequent events fell in
1492 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. On these terms an
1494 “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. The
spark that roused, or gave plausible ground for, his
1495
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. By the death of the young Ivan, son of the
(1490)
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.
1499 Renewed 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 dogs[105] 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.

The superiority in warfare which had distinguished the
July 1500 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. In the month of June
1508 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. Thus the
1509 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. The vetché was dissolved and
1510 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. Under these
circumstances Vasili set forth in mid-winter, attended
Dec. 1512 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] Three months later Vasili’s lieutenants at
1514
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. On the 8th September[118] at Orsha, on
1514
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.
The death of Mengli-Girei and the accession of his son
1515
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. The chances
1517 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. Various causes contributed to
1517 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. A wild and devastating war
1520
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. The
(1518) 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.
Now, however, when Sigismund was experiencing an
(1519) 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.
The following year a “Waffenstillstand” for four years
1520 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.
During the greater part of the following year the
1522
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] Vasili
1526
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. For reasons of state it
1533
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.

SKETCH MAP
of
GRAND-PRINCIPALITY of MOSKVA
with
GRAND-DUCHY
of
LITHUANIA and BALTIC PROVINCES.

CHAPTER VIII
IVAN GROZNIE
The lapse of 500 years found the principles of settled hereditary
government in much the same condition in Russia as they had been when
the infant Sviatoslav succeeded to the throne of Kiev under the
guardianship of his mother. Despite the fact that two of the late Sovereign’s
brothers were yet living, Elena Glinski assumed the regency on behalf of
her three-year-old son, supported by a knot of boyarin-princes, whom the
circumstances of the time suddenly threw into prominence. The over-
shadowing figures of the last two Moskovite monarchs had almost
obliterated the fact that there were persons of importance in the land besides
the members of the princely family. Now a whole crop of nobles emerges
from the background, like a ready-made second chamber from the brain of
an Abbé Sieyés. Ivan Oblenski, an offshoot of the House of Tchernigov, the
Bielskis, the Glinskis, and the Shouyskies, form the aristocratic nucleus
round which revolve the intrigues and faction vicissitudes which seem the
natural accompaniments of queen-mothers and minorities. Necessarily the
Princess Regent had a lover, in the person of Oblenski, and equally as a
matter of course, the latter had personal enemies. Of these he proceeded to
dispose with all expediency; Urii Ivanovitch, uncle of the Grand Prince,
suspected of plotting against the Existing Order of Things, was lodged in a
state dungeon, where he died of hunger some two and a half years later.[133]
A more celebrated, if less august victim was the kniaz Mikhail Glinski, who
had expostulated with his niece anent her unseemly intimacy with Oblenski,
and was thrown into prison, where he “died unhappily.”
1534 From which it would appear that the old saying
concerning the unwisdom of intervening between
husband and wife might be applied with equal truth to a less recognised
connection. Andrei Ivanovitch, Vasili’s remaining brother, took fright at the
irreverent procedure of the Regent and her favourite (who caged Princes of
the Blood as unconcernedly as though they were linnets or human beings),

and stole off one day, with all his household and retainers, towards
Novgorod. The farther he got from Moskva the more
1537 his courage rose, and ere long he had drifted into open
rebellion against the boyarin-wielded authority.
Numbers of disaffected landowners sped to his support, but the gates of
Novgorod remained shut and the Oblenskie were hard upon his track with
the best-mounted Moskovite cavalry. Andrei surrendered without striking a
blow, and was escorted back to the city of his deep dislike, leaving behind
him at intervals along the Novgorodskie road the swinging corpses of thirty
of his adherents. His remaining followers died by torture or in prisons, and
the latter fate disposed of the last surviving son of the great Ivan.
Meanwhile the success of Elena’s regency had justified the means taken to
retain it. Vasili’s death had encouraged the King of Poland to renew with
threatening insistency his demands for the restitution of the territories
conquered by the late Prince and his father; refusal on the part of Moskva
led to hostilities in which the Lit’uanian forces were unable to obtain any
advantages, and a prolongation of the truce, on the terms “as you were,”
ensued (1537). A skilful balancing of the conflicting interests which
agitated the Krim and Kazan Hordes maintained the Moskovite peace in
those directions, and a renewal was also effected of the truces with Sweden
and the Livlander knights. Nor was the inner administration of the regency
wanting in beneficial activity. The Kitai-gorod of Moskva (after the Kreml
the most important quarter of the city, containing the houses of the boyarins
and the principal bazaars and trading stores) was surrounded by walls and
towers which added greatly to the security of the capital.[134] Vladimir,
Tver, Novgorod, and other provincial towns were newly fortified and in
some cases rebuilt; the state coinage was also put upon a more satisfactory
footing. Under these circumstances the severities and loose morals of Elena
Glinski might well be overlooked by her subjects. Her greatest offence was
yet to come. She died. Of poison, said many-tongued
Ap. 1538
rumour, on which the only rational comment must be
the useful Scotch verdict, “not proven.” Her untimely
death left Oblenski in precarious possession of the supreme authority, which
his enemies were already preparing to wrest from him. Foremost among
these was the veteran Vasili Shouyskie, nick-named “the Silent,” the head
of an important Souzdalian family. For seven days lasted Oblenski’s
regency, and then himself and his sister were seized and thrown into prison,

where the fashionable death-by-starvation awaited them. The silent
Shouyskie assumed the regency, which he held till his decease in the
October of the same year, when it passed to his brother, Ivan Shouyskie,
who displayed his newly-acquired power by packing the Metropolitan
Daniel off to the cloister, and installing in his place Ioasaf, hegumen (abbot)
of the Troitza monastery. Hard and brutal was the rule of the Shouyskies;
“fierce as lions,” bemoaned the Pskovskie chronicle, “were the voevodas,
and as wild beasts their people against the peasants.” The only check on the
absolute supremacy of the dominant family was the ever-present apparition
of the kniaz, Ivan Bielski—Ivan and Vasili were fashionable names among
the Moskovite aristocracy of that period—who was a formidable competitor
for the possession of the regency. Bielski justified the nervous
apprehensions of the Shouyskies (who had kept him in prison for several
years and only released him at the intercession of the new Metropolitan), by
taking advantage of the disaffection bred by their arrogance to oust them
from the head of affairs. As Regent his rule was milder and less overbearing
than that of the kniaz he had supplanted, and a firmer front was shown
against the Tartars of Kazan and the Krim Horde, who were continually
devastating the frontiers. Possibly the increased activity was rather forced
by their side, for in the year 1541 both Hordes set themselves in motion
against Moskva. The Krim Tartars brought a formidable force into the field,
augmented by cannon, musketeers, and some squadrons of Ottoman cavalry
—the first warriors of that nation who had fought against the Russians. The
double danger stifled for the moment the bickerings of the Shouyskie and
Bielski factions, and the Moskovites found themselves strong enough, when
thus united, to repel the incursion of both Hordes. Safa-Girei and the
Kazanese were chased out of the neighbourhood of Mourom, which town
they had fruitlessly attacked; Saip-Girei, confronted by a powerful army on
the yonder bank of the Oka, dared not attempt to force the passage, and
retired to the Don. The jealousy which existed between the leading boyarins
made it impossible for the Russians to follow up their advantage by a
campaign in Tartar territory, and Ivan Shouyskie turned instead to his own
advantage the employment of the troops which the war had placed at his
disposal. Secretly supported by many of the notables of Moskva, and
openly by those of Novgorod, he resolved upon a bold bid for the recovery
of his ascendency. On a dark night in January Petr
1542 Ivanovitch Shouyskie rode into Moskva with a picked

body of soldiers from Vladimir, and before morning the Kreml was in his
hands. Bielski was seized in his bed, and the Metropolitan was disagreeably
awakened by showers of stones hurtling through his windows and weapons
hammering against his door. The chief of the Church barely escaped with
his life to the shelter of the Troitza, an unpleasant exercise for an early
morning in mid-winter. At daybreak Ivan Shouyskie entered the city and
resumed his old position of authority. Bielski and the Metropolitan were
sent off to safe keeping at Bielozero, the lonely stronghold on the waters of
the lake of that name, where the Grand Princes’ treasures and prisoners
were securely stored away.[135] This time Shouyskie took good care that his
rival should not emerge from prison to trouble him, and the soul of Bielski
put on immortality.[136] A new Metropolitan, the second who had been
nominated by the Shouyskies, was elected to fill the place of the shifty
Ioasaf, who had leisure, in the seclusion of the Kirillov monastery at
Bielozero, to reflect on the unwisdom of being all things to all men in
sixteenth-century Moskva. The Novgorodskie had supported the coup
d’etat, and their Archbishop Makarie was rewarded with the vacant post. In
the meantime, while these various Ivans were ruling the State and crushing
one another in turn, how fared it with the other Ivan in the background? The
much-prayed-for princeling had not, since the death of his mother, spent a
very happy or altogether comfortable childhood. The chief boyarins and
their followers appear to have treated their Sovereign with a curious
mixture of neglect, disrespect, and superstitious awe. Surrounded
exclusively by the partisans of whichever faction happened to be
uppermost, the friendless orphan could only brood in silent resentment over
the wrongs he sustained at the hands of his temporary masters. The rude-
mannered, tyrannical, gold-greedy Ivan Shouyskie was an especial object of
his dislike. A letter written by the monarch in after days to Prince Andrei
Kourbski, comments bitterly on the fact that though, in the lifetime of the
Princess Elena, Shouyskie had possessed only one cloak, green silk
trimmed with marten fur, “and that a very old one,” during his regency he
was able to have cups of gold and silver fashioned him, with his initials
graved thereon.[137] The despotic jealousy of Shouyskie and of his
supporters in the State Council robbed the young Ivan of friends as well as
treasure. For one of their number, a boyarin named Vorontzov, the Prince
had betrayed a marked partiality, a dangerous compliment, which brought
down on the recipient’s person the practically-expressed dislike of his

fellow-councillors. In solemn conclave, and in the presence of Prince and
Metropolitan, the angry men of State fell murderously upon the courtier
whom the Sovereign had delighted to honour, and Ivan’s entreaties, backed
up by those of Makarie, could scarcely obtain a mitigation of his fate to one
of exile and imprisonment. The amusements of the boy Prince, besides
religious devotions, at which he was an adept, and the more legitimate
forms of hunting, consisted in chasing dogs and cats over the battlements of
the Kreml, and in wild gallops with his allotted companions through the
streets of Moskva, in which the old and unwary were ruthlessly trampled
underfoot.[138] The days of his repression were, however, drawing to a
close. The fearsome Regent Ivan died in 1543, and left a commission of his
sons and relatives to replace him. But the reign of the Shouyskies was
doomed. The manly exercise of the chase is a valuable school for
inculcating self-reliance and a will to overcome the obstacles of life. It was
straight from a day’s sport in the woods of Vincennes that the grand young
Louis, whip in hand, strode in upon the Parliament of Paris and quenched it
with an epigram; it was after the autumn hunting at Voloko-Lamsk that Ivan
Vasilievitch first showed his teeth and gave evidence of that cold-blooded
severity which was to gain for him the distinctive adjective “Groznie”
(Terrible). At Moskva, where the Court had assembled for the festival of
Noel, the Prince suddenly accused the ruling boyarins of misgovernment
and abuse of their powers; many had been guilty, but he would content
himself with one example. Calling to his kennel-men he bade them seize
Andrei Shouyskie and throw him to the dogs. Out into the street they
dragged the unhappy man, and there, before the mute, disconcerted
boyarins and the long-time Shouyskie-ridden citizens, the Prince’s hounds
worried the offending kniaz to pieces in the reddening snow. “The little tin
gods” had missed “the hour when great Jove wakes”; Andrei Shouyskie
paid dearly for the oversight. The youth of Ivan still necessitated a regency,
and his mother’s relatives, the Glinskies, next came into power; but from
the day of the red Noel no liberties were taken with the young monarch. His
new counsellors, indeed, encouraged him in his savage inclinations, and the
chronicles give instances of callous brutalities inflicted upon Russian
subjects by both Ivan and the Glinskies. A party of Novgorodskie
arquebusers, who had interrupted one of the Prince’s hunting expeditions
with importunities respecting their pay, were punished for their presumption
by being tortured to death, and a similar ghastly fate awaited some

petitioners from Pskov, upon whom was poured blazing spirits, which
ignited their hair, beards, and clothes.[139]
When Ivan was in his eighteenth year he celebrated with much pomp and
circumstance the double event of his coronation and his marriage with
Anastasia, daughter of Roman Zakharin-Koshkin, member of a family
which had migrated from Prussia to Moskva in the fourteenth century.[140]
In the hallowed Ouspienskie Cathedral the
Jan. 16, 1547
Metropolitan crowned him with the title of Tzar, which
was here used for the first time at the coronation of a
Russian ruler. The old style of Velikie-kniaz dies out from this moment, and
as the customary chant, “In plurimos annos,” swells through those dim
frescoed arches, the old order seems to pass away with the wafted incense
fumes. A new figure is borne into Russian history amid the striking of bells
and shouting of a myriad throated multitude. The Tzar comes!
The fact of Ivan’s coronation caused no immediate change in the
government of Russia, which continued to be directed by the
“Vremenszhiki,” or men-of-the-season, that is to say, by the Glinskies. That
their administration was iniquitous to an insupportable degree may be
gathered, not only from the possibly exaggerated accounts of the
chroniclers, but from the fact that long-suffering Moskva was goaded to the
brink of revolution. Ivan amused himself with his religious hobbies and
other less respectable diversions, and only assumed the part of Sovereign
when he wished to “make an example” of some offending subject. The
purging of Moskva from the vampire brood that afflicted it, and the
simultaneous “reformation” of the young Tzar, form a curious episode in
the history of this time. The summer of 1547 was signalised by disastrous
conflagrations in the capital, the first of which broke out on the 12th April;
the last and most serious occurred in June. The flames on this occasion
reduced to ashes a large portion of the Kreml, the Kitai-gorod, and the outer
town, and destroyed 1700 of the adult inhabitants, besides children, “who
were not counted.” Amid blazing streets and rolling smoke-clouds, falling
roofs and crashing cupolas, panic and anarchy reigned supreme. The
populace, rendered unreasonable by terror and hatred, loudly denounced the
Glinskies as the authors of the calamity; in particular, Anna Glinski, Ivan’s
maternal grandmother, was accused of sprinkling the streets of Moskva with
a decoction of boiled human hearts, which apparently possessed

inflammable qualities unknown to science. Urii Glinski, the Tzar’s uncle,
was seized by the enemies of his party and slain in the sanctuary of a sacred
building, and the infuriated townsfolk penetrated into the country palace at
Vorobiev, whither Ivan had retreated, with a demand for more Glinskies. At
this moment a thing happened which, in the accounts of the earlier Russian
historians, recalls Edinburgh before the battle of Flodden. A “holy man of
Novgorod,” one Silvestr, appeared on the scene and quietly annexed the
soul of the Tzar. The people had attributed the conflagrations to the
Glinskies; more critical and dispassionate examiners have been inclined to
suspect the Shouyskie faction of complicity in the matter. Silvestr, however,
put a different complexion on the affair and announced that the partial
destruction of the town and burning of the 1700 inhabitants and
unenumerated children was the work of God. As he supported this theory by
producing “visions,” there could be no further doubt on the matter—none,
at least, with Ivan, who saw the visions.[141] The conscience-stricken young
man, convinced that the Glinski administration was as unpopular with
heaven as it was with the Moskvitchi, since such heroic measures had been
taken to displace it, surrendered himself, body and soul, into the hands of
Silvestr, who, needless to say, made a clean sweep of the Vremenszhiki and
replaced them with his own friends. Without ruthlessly disturbing the halo
of romance and sanctity which has been fastened upon the man of
Novgorod, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that the monk was an old
acquaintance of Ivan—who was a frequent visitor to all the religious
establishments within his reach—and took advantage of the popular
excitement and general disorder to upset the palace intrigues of both the
Glinski and Shouyskie factions. That Silvestr, and the equally nebulous
layman, Adashev, whom he associated with him in the new government,
exercised a restraining and beneficent influence on the young Prince may
well be believed; with an opposition of watchful and resentful nobles in the
background, circumspection was essential, and Ivan, who had seen a
consuming fire, an angry populace, and a frowning Providence threatening
him on all sides, was likely to be a docile pupil. For the time. The austere
and monkish repression of the latest Vremenszhiki was the finishing touch
necessary to perfect the education of the Terrible Tzar.
The early part of Ivan’s reign, and the whole of the preceding one, are
characterised by the recurrence at irregular periods of a deliberate campaign
against Kazan. The Russians seem to have borrowed the tactics of the

wolves which inhabited their steppes and forests, and to have leisurely and
persistently wearied their quarry down, without caring to rush in and
dispatch it. Again and again did the Tzar summon from the far corners of
his dominions an enormous army, trail forth his ponderous siege-pieces and
sacred banners, take an affecting farewell of his capital, and march upon the
Tartar city. The wooden walls were relentlessly battered down, the garrison
reduced to the last extremity, and then the Moskovite hosts would return
home in good order. The walls were easily rebuilt and the Kazanese would
pursue the even tenor of their way. It would almost appear as though the
Russians were loth to irrevocably destroy the only enemy against whom
they warred with any comfort. A more feasible explanation is that the
Kazanese supplemented their feeble defences by a judicious outlay of the
metal which corrupts, and that some of the Moskovite voevodas did not
return empty-handed from these abortive expeditions. In 1552 Ivan
determined to set once more in motion the huge army which had been left
quartered on the frontiers of Kazan, a locality which had had a demoralising
effect on the troops, many of whom had shaved off their beards to please
the Tartar maidens who for the time being under-studied their wives, “to
prove,” remarked a scandalised messenger from the Metropolitan, “by the
indecent nudity of your faces, that you have shame to be men.” Familiarity
had bred contempt, and the dwellers in the city by the Volga’s shore
scornfully refused to open their gates at the approach of the 150,000
footmen and the 150 cannon which the Tzar brought against them. The
Moskovites prepared for a long and obstinate resistance, and by way of a
beginning erected and dedicated three pavilion churches in their camp.
Events justified their expectations; the Kazanese held out stoutly against
both the assaults of the besiegers and the offers of the Tzar. August and
September passed in continual sorties and battles without the walls,
skirmishing attacks by the Kozaks in the tzarskie army, and mining
operations by the German engineers. The overwhelming forces and superior
artillery which Ivan was able to bring against the city at length beat down
the heroic defence, and the triumphant Moskovites put their stubborn and
still resisting enemies to the sword. The Tzar is said to have been moved to
tears at the sight of so many Tartar corpses; “they are not Christians,” he
observed, “but yet they are men.” The reduction of Kazan was an event of
the first importance in Russian annals. It marked an epoch. “The victory of
Ivan the Terrible is the first great revenge of the vanquished over the

vanquishers ... the first stage reached by European civilisation in taking the
offensive towards Asia.”[142] Prudence suggested that Ivan should remain
on the scene of his conquest until his authority over the neighbouring
districts was assured; a desire to return to his capital in the full flush of
triumph prompted him to disregard more solid considerations. He was still
very young. The newly-acquired territory was therefore left under the
united protection of the Christ, the Virgin, the Russian intercessory saints,
and Aleksandr Shouyskie. Ivan, on his homeward way, received the
welcome intelligence that his wife had given birth to a son, the Tzarevitch
Dimitri, first of a series of Ivanovitches so named. The prolonged
rejoicings, banquetings, and thanksgivings which ensued at Moskva were
followed by a disagreeable sequel; Kazan, despite the august protection
under which it had been left, rose in revolt, and the Russian ascendency was
seriously imperilled. The Tzar’s health at the same time
1553
broke alarmingly down, and another long minority
seemed to threaten the State. The boyarins and princes,
summoned to take an oath of allegiance to the infant Dimitri, showed a
strong reluctance to bind themselves down in the manner required; the
succession of Ivan’s child to the Tzardom would mean a Romanov regency
and a repetition of the faction intrigues which had attended the early years
of the present reign. Urii, the Tzar’s brother, appears to have been a
weakling in mind and body, too feeble even to decorate with the divine
attributes of monarch; in Vladimir Andreievitch, the Tzar’s first cousin,
however, there existed a possible candidate for the throne, and even Silvestr
and Adashev hesitated between the claims of the hereditary and collateral
succession. The oath, whatever its value might be, was exacted from the
unwilling courtiers, but Ivan’s recovery prevented the necessity of testing it.
The convalescent Tzar, in spite of the remonstrances of his advisers, set off
on a course of shrine visiting, taking with him his unfortunate offspring,
who was scarcely of an age to stand such energetic piety. In fact he died on
the journey. The pilgrimage of Ivan was, if the chroniclers and some of the
later historians are to be believed, disastrous in another fashion. Among the
religious establishments visited was the Piesnoshkie monastery, wherein
was caged an interesting prisoner. Vassian, Bishop of Kolumna in the reign
of Vasili, had been deprived of his episcopal office during the time of the
regencies on account of his evil life; now, in the decrepitude of age, he is
represented as harbouring with unquenched passion the unholy frettings of

a sin-warped mind. Ivan desired an interview with the hoary reprobate;
perhaps after a course of devotions among a community of irreproachable
saints, living and departed, he was attracted by the rare personality of a
sometime bishop who was no better than he should be. The monk-with-a-
past seized the grand opportunity to poison the monarch’s mind against his
boyarins, his relations, and his subjects, and Ivan drank in with greedy ears
the vicious counsels of the unhallowed recluse. It is a fascinating picture,
the aged priest who had eaten his heart out in helpless bitterness these many
years, and chafed against the restraint of his prison-cell, given at last one
deadly moment of revenge in which to work a superb evil against the
society that had mishandled him. And as the Tzar went out from his
presence a changed man, might not the ex-prelate have flung a crowning
blasphemy at his heaven and chanted exultingly nunc dimittis? Ivan, indeed,
in the hands of the chroniclers, is a creature easily swayed; a monk from
Novgorod tells him to be good, and he straightway abandons the wrong-
headed sins of his wayward youth and becomes an exemplary monarch, till
a monk of Piesnoshkie gives him dark and evil counsel, and sends him forth
upon the world with a cankered, blood-lusting soul.
The Tzar’s return to health was accompanied by a return of Moskovite
prosperity. Another Tzarevitch, Ivan, replaced the dead Dimitri; Kazan was
gradually Kozaked into submission, and received a bishop as a mark of
special favour. Another conquest equally important was achieved without
bloodshed. The Astrakhanese having insulted the envoys of Moskovy, a
small but well-equipped army was sent against them, with the result that
this khanate, once the head-country of the redoubtable Golden Horde,
acknowledged Ivan’s sovereignty and yielded equal rights in the Volga
fishery to his Great Russian subjects. The Nogai
1554 Tartars, occupying the intermediate steppes, submitted
at the same time to the Moskovite dominion, and the
Russian state, still cut off from the Black Sea, to which in the tenth century
it had given its name,[143] wriggled its way down to the Kaspian.
The acquisition of the two Tartar sovereignties, while giving increased
importance and security to Ivan’s dominions, and opening up a valuable
trade with Persia and other eastern countries, did not tend to make Moskovy
less Asiatic, or bring her closer into the European family. The Tzar’s
political ambitions turned naturally towards the west. With a sagacity equal

to that of his most celebrated successor, and in opposition to the advice of
his counsellors, he wished to find a free outlet for communication with the
great Empire-Republic (which, though decaying in organisation, was at this
moment so instinct with life), and with Europe generally. The death of
Sigismund of Poland (1548) and the accession of his son, Sigismund-
August, had scarcely affected the grudgingly pacific relations between the
two countries, though their common grievance against the Krim Tartars
seemed to warrant the hope of a more cordial understanding. With Sweden
the Moskovites waged one of those short inconclusive wars, in which
neither party seemed to have any definite object in view, beyond the fact
that they “lived unhappily” as neighbours. A forty
1557 years’ truce concluded the hostilities between these
ancient enemies. It was about this time that some
adventurous merchant-seamen of the city of London “discovered”
Moskovy, by way of the White Sea, and opened up a commercial and
diplomatic intercourse between the two isolated nations who were one day
to come face to face with each other on the roof of the world. The country,
however, towards which Ivan’s thoughts were chiefly turned was the
uniquely governed Baltic land, comprising Estland, Livland, and Kourland,
and the adjacent islands of Dago and Oesel. The extinction of the Prussian
section of the Order had necessarily weakened the Livlandish branch, and
the spread of Lutheran ideas had further added to the confusion which
reigned throughout the Baltic burghs. Nowhere, perhaps, in Europe did
bishops wield such extensive temporal powers, and the fact that local
opinion ran strongly in the direction of the reformed principles and of
secularisation made the immediate future of these districts a very open
question. Ivan had a solution of the difficulty which he was not loth to put
into practice. A grievance he undoubtedly had against the Livlanders, who
had hindered his intercourse with the Hansa League and prevented free
immigration of artificers and craftsmen from the Empire into Russia.
Consequently he suddenly bethought him of the clause in the original truce
with von Plettenberg, whereby an annual tribute from the town of Dorpat
had been agreed to, and promptly lost sight of. The Tzar reminded the
Livlandish envoys of this unremembered pledge, and refused to renew the
truce until the arrears had been paid in full. The
1557 representatives of the Land-Master and the sovereign
bishops argued and promised, but they did not pay, and

Ivan prepared for war. Von Fürstenberg vainly endeavoured to rouse his
subordinates and coadjutors to a sense of the coming danger. The Bishop of
Dorpat hastily declined the offer of a few companies of lanzknechts, whose
loosely disciplined habits he well remembered; he had forgotten the
Russians. In January three divisions of Moskovite,
1558 Tartar, and Tcherkess troops, under the command of a
Glinski, a Romanov, and an erstwhile Khan of Kazan,
rode into the Order territory and wasted Livland and Estland to within four
miles of Revel.[144] The outskirts of Dorpat were burnt, and the invaders
returned from this preliminary winter campaign with a heavy spoil of
cannons, church bells, treasure, and captives. A contemporary account
accuses the Tartars of fiendish cruelties upon the hapless inhabitants who
fell into their clutches; among other fantastically devised tortures, men were
fastened on to the ground, holes punctured into their sides, and gunpowder
poured therein, which being ignited, sent the victims into shreds.[145] Ivan’s
object in sending war and desolation careering through the land was to
bring the various factors which composed its government into subjection to
his authority, as the Prussian State had been brought under the sovereignty
of Poland. The Livlanders still imagined that peace might be bought, and at
a Landtag held at Wolmar in March it was resolved to send envoys to the
Tzar with an offer of 60,000 thalers. Ivan refused to receive the
ambassadors, and the chances of reconciliation were still further lessened
by an outbreak of hostilities between the opposing fortresses of Narva and
Ivangorod, the former of which was captured by the Russians. The war
recommenced with renewed vigour on the part of the invaders; the
defending forces were too hopelessly disorganised to offer an effective
resistance to the Moskovite attack. Churchmen and Ordermen, nobles and
burghers, blamed each other mutually, and the luckless peasantry (who
since their conversion to Christianity by the Sword Brethren had scarcely
been surfeited with the peace and goodwill which had been officially
promised them) suffered at the hands of all. Dorpat, Neuhausen, Ringen,
and many other strongholds fell before the assaults of the Moskovites, and
Ivan’s troops extended their ravages into Kourland. But meanwhile
significant events had been taking place at the headquarters of the Order.
Von Fürstenberg had resigned his office to a younger man, Gotthard Kettler,
and this new chief had inaugurated vigorous measures whereby to save, if
possible, some fragment from the ruin of the rapidly dissolving

anachronism which had held together for over 300 years. The Kings of
Poland, Sweden, and Denmark were appealed to for assistance, and a more
spirited opposition was shown to the Tzar’s voevodas. A half-hearted
irruption of the Krim Khan, Devlet Girei, into Moskovite territory towards
the close of the year did not materially weaken Ivan’s grip upon the
struggling provinces, but in the following May, through the mediation of the
new King of Denmark (Frederick II.), an armistice of six months was
granted to the distressed Livlanders. Kettler, the
1559 Archbishop of Riga (Wilhelm Hohenzollern), and the
various representatives of the Order, the cathedral
lands, and the cities sought to turn this respite to good account. Like
vultures swooping down from an empty sky, the agents of the neighbouring
northern powers appeared suddenly on the scene now that they understood
that the Baltic Bund really meant dying. The Empire, torn and exhausted by
the religious warfare which had attended the progress of the Reformation,
was unable to take effective part in the obsequies of its detached colony.
Other interested waiters upon Providence, however, there were in plenty.
Magnus of Holstein, brother of the King of Denmark, was elected successor
to Johann Munchausen, Bishop of Oesel and Wiek, who was willing, for a
substantial recompense, to evacuate a bishopric which had become neither
Catholic nor safe. Revel and the Estlandish barons turned their eyes
Swedenward, while in September an alliance was formed between Poland
and the expiring Order, which showed in which direction Kourland and
Livland were likely to fall. The truce came abruptly to an end in the midst
of all these schemings, and the Order knights fought their last campaign
amid depressing circumstances. The strongly fortified town of Fellin, in
which ex-Master von Fürstenberg had entrenched himself, was captured—
or bought—by the Moskovite voevoda Kourbski, and another disaster
overtook the Cross warriors at Ermes, where a whole detachment was
surrounded by an overpowering force of the enemy and all who were not
slain taken as prisoners to Moskva. The Tzar who had wept over the dead
Kazanese did not on this occasion permit his triumph to soften his feelings
towards the wretched captives, who were flogged through the streets of the
capital with whips of wire and then beheaded.[146] Hatred and fear of the
Tartar-tinged and autocratic Moskovite sovereignty, heightened by acts such
as this, drove the Baltic folk more speedily into the arms of the various
foreign powers who were able and willing to absorb them. Oesel had

already come under Danish influence; in June 1561 Erik XIV. of Sweden
(who had succeeded Gustavus Vasa the preceding September) took Estland
formally under his protection. Sigismund-August completed the partition by
taking over from the Order Kourland and as much of Livland as was not in
the hands of the Russians. The former province was
Mar. 1562 erected into a hereditary duchy dependent on the Polish
crown, and bestowed upon the ci-devant Master,
Gotthard Kettler, who was transformed into Duke of Kourland; the
ecclesiastical lands of the Kourlandish bishopric of Pilten, however, “went
with” the territory of Oesel, which also comprised the church-lands of Wiek
in Estland. Riga remained for the present a free city, depending more or less
upon Poland, and the archbishopric was extinguished on the death of its last
prelate, Wilhelm Hohenzollern, in 1563.[147] Thus passed away in violent
dissolution the strange anomalous time-honoured Baltic Bund, that
missionary outpost of western Christianity and civilisation, which had
crammed its commerce and its Christ swordwise down the throats of the
Liv tribes, had led an existence of intermittent strife with its neighbours and
within itself, and dying, left a legacy of two hundred years’ warfare behind
it.
Ivan, in killing the Order, had not reaped unmixed benefits from his
destructive efforts; he had advanced the Russian frontier in a direction in
which expansion was most needed, but he had seen a large accession of
territory fall to his hereditary enemy, Poland, and his other hereditary
enemy, Sweden, had obtained a foothold south of the Finnish gulf—two
circumstances which did not bode peace on his north-west frontier. At
Moskva meanwhile troubles were brewing. The Tzar had probably never
forgotten or forgiven the part Adashev and Silvestr had played when their
sovereign seemed little better than a dead dog, and his consort had since
that affair nourished open enmity against the two advisers. Their opposition
to the war with Livland, in place of which they would have preferred a
crusade against the Krim khanate, still further nettled Ivan, and the
Vremenszhiki might plainly perceive that their “season,” which had set in
amid the glowing ashes of a burnt Moskva, was drawing to a close in the
winter of the Tzar’s displeasure. The death of Anastasia
(Aug. 1560)
(who had erewhile presented her husband with another
son, Thedor, and a daughter, Eudokiya) did not improve
the monarch’s temper, and the fallen favourites were glad to leave the

unhealthy neighbourhood of the Court. Adashev was sent in the capacity of
voevoda to the newly acquired fortress of Fellin, and the man of Novgorod
relapsed into the obscurity of the cloister. Their rule had been ambitious,
austere, and paternal to the point of irritation, and they left behind them a
circle of disparaging courtiers who helped the Tzar to remember how
arrogant his disgraced counsellors had been in the past, and to realise how
dangerous they might be in the future. It was darkly hinted at the Kreml that
Anastasia Romanov had died in the prime of life and health, and that she
had been the enemy of the Vremenszhiki. Ivan himself raked up real or
imagined grievances against these restrainers of his violent youth, and
before long the frown of the Tzar was followed by a stroke of his far-
reaching arm. Adashev was removed to a prison at Dorpat, where he died
six months later—by his own hand, said his enemies; Silvestr was sent to
contemplate the abstract to the music of “the ice-fields which grind against
the Solovetsky Monastery on its savage islet” in the White Sea—a favourite
storing-place for inconvenient churchmen, as Bielozero was for lay
offenders.
A new circle of favourites and boon companions sprang fungus-like around
the stern-grown Tzar, but for the future they ceased to try and control his
goings; if they could avoid being trampled on they counted themselves
lucky. The Basmanovs—Thedor, the son, “with the face of an angel and the
heart of a devil”—were among this sinister throng, which also included
Maluta Skouratov, “readiest of all to minister to his depraved inclinations
and shameful lusts.”[148] Ivan, after the punishment of Silvestr and Adashev,
was seized with remorse—for wasted opportunities. He might have been so
much more savagely exemplary than he had been. It was not yet too late to
remedy the omission; Adashev had been disposed of, and the recluse could
not well be dragged forth again and re-sentenced; but there were others. The
gravest political fault that must be laid to Ivan’s account is that his cruelties
were occasionally stupid. In the instance of his first experiment at a reign of
terror he selected as principal victim of his unappeased wrath Daniel
Adashev, brother certainly of the late minister, but one of the few reliable
voevodas with the army in Livland. The exact ground on which he received
the death-sentence—beyond the fundamental one of blood-relationship with
a fallen idol—does not transpire, but the fault was apparently a
comprehensive one, as with him perished his youthful son, his wife’s father,
his brother’s wife’s brothers, and his relative Ivan Shiskin, with wife and

child.[149] At the same time was put to death, on the double charge of
sorcery and affection towards the Adashevs, a woman of Livland, a convert
to Orthodoxy, who had come to Moskva with her family, the interesting
name of Magdalin, and a reputation for piety. The first perished with her.
Other victims of the Tzar’s dislike or distrust were sent either to their
graves or to Bielozero, and then the “young man’s fancy” lightly turned to
“thoughts of love.” Envoys were sent to the King of Poland suggesting the
marriage of Ivan with one of Sigismund-August’s sisters as a basis of peace
between the two countries, but the negotiations fell through. The question
of Livland had added another item to the many vexed points which made a
durable reconciliation impossible. The offended wooer
Aug. 1561
haughtily turned his back upon possible western brides
and allied himself with a beautiful Tcherkess maiden, of
a princely house, whom he caused to be Christianised and baptized at
Moskva under the name of Mariya. Towards the close of the following year
Ivan assembled an immense army with which to give practical effect to his
resentment against Poland, and in January 1563 led his troops in person
against Polotzk. Probably no previous Russian prince or voevoda had ever
been at the head of so imposing a host; its fighting strength was computed
at 280,000 men, another 80,000 accompanied the huge baggage train, and
200 cannon bumped in their sledges over the frozen snow. How such a
multitude of men and horses was maintained in the frost-bound and much
ravaged border province of Polotzk it is difficult to surmise. Fortunately the
siege was not of long duration; the old capital of the House of Isiaslav
surrendered to the mighty host which encompassed it, and Ivan was able to
add the title of Grand Prince of Polotzk to his already fatiguingly imposing
designations. His return journey to Moskva was a repetition of his earlier
triumph after the fall of Kazan. As on that occasion, he was met with the
pleasing intelligence that his consort had presented him with a son (Vasili).
[150]
The infant continued the parallel by dying when a few weeks old.
Another death happened in the tzarskie family towards the end of the year,
Urii, the weakling brother, dropping quietly out of existence at this time.
Makarie, the Shouyskie-elevated Metropolitan, died on the last day of the
year, “leaving behind him the blessed memory of a prudent pastor.”[151] As
he had lived in peace with the various Vremenszhiki and with Ivan himself,
the prudence cannot be gainsaid. Athanasie, the Tzar’s
1564
confessor, was elected to the vacant post, which he

probably found less onerous than that of keeper of his Majesty’s
conscience.
A truce of six months had been accorded to Sigismund-August,
notwithstanding which both Moskovites and Poles (the latter with the
assistance of the Dniepr Kozaks) mutually harried each other’s lands. The
Polish ambassadors who came to Moskva in December 1563 put forward
the usual inflated demands for Pskov, Novgorod, and other integral Russian
possessions; scarcely likely to be yielded to a country which had just lost a
valuable province. Ivan’s diplomatists countered these extravagant
proposals by equally unreasonable claims, and the futile negotiations—
which more resembled a Dutch auction—were broken off in January. The
renewal of active hostilities brought disaster upon the
1564 Moskovite arms; in the ill-fated neighbourhood of
Orsha Petr Ivanovitch Shouyskie, in command of a
large Russian force, was surprised by the hetman Nikolai Radzivil and
completely defeated. Among the many conflicting accounts of this battle it
is impossible to estimate what was the proportionate loss of victors and
vanquished, but it is fairly evident that the Moskovites abandoned their
cannon and baggage train to the enemy, that they were pursued by
moonlight through brakes and swamps, and that Shouyskie lost his life in
the battle or the flight. According to some writers his body was found in a
well. The consequences of this defeat were not weighty, but Ivan was at the
same time confronted with the defection of one of his most important
voevodas, Aleksandr Mikhailovitch Kourbski. This boyarin, who held
command of the troops in Livland, had been a companion-in-arms of Daniel
Adashev, and was well disposed towards the Vremenszhiki who had had so
grim a downfall. As Moskovite generals went, he had been energetic and
fairly successful, though at a battle at Nevl he had been worsted by a much
inferior Polish force. The cruelty and tyranny which were making the Tzar
daily more breathlessly interesting to his courtiers roused apprehensions in
the mind of Kourbski, who suddenly took the resolution to transfer his
services to the cause of Sigismund-August. The letter or declaration in
which he informed the Tzar of the reasons which had driven him to take this
step was couched in terms of Biblical reproach, and upbraided the tyrant
with having shed the blood of innocent men and slain the mighty ones of
Israel. Kourbski was pleased with this composition and expressed his
intention of having a copy of it buried with him. Ivan, who was not so

pleased with it, drove his iron-tipped staff through the foot of the messenger
who had brought it, and kept it there while he read it; and it was a long
letter. An extraordinary correspondence ensued; Ivan hurled at his departed
boyarin reproaches, scriptural texts, sarcasms, and fragments of classical
history. Why to save his miserable body had Kourbski stained his immortal
soul with treachery? What, he wished to know, would happen to Kourbski’s
soul “on the day of awful judgment”? How had he dared to say that the
throne of God was surrounded by his (Ivan’s) victims, against the authority
of the Apostle, who said that no man could see God? Heretic! “You tell me
that I shall never again see your Ethiopian face. O Heaven! what misfortune
for me!” And let him place his letter in his coffin, thereby proving that he
was no Christian, since Christians loved to die in forgiveness and not hate.
“Written in our residence of Moskva, in Great Russia, the 5th of the month
of July, the year of the world 7,072.”[152]
The passing over of Kourbski infused new vigour into Sigismund-August’s
war measures. Devlet-Girei, who had been on the point of concluding an
alliance with Moskva, was suddenly induced by Polish gold to make an
inroad upon Riazan; Kourbski and Radzivil led a large army against
Polotzk, and hostilities were actively prosecuted in Livland. Nothing,
however, resulted from this triple attack; Riazan was heroically defended by
the Basmanovs, father and son, until reinforcements arrived to drive the
Tartars back into the steppes. Polotzk equally defied the Polish arms, and
the Moskovites on their part captured the Lit’uanian fortress of Ozeriszh. In
Livland neither side could claim a decided advantage.
Had Ivan at this crucial moment gathered together the formidable resources
at his command and led his army against his old hereditary enemy,
enfeebled by the rule of a weak and aristocracy-fettered king, and involved,
moreover, in a quarrel with Sweden, he might have achieved a conquest
more splendid and important than those of Kazan and Polotzk, and have
wreaked on foreign foes his consuming lust for blood. But suspicion, the
Nemesis of tyrants, had already commenced to haunt the dark mind of the
Tzar, and he cared not to risk his sacred person in the hands of possibly
traitorous boyarins. His warped imagination peopled Moskva with treason-
mongers and conspirators, secret adherents of Kourbski and of the
disgraced Vremenszhiki. Promiscuous arrests and judicial murders had not
increased the gaiety of the capital, and Ivan glowered round upon gloomy

and anxious faces with a sense of injured and threatened majesty. One
morning in December boyarins and citizens saw with a feeling of uneasy
alarm the Kreml square crowded with sledges, in which were piled crosses,
ikons, church and domestic furniture, State treasures, and the various
paraphernalia necessary to a peregrinating Tzar. The Terrible was about to
desert his capital on the eve of the festivities of Noel. Escorted by a troop of
horsemen, and accompanied by his family and favourite courtiers, Ivan
Vasilievitch Groznie swept out of Moskva before the eyes of his silent and
wondering subjects. This portentous Hegira halted at the Aleksandrovskie
sloboda, a village some 107 verstas (86 miles) from the capital, where the
Tzar set up his Court afresh. The unknown is proverbially the dreaded. All
Moskva shivered at this mysterious departure. Clergy, boyarins, and
townsfolk asked themselves what boded the winter flitting of their
sovereign; they had not long to wait for an explanation.
1565 On the 3rd January came a New Year’s message from
Aleksandrov to the Metropolitan, and another to the
merchants and people of Moskva. The burden of both these epistles was,
that during Ivan’s minority and under the administration of Silvestr and
Adashev the interests of the State had been neglected and its coffers
plundered; that Moskva still swarmed with a brood of disaffected and
rebellious boyarins, and that whenever the long-suffering sovereign wished
to mete out justice to the guilty, the Metropolitan and clergy interfered to
screen them from their well-deserved doom. Hence the sorrowing Tzar had
resolved to shake the dust of an ungrateful capital off his feet, or in other
words, to leave the white-built but black-hearted city to simmer in its own
iniquities. The effect of this announcement was general panic and
consternation, as Ivan had probably intended it should be; a deputation of
clergy, boyarins, merchants, and townsfolk, headed by Pimen, Archbishop
of Novgorod, waited upon the Tzar in his retreat at Aleksandrov and
humbly implored him to return to his desolate capital and to deal with the
evil-doers as seemed best to him. Ivan graciously relented and made a
solemn entry into the city on the 2nd February. If the chronicles are to be
credited, the change of air and scene had done him little good as far as
bodily health was concerned, and the people were appalled to behold the
ravages which two months’ absence had wrought on the person of their
sovereign, who now appeared before them “a gaunt, bent man, with dull
eyes, matted, unkempt hair, and a gloomy fierceness stamped upon every

feature.”[153] Certainly this Tzar gave his subjects plenty of excitement. As
a conqueror he had retaken possession of Moskva, and a new batch of
regulations marked his return to the head of affairs; most notable of these
enactments was the institution of a personal body-guard, chosen from the
ranks of the courtier boyarins, and originally fixed at 1000 strong
(afterwards raised to 6000), to whom was given the name of Opritchnina, or
select legion. These satellites and creatures of the Tzar fulfilled the duties of
guards, police, and special messengers, and became the agents for such
cruelties and extortions as Ivan could not superintend in person. They
carried at their saddle-bow a broom and a dog’s head, to signify that they
swept treason out of the land and devoured the Tzar’s enemies; the terror
they inspired among the unfortunate people upon whom they were let loose
earned for them the name of “Kromieshniki,” “of the outer darkness,” or
literally “outers.” Another new departure was the commencement of a
palace outside the walls of the Kreml; an unaccountable whim, unless Ivan
feared to be shut up like a rat in a trap among a people whose patience
might one day give out, and who might hunt for a Vasilievitch as on a
memorable occasion they had hunted for Glinskies. For the present the
Moskvitchi were huddled like sheep in the corner of a pen, watching with
nervous interest the movements of the personage who might be said to
embrace the double part of shepherd and wolf. No time was lost in getting
to business; in the month of February a batch of victims was selected to
inaugurate the new days of personal rule—a dark festival, in sombre,
gloomy, and terrible setting, and not as yet common enough to have lost the
thrill of expectancy. A list of names stalk spectre-wise across this ugly page
of Moskva’s history, as the bearers of them walked to their doom under the
gaze of a blood-frozen multitude. Aleksandr Gorbati, who at least had
fought for the Tzar “from Kazan to the field of Arske,” and his son Petr,
who at the age of seventeen could not have been steeped very deeply in
treason, died together under the executioner’s axe. Four other enemies of
the Tzar’s repose suffered by the block; for a fifth was reserved a more
ghastly punishment. Kniaz Dimitri Shaferov expiated his real or imputed
crimes by a slow death by impalement. All day long, it was said, he
lingered, bearing his pain heroically; and Church and Tzar looked on
impassively at a deed more meanly cruel than that monk-taught tragedy, the
memory of which they bewailed every Good Friday. To the credit of the
Metropolitan, be it said, that having not the courage to thwart his

sovereign’s sacrificial bent, he retired from an office whose merciful
functions he might no longer wield, and withdrew into the Novo Spasskie
monastery. Germanus, Archbishop of Kazan, was pitched upon to fill the
vacant post, but Ivan quarrelled with him before the ceremony of
consecration had time to take place, and the old man escaped thankfully
back to his former diocese. The Tzar then nominated Filipp, hegumen of the
Solovetski Lavra, who unwillingly assumed an office which could not fail
to bring him into disastrous contact with the Terrible and his unbearable
Opritchniki.
Ivan divided his time between the capital and the Aleksandrovskie sloboda,
which latter place he transformed into a peculiar hybrid settlement, half
fortress, half monastery, in which he led an equally peculiar life. A whim or
a superstitious fancy caused him to garb himself and his boon companions
with the titles and even the robes of monks, but the religious routine of this
strange establishment was no make-believe. Matins and masses and vigils
were here observed, perhaps more regularly than in most Russian
monasteries of that day, and by none more punctiliously than by the Tzar-
abbot; a fearful and wonderful being, if contemporary reports have not
grossly lied, grovelling in abject fervent worship before the chapel altar at
one moment, and gliding out to superintend the fiendish torture of some
wretched captive at another, returning “radiant” and comforted—grotesque
and scarcely credible, yet supported by the facts that are available. While
the baboon-hearted sovereign passed his days in a blended medley of piety
and savagery, buffoonery and State affairs, his familiar sprites, the Six
Thousand, infested Moskva and a large portion of the country districts like
a devouring pest or an army of occupation. Princes, boyarins, burghers, all
who were not connected with the Elect Legion, were liable at any moment
to be insulted, plundered, or maltreated by the light-hearted and light-
fingered Opritchniki, and redress from the Tzar there was none. Houses and
lands were ruthlessly filched from unoffending subjects in order to provide
for the wants and luxuries of the favoured legionaries.[154]
The new Metropolitan, a man of firmer fibre than his immediate
predecessors, inevitably clashed against the drifting forces of oppression
and State anarchy which bore athwart him, and incurred the disfavour alike
of Tzar and Opritchniki. Previous to his consecration he had made a half-
hearted attempt to procure the suppression of the latter, and in return they

hated him with a thoroughness which boded his ultimate destruction.
Throughout his ministrations in the gloomy and splendid temples of
Moskva the grinning dog’s head must have been ever before his eyes, and
the renewed cruelties and executions with which the Tzar terrorised the
capital made a rupture daily more imminent.
During these inward developments of Ivan’s reign a curious languor had
crept into the foreign relations of the country. It seemed as if the three
north-eastern powers were gorged and torpid after having assimilated
within their maws the decayed carcase of the Baltic Bund. The Swedish
raven and the Slav eagles sat inertly blinking at each other, or indulged in
desultory sparring over the remains of their banquet. Perennial embassades,
solemnly and sumptuously upholstered, trailed to and fro between Moskva
and the Lit’uanian capital, and concurrently Kozaks and razboyniks (moss-
troopers) kept alive the smouldering embers of war. As a matter of fact
neither of the three neighbour nations was in a position to engage in a
vigorous foreign campaign. In Sweden Erik, second monarch of the House
of Vasa, was undoing the good work of his father and sowing the whirlwind
which was shortly to sweep him from his throne. In Poland the line of
Yagiello seemed likely to come to an end with the childless Sigismund-
August, and men looked anxiously or selfishly forward to the prospective
troubles of an open succession; for the most part selfishly. In Russia Ivan,
who might have reaped splendid profit from the embarrassments of his
rivals, seemed bent rather on warring upon his own subjects. His hatred of
the boyarins may legitimately be explained by the recollections of his
dreary and friendless youth, and of the torturing anxiety of his sick-bed,
when loyalty ran cold and men turned their backs upon the seemingly
setting sun. And yet the prime mover in that incipient treason appeared for
long to have escaped the jealous fury that bore so strong a sway in the
Tzar’s breast. Vladimir Andreivitch, who had put himself forward as his
cousin’s under-study, was for many years the object of caresses rather than
openly shown resentment. Fiefs, palaces, commands, and other
compliments were showered upon him, as though to remove the possibility
of further disaffection. But there are more ways of killing a cat than by
choking it with cream. Ivan one day summoned his relative to visit him at
Aleksandrovskie, and rode forth to meet him with a band of ever-useful
Opritchniki—and some poison. Vladimir, accompanied
1569 by his wife and two children, was intercepted at a little

village on the road, where all four were forced to drink of the Tzar’s
hospitality—a beverage which needed no digestion.
Whatever object Ivan may have had in selecting a man of Filipp’s
disposition for the office of Metropolitan, he soon laboured to displace him
therefrom; “there is no law to say such things as may disgust the ear of
kings,” and Filipp had been, for a Russian churchman, tolerably outspoken.
The uncompromising Vladuika was arrested, arraigned
(1568) on some raked-up charge relating to his monastic life,
deposed from his office, and immured in a cell of the
Otrotch monastery near Tver. Here in the following year Maluta Skouratov
helped him to die; Ivan has the credit of having added a martyr to the
Orthodox calendar. Kirill, hegumen of the Novinski monastery (Moskva)
replaced Filipp in the Russian primacy.
Despite the passive and unresisting temper with which the Moskovites seem
to have endured the tyranny of their sovereign and his satellites, Ivan was
never free from apprehension on the score of treason. The carefully-guarded
seclusion of his life both at Aleksandrov and at the capital betray his
nervous fears in this respect, and even more unmistakable is the drift of the
correspondence he had with Elizabeth of England on the subject of a
possible asylum in that country. In the last years of Edward VI. the English
navigator Richard Chancellor, of “the Mystery Companie and Fellowship of
Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of unknown lands,” had stumbled
upon Moskovy while searching for a northern passage to India and China,
and diplomatic and commercial relations had been opened up between the
two countries. The Queen responded graciously to “the deare most mightie
and puissant Prince, our brother, great lord Emperor and greate Duke Ivan
Basily of all Russia,” promising a sanctuary for “the free and quiet leeding
of your highnes lief ... and that it maie be laufull for you to use your
Christian relligion in such sorte, as it shall be best like you.” Besides, the
letter went on, a place should be appointed for the prospective fugitive and
his Court “as long as you shall like to remaine with us,” adding, however,
“upon your owen charge.” The Tudors were not given to quixotic
extravagance.
Russia it has well been said is the country of contrasts, and the reign of Ivan
furnishes some curious anomalies of administration. Of all the strange fruit
to be borne under the circumstances of time and place—in the Moskovy of

the sixteenth century—a States-General was about the last to be looked for.
And yet this was indeed the apparition which the violent control-impatient
Tzar called up to advise him on the purely administrative question of
continuation or termination of the Polish war. In the summer of 1566 came
to Moskva an unwonted assemblage of boyarins, higher clergy, small
proprietors, merchants, and townsfolk, 339 in all, to deliberate on the matter
which had been submitted to their decision. Sigismund-August had
abandoned his demands for the restitution of Smolensk and Polotzk, and
was willing to unite with Ivan in a scheme for driving the Swedes out of
Estland and partitioning that province and Livland amicably between the
two Slav powers. The East-Russian monarch did not jump at these
favourable proposals, but insisted that Riga, Wenden, Wolmar, Ronneburg,
and Kokenhausen should be added to his share of Livland. Possibly his
object was to harass Lit’uania by a prolongation of the war, in the hope that,
on the death of Sigismund-August, the electors of the grand duchy might be
driven to put a term to their country’s sufferings by bestowing their
suffrages on their most formidable neighbour; as the Poles had done in the
case of Yagiello. The King refused to make the required concessions, hence
the deadlock which the Russian Diet was called together to discuss. The
assembly unanimously concurred in refusing to abate the Tzar’s demands
upon Livland, which appeared to them extremely reasonable. Thus the old
Slavonic custom of violently disposing of a minority was not called into
requisition; had the unanimity been the wrong way Ivan would probably not
have shrunk from a heroic treatment of the case. Whatever hopes the Tzar
may have entertained of detaching Lit’uania from the Polish crown were
dispelled by the political stroke which Sigismund-August effected a few
years later; by the Union of Lublin, signed, after many a stormy sitting, on
the 1st July 1569, Poland and Lit’uania were definitely bound together in a
dual but indivisible realm. The question of the succession to the double
throne still remained open, but it was scarcely likely that the turbulent and
almost independent nobles of the Polish provinces would turn their thoughts
towards the grim despot of Moskva, charm he never so wisely. Ivan,
however, in obstinately refusing to conclude peace on any but the most
exorbitant terms, and confining his military operations for the most part to
unimportant border skirmishes, was pursuing the time-honoured Moskovite
wolf-borrowed policy of wearing down an adversary by persistent untiring
attack. Even more hoary and respectable with the sanction of age, dating

indeed from the days of Sviatoslav Igorovitch, was the happy-go-lucky
neglect of the southern and eastern possessions of the gosoudarstvo, which
were generally left with no better protection than those with which nature
had surrounded them. South of Moskva nothing matters, might have
expressed the indifference with which the Russian statecraft permitted its
outlying districts in this direction to be continually overrun by marauding
armies. In the year of the Lublinskie Union a Turko-
1569 Tartar invasion, having for its nucleus 17,000 troops
under the command of an Ottoman pasha, entered the
steppe-lands of the Azov basin to prosecute what might be considered a
holy war against the Infidel conquerors of Kazan and Astrakhan. With the
idea of bringing the Mussulman lands watered by the Volga into closer
touch with Azov, and thereby with the water-way to Constantinople, the
Turkish plan of campaign included the gigantic project of uniting that river
with the Don by means of a canal. Neither this undertaking nor the
meditated swoop upon Astrakhan was seriously prosecuted, and the
invaders seem to have gathered alarm from the awful stillness of the
solitudes into which they had penetrated, and to have seen Moskovite
armies stealing upon them where only the foxes and the steppe-eagles
sought their prey amid the waving grasses. The Tartar auxiliaries gradually
dispersed and the famine-wasted troops of the Sultan re-embarked at Azov
without having encountered human enemies other than the skirmishing
bands of Tcherkess warriors who had harassed their retreat.
Permanently at war with Poland, never safe from the hostility of the Krim
Tartars, and threatened with the aggression of the great Mohametan power
of South-East Europe, Ivan seemed to find among his own subjects enemies
more punishable than any who menaced him from without. Moskva and
Aleksandrov had been the scene of many a nightmare deed of cruelty; many
an action of injustice and oppression had been perpetrated by the fiend-
hearted Opritchniki in the country districts; but now something on a larger
scale was to be attempted. The “episode of Novgorod,” one of the most
terrible events of a terrible reign, is introduced by some of the earlier
historians in a somewhat fantastic manner. One Petr, a native of Volhynia,
who had suffered for some offence at the hands of the Novgorodskie
authorities, revenged himself by calumniating the city rulers in the too
susceptible mind of the Tzar; his story was that a letter, addressed to
Sigismund-August, and signed by the Archbishop (Pimen) and the leading

inhabitants of the city, offering to transfer their allegiance to the Polish
monarch, had been hidden behind the image of the Mother-of-God in the
Sofia Cathedral at Novgorod, where it was eventually found by a
confidential agent dispatched by Ivan from Moskva.[155] Why a letter
intended for the King of Poland, and presumedly of some urgency, should
have been placed, and left, in such a curious position, is not very apparent.
That such treason was actually meditated is at least possible. Novgorod,
clinging to the memory of lost liberties and departed glories, may not
unnaturally have turned wistful eyes towards any protector who might save
her from a dynasty which, in the person of Ivan III., had wrought her such
lasting injury, and in the person of his grandson threatened her with further
oppressions. The morbidly suspicious mind of the Tzar would not be
without apprehension on this score, and in this case there is no reason to
presuppose that evidence, real or concocted, was an essential preliminary to
preventative action. In the autumn of 1569 the incriminating letter is said to
have been found. In December the Tzar, with the Tzarevitch Ivan, his
favourite boyarins, and an army of Opritchniki, set out on a punitive
expedition against Novgorod and the neighbouring towns. Like a python
encoiling its prey this strange peregrinating “bed of justice” moved towards
the devoted city, leaving an ugly streak of blood and desolation in its track.
Klin, a small township near Tver, was the starting-point of the red carnival.
What exact offence the inhabitants had committed in the eyes of their
sovereign it is impossible to say, since they could scarcely have been
suspected of complicity in the alleged treasonable correspondence with
Sigismund-August. The Tzar, however, let slip his “peculiars” on them, and
murder and pillage became the order of the day. “Houses and streets were
filled with corpses, and neither women nor children were spared.”[156]
Hence onward, at Tver, Torjhok, Gorodnya, and in all the villages as far as
lake Ilmen, the same scenes of blood and rapine were enacted; the roads
leading to Novgorod were strewn with dead bodies.[157] It was during this
grisly progress through the dark snow-swathed pine-forests, where the
ravens watched over the frozen corpses, and the wolves feasted on what the
Kromiesniki left behind them, that Maluta Skouratov turned aside to the
Otrotch monastery and transacted his business with the ex-Metropolitan
Filipp. Truly the frosts of winter seemed to have got into men’s blood and
all feelings of mercy and goodwill to have evaporated at the festivals of
Noel. To the Novgorodskie, awaiting the arrival of this dread visitation,

tidings kept pouring in which might well have roused them to the defiance
of despair, and armed them against their fate. The
Jan. 1570 Opritchniki had already drawn a cordon round the
slobodas and outskirts of the city, and were ransacking
the numerous monasteries which studded the sandy plain, putting to death
such of the inmates as showed the least sign of opposition. But there was no
Martha to organise resistance, no Mstislav the Brave to step in between
Novgorod and her doom. When Ivan, accompanied by his son, courtiers,
and a formidable body-guard of Strielitz, made his entry into the terror-
stricken city, he was met on the famous Volkhov bridge by the Vladuika
Pimen at the head of the clergy and principal citizens, with the cross and
sacred banners displayed. The miraculous ikon, which had repelled the
attack of the Souzdalskie besiegers, failed to turn the heart of the Tzar, and
the Archbishop’s quavering blessing was refused. Novgorod was given over
to slaughter and pillage and Pimen himself was spared only to perform
antics degrading alike to his manhood and his office. For six weeks the city
and its outskirts was a continued scene of confiscation and wholesale
execution; numbers of the inhabitants were flung into the Volkhov, at a
point near the bridge where its waters never freeze, and so many were
disposed of in this way that lake Ladoga is said to have been tainted by the
carrion. The total number of the victims has been variously computed,
contemporary accounts fixing the death-roll from 2770, “besides women
and common folk,” to the maximum and probably enormously exaggerated
figure of 60,000.[158] In a curious and appallingly suggestive register,
preserved at the Kirillov monastery, in which Ivan used to keep a reckoning
of his victims and apparently apprise his God of their dispatch, there is the
following entry: “O Lord! give peace to the souls of 1505 of Thy servants,
Novgorodians.”[159] The number of unburied corpses was sufficiently great
to cause a pestilence, which rounded off the Tzar’s act of vengeance. After
having denuded the celebrated Cathedral of its bells, vessels, ikons and
other treasures, and destroyed cattle, grain, and whatever could not be
conveniently carried off, Ivan called together the wretched remnant of the
citizens and graciously asked for their prayers on behalf of himself and his
family.
Then, in the middle of February, he departed towards Pskov, leaving the
silent city alone with its dead. A romantic, but not necessarily romancing,

element runs through the account of Ivan’s dealings with Pskov. Sharing in
the conjectural guilt for which Novgorod had been so mercilessly chastised,
the Tzar had devised for the city on the Peipus a similar punishment.
Halting at one of the monasteries without the walls, on the eve of his
intended assize, he was moved by hearing the bells of all the churches and
religious houses around toll at midnight, in funeral anticipation of the
threatened butchery. His feelings were still further worked upon by the
appearance on the scene of a local celebrity, one Nikolai, half-hermit, half-
charlatan, who offered him meat, and on being indignantly rebuked—it was
Lent—boldly accused the Tzar of feeding on human bodies. This stark,
uncanny being, in the vigorous words of Sir Jerome Horsey, an adventurous
Englishman who visited Moskovy several times in various capacities, “with
bold Imprecations and Exorcismes calling him Blood-sucker and Deuourer
of Christian flesh, swore by his Angell that hee should not escape death by a
present Thunderbolt, if he or any of his did touch the least childs haire in
that Citie.”[160] It is not improbable that this madman and fanatic may have
made a strong impression upon a kindred spirit, and the unusual occurrence
of a thunderstorm in February, which the chronicles relate, would have
added to the Tzar’s superstitious uneasiness. Of the existence of this
“sorcerer” Horsey gives evidence at first hand: “I saw this Impostor, a foule
creature; hee went naked Winter and Summer.... His Holinesse could not
endure me,” he adds, which, as the Englishman was openly sceptical as to
his supernatural powers, was not wonderful. Whatever may have influenced
the Tzar to an unwonted deviation into humanity, he suddenly stayed his
avenging hand and returned to Moskva with his Opritchniks, his Court, and
the captive Archbishop. That he was in any way satiated with cruelty does
not appear, as in the same year he treated the capital to a blood-carnival on
a grander scale than any it had yet witnessed. What gave added alarm to this
new reign of terror was that no one was safe from implication, for the
Tzar’s own seeming favourites and the most trusted of his creatures were
arrested one after the other. The Basmanovs, father and son, Viskovatui, the
Treasurer Founikov, Athanasie Viazemskie, Ivan Vorontzov, and scores of
other princes and boyarins were pounced upon and hurried off into safe
keeping, while sinister preparations went forward in the great square of the
Kitai-gorod. On the 25th July all was in readiness; eighteen gibbets and a
large cauldron suspended over a glowing furnace, with other implements of
punishment, met the Tzar’s eye as he rode with Maluta Skouratov and other

yet surviving favourites on to the scene of execution. But one important
item was lacking; where were the onlookers? The great square was
deserted, for the Moskvitchi had hidden themselves away from the alarming
spectacle which the Gosoudar had prepared for them; there was no knowing
where the matter would stop. Ivan sent his soldiers to summon his subjects
to the show, and even went in person to beat up the skulking citizens, who
flocked with quaking hearts to the various coigns of vantage round the Red
Place. The audience having been secured, the prisoners were marched out in
a long file to the scene of their punishment. The crowd, scanning the wan
faces of the victims, missed that of Viazemskie, who had died under torture,
and the Basmanovs were also absent. A crowning horror was reserved for
them. But see, the Tzar speaks. Raising his voice that all might hear, he
demanded of the people of Moskva if the tortures and executions they were
about to witness seemed to them just? They did, they did. No shred of hope
could the doomed men grasp from that hoarse murmur of servile
approbation. Like beaten gladiators, reading their fate in the upturned
thumbs and hard faces of the onlookers, they stood unfriended before that
vast multitude. I.H.S. has taken the place of the S.P.Q.R., but fifteen
hundred years have not materially removed Christian Moskva from the
ethic-level of pagan Rome. Up to the mounted monarch was led the first
victim, Viskovatui, whom Ivan accused of treasonable correspondence with
the King of Poland, with the Sultan, and with the Krim Khan, emphasising
his accusations by slashing the boyarin’s face with his whip. Bound,
gagged, and hung by the feet, he was forthwith hacked to pieces; Maluta
Skouratov, descending from his horse, sliced off an ear by way of a
beginning. Founikov was dispatched by alternate drenching with boiling
and iced water, and “expired in horrible torments.” Others, to the number of
about 200, were put to death in various manners, the Tzar himself having
the credit of impaling one old man on his lance.[161] On what evidence, if
any, these men were found guilty of treason and disloyalty it is impossible
to know, but this at least may be remarked, that, enjoying as they did the
Tzar’s favour and patronage, they had scarcely a motive for wishing to
overturn or undermine his authority. The executions on the Red Place,
renewed after an interval of a few days, were not the only outlet for the
monarch’s anger or blood-thirst; other evil deeds are related of this reign of
terror, this running amok of a human being among his unresisting fellows. It
was said that Ivan forced Thedor Basmanov, the “angel-faced,” to kill his

own father: a ghastly deed which did not save the perpetrator from a death
by torture, and which at least need not be unreservedly believed in. Torture
was also meted out to the widows of some of the most distinguished of the
victims of the Red Place, and eighty were said to have been flung into the
Moskva river. Such a glut of corpses defied expeditious or thorough burial,
and for many days and nights the inhabitants of that horror-haunted city
witnessed packs of dogs crunching and tearing human bones and flesh in
the dry ditches beneath the Kreml walls and in the open spaces of the Kitai-
gorod. Some of the bodies appear to have found their way into the tzarskie
fish-ponds, and carp and pike grew bloated on the rich banquet.[162] And
amid the gloom and stifled wailing the dread author of it all, the man of
terror and blood and punishments, prostrates himself daily in the holy
places, bumping his forehead on the pavement before the sacred ikons.
Splendid triumph of the Nazarene! Oh glorious irony! The great Orthodox
Tzar, conqueror of Kazan and Astrakhan and Polotzk, master of the lives
and liberties of his trembling subjects, bows in abject worship before the
picture of a woman and a little child.
Amid the seemingly indiscriminating severities with which Ivan cowed the
inhabitants of his principal cities, his mind was engaged in the conduct of a
dexterous and well-thought-out foreign policy. The same year that
witnessed the episode of Novgorod and the butchery in the Kitai-gorod was
signalised by a long-laboured truce (to run for three years) between
Moskovy and Poland. The growing expectancy of a
1570
vacancy of the Polish-Lit’uanian throne had no doubt
something to do with this reconciliation. That Ivan
seriously put himself forward as a candidate for that extremely limited and
curtailed monarchy seems to be the case, judging from the significant
instructions which his ambassadors received, to keep strict silence, when in
Poland, on the subject of the Tzar’s domestic tyrannies.[163] Equally
surprising, but nevertheless credit-worthy, the Tzar was not without a party
among the liberty and license-loving Polish nobles, many of whom,
particularly at Warszawa, were said to be adopting Moskovite costume in
view of a coming dynastic displacement. His adherents were chiefly among
the szlachta, or small nobility, who numbered in their ranks many of the
Reformed persuasion. At this period Protestants and Orthodox were lumped
together in Poland, under the common designation of Dissidents, and

suffered equally at the hands of the dominant Catholics. Hence many
members of the Diet were more alarmed at the prospect of an Austrian, or
other Jesuit-ridden king, than at the possible unmanageability of the
Moskovite Tzar. While awaiting the drift of events in Poland, Ivan set in
motion a course of action by which he hoped to drive the Swedes out of the
Baltic provinces. His idea was to enlist the sympathy and support of the
long-suffering Livlanders and Estlanders by setting up a puppet king who
should govern the old lands of the Bund, under the suzerainty of Moskva.
The title of King of Livland, offered, according to contemporary report,
successively to ex-Master von Fürstenberg and the Duke of Kourland (by
both of whom it was declined), was eventually accepted by the ambitious
but effete Magnus of Holstein, Duke of Oesel and Wiek. Magnus paid a
visit to Moskva—in some trepidation, for the city was
(1570) getting an unhealthy reputation—and returned with the
Tzar’s proclamation of his new dignity, backed up by
five-and-twenty thousand Russian troops. With this force and his own
German guards, the Holsteiner advanced upon Revel, which, however, held
out against both his wiles and his assaults; the latter he discontinued after a
siege of thirty weeks’ duration (16th March 1571), burning his camp-works
and withdrawing his army into quarters. This rebuff settled the fate of the
vassal “kingdom.” In another direction Ivan’s foreign policy had been
equally unsuccessful—in an attempt, namely, to cultivate friendly relations
with the Ottoman power. The embassy which he sent in 1570 to
Constantinople, to congratulate Sultan Selim on his accession, was coldly
received, and a demand put forward for the relinquishing of the Russian
sovereignty over Kazan and Astrakhan. The uneasiness which the Tzar felt
with regard to the possibility of a forward Mussulman movement was
increased by news which was brought to Moskva in the spring of 1571 of a
warlike activity among the Krimskie Tartars. Whether instigated by Turkish
influences, or by the anti-Moskovite party in Poland, or whether acting on
his own initiative, Devlet-Girei was certainly preparing for an inroad upon
Russian territory, and Ivan hastily assembled an army of 50,000 men, which
he posted, under the leadership of several voevodas, along the banks of the
Oka, where the enemy was expected to pass. The invading force, said to be
120,000 strong, eluded this first line of defence and bore straight upon
Moskva. The Tzar, who might with the forces at his disposal have held the
Tartars in check till the army of the Oka came up on their flank, fled, as his

father Vasili had done, as most of the Grand Princes of Moskva had from
time to time done under similar circumstances, and sheltered himself at
Rostov, leaving the capital to its fate. Weakened and dispirited by this
desertion, the force which had raced back from the Oka and arrived at much
the same time as the Krimskies made no attempt to defend the slobodas and
outlying quarters of the city, which were set on fire by the Khan’s orders.
Ignorant, probably, of the strength of the Russian garrison, and fearing to be
taken unawares by a reinforcement from the north, the Tartars made no
further move upon the city, and indeed the rapid spread of the flames made
pillage impossible. With the exception of the stone-built Kreml, nearly the
whole town was destroyed, and the loss of life, though probably
enormously exaggerated by contemporary writers, was undoubtedly very
great. “Then might you haue seene a lametable spectacle,” writes an
English traveller twenty years later, “... the people burning in their houses
and streates, but most of all such as laboured to passe out of the gates
farthest from the enemie, where meeting together in a mighty throng, and so
pressing euery man to preuent another, wedged themselves so fast within
the gate, and streates neare vnto it, as that three ranks walked one vpon the
others head, the vppermost treading downe those that were lower: so that
there perished at that time (as was sayd) by the fire and the presse, the
number of 800,000 people, or more.”[164] Or less. Another Englishman, Sir
Jerome Horsey, bears witness to the fact that numbers of the inhabitants,
plunging, with all their removable valuables, into the river, to escape from
the flames and the Tartars, sank beneath its waters, and that long after the
bodies had been disposed of, it was a fashionable amusement to drag the
river bed for submerged treasure, adding significantly, “I my selfe was
somewhat the better for that fishing.” Satisfied with the striking and easily-
accomplished chastisement which he had inflicted upon the half-dreaded,
half-despised enemy, the Khan withdrew his Hordes, carrying with him
immense numbers of captured Moskovites, and pursued at a safe distance
by the tzarskie voevodas. Ivan, returning to his desolated capital and
dreading a renewal of the struggle with an antagonist, formidable in himself
and possibly a forerunner of Turkish hostility, began to reckon on the
necessity of purchasing peace by the surrender of Astrakhan. While,
however, the victorious Tartar was plaguing him with taunting messages
and importunate demands, the Tzar diverted his mind to the consideration
of a more pleasing matter. His second wife Mariya had died in 1569, and he

had for some time contemplated a renewal of the marriage state. The
present seemed to him a good opportunity for carrying out his project, and
the usual preliminaries were set in motion. The selection of a mate for the
Russian Gosoudars was conducted on a thoroughly democratic principle,
and any young woman of healthy and pleasing appearance might aspire to
the honour of becoming Tzaritza. On this occasion over 2000 of the likeliest
maidens of Moskovy were brought to the Aleksandrovskie Sloboda, and the
Court doctors and midwives helped the monarch to make his choice, which
fell upon a young girl of Novgorod, Martha Sobakin. Either the work of
selection was badly done, or the Tzar was particularly unfortunate, or the
bride met with foul play, for she died before the marriage ceremonies were
well through. Needless to state the thwarted widower inclined to the last
alternative, and several persons were put to death on suspicion. The proverb
“one funeral makes many” certainly applies to the decease of a Tzaritza in
sixteenth-century Moskva. A batch of boyarins and voevodas were ordered
to execution the same winter (1571), on the charge of having been in league
with the Tartars, and doubtless some such suspicion was a deciding factor in
Ivan’s supine flight before the invaders. Some were impaled, others knouted
to death, others poisoned.[165]
Whether this sanguinary example had the effect of encouraging “les
autres,” or whether the damage sustained by Moskva from the Tartar brands
stung the Russians to exceptional effort, a renewal of the invasion by the
Khan met with a determined and successful opposition.
Aug. 1572
An enormous army of Krim and Nogai Tartars,
reinforced by troops of Yeni-Tscheri and other Turkish
soldiers, pushed across the Oka, but was encountered and decisively
defeated by a Moskovite force of inferior numbers, under the command of
Kniaz Vorotinski and Ivan Sheremetiev. The slaughter was heavy and the
issue of the day swept away all question of withdrawal from Astrakhan, and
gave Moskovy a long immunity from trouble with the steppe-folk. Ivan,
who, while the attack threatened, had been seized with a desire to visit the
northern districts of his dominions, returned from Novgorod to share in the
general rejoicing. In the early part of the year he had scandalised and
embarrassed the heads of the Church by taking unto himself a fourth wife,
Anna Koltovskoi; after having accomplished this breach of the Church’s
law he still further disturbed the spiritual fathers by announcing his sin to
the Synod then sitting for the election of a Metropolitan in the place of

Kirill, deceased, and demanding absolution. The Vladuikas, torn between
love for their precious dogmas and a natural and earnest desire to fall in
with the Tzar’s wishes, yielded finally to the stronger sentiment and
hallowed the union. In order to prevent other less privileged persons from
imitating the Tzar’s example, they hastened to “menace with a fulminating
anathema those who should dare to enter into a fourth marriage.” Antonie,
Archbishop of Polotzk, was elected Metropolitan.
While Moskva was yet quaking in anticipation of another visit from Devlet-
Girei, an anxiously awaited event had taken place in the grand-duchy of
Lit’uania. At Knyszyn, near Grodno, on the 7th July,
1570 had passed away the amiable Sigismund-August, “last
of the Yagiellos.” Instantly the states composing the
Polish kingdom were plunged into the modified anarchy of an interregnum,
and various aspirants to the kingly title, starting suddenly into the
foreground, added to the general confusion. The internal differences which
complicated the election of a successor to the defunct monarch were
succinctly stated in the correspondence of a French diplomat, who informed
his Court “there are four sorts of discords and different principles which
greatly retard the election, which are: of the Lit’uanians with the Poles, of
Great Poland with Little Poland, of the barons with the rest of the nobility,
and of the Catholics with the Protestants.”[166] The faction of the Szlachta,
or small landowners, was more or less identical with the Great-Poland
party, while Little Poland was the stronghold of the higher magnates; this
line of demarcation was further accentuated by the personal rivalry of
Uchanski, Archbishop of Gniezno, who led the former party, and Firley,
Grand Marshal of the realm, who headed the other. Add to this the fact that
the Protestants were divided into more or less hostile camps of Lutherans,
Calvinists, and Anabaptists, and a fair idea will be gathered of the field
wherein the agents of the several candidates were to ply their arts. Of the
princes who placed themselves, or were placed, in competition for the
throne of the Yagiellos, the one whose claims stood forth most prominently
was the Austrian Archduke Ernst, second son of the Emperor (Maximilian
II.). The Habsburgs, who had already absorbed Bohemia and were almost as
firmly established in that part of Hungary which was not occupied by the
Turks, had on every possible occasion contracted matrimonial alliances
with the Polish royal House, and hoped to add the Lekh kingdom to their
family dominions. The candidature of the Archduke was backed by the

imperial influence and had, moreover, the support of the Papacy, whose
agent, Cardinal Commendone, was working to secure his election. On the
other hand there were considerations which made his success by no means a
foregone conclusion; the great body of the Protestants would unite in
objecting to a monarch whose family traditions were bound up with Roman
Catholic supremacy, and many of the Poles were apprehensive that an
Austrian connection would involve them in a war with Turkey, a thing they
were particularly anxious to avoid. Above all, he personified German
intrusion, an element naturally distasteful to the Polish national spirit. The
same dread of a foreign war which weakened the chances of the Archduke
was the strongest factor, especially with the Lit’uanians, in advancing the
Moskovite candidature. The term of truce had nearly run out and Ivan had
clearly let it be understood that an unfriendly election would mean renewal
of war. That the Tzar, as sovereign, might be a worse affliction than as a
hostile neighbour was a contingency partly provided for by the jealous
restrictions of the Pacta conventa, which he would be required to sign
preliminary to his coronation. The idea of the Moskovite party in Lit’uania
was, however, to elect the weak and more easily handled Thedor, Ivan’s
second son, rather than the father. None of the Protestant princes who put
themselves forward—John, King of Sweden (brother-in-law of the late
Sigismund-August), Stefan Batory, Voevoda of Transylvania, and the young
Duke Albrecht-Freidrich of Prussia—were strong enough to command the
confidence even of their co-religionists. A further candidate there was,
however, from an unexpected quarter. Henri de Valois, Duke of Anjou,
brother to his Most Christian Majesty of France, and favourite son of
Catherine de Medici, was a young gentleman who was casting about in
various directions for an opening suitable for the development of his
ambitions, and whose relations and acquaintances were exceedingly
desirous to see him settled. Charles IX. was anxious to have this too
brilliant brother removed to any sphere other than the kingdom of France,
already in a sufficiently electric condition, a wish which was shared by
Coligny and the Huguenots; while Catherine nursed the proud hope of
seeing all her sons decorated with the kingly title. Monsieur himself was
least enamoured of the project. From the Polish point of view he made an
ideal candidate; belonging to a powerful House, which was neither German
nor Moskovite, he was strong without being dangerous, and the good
understanding which existed between the Louvre and the Porte would be an

excellent guarantee for immunity from Turkish aggression. Nor was the
Catholic bias of the Valois an insuperable obstacle to his election. The
Prince who hunted Huguenots with such apparent zeal had in his boyhood
dallied with the principles of the Reformation, and in later life seriously
considered the project of placing himself at the head of the Protestants of
the Low Countries.[167] He was in fact a thorough opportunist, and would
probably hold, like his namesake of Navarre, in similar though reversed
circumstances, that a kingdom outweighed the significance of a mass. His
interests were actively pushed by the ambassador dispatched from France
for that purpose, Jean de Montluc, Bishop of Valence, and the hesitancy of
the Emperor and uncompromising attitude of the Tzar smoothed the way for
his election. The news of the “happy and holy enterprise,” which had been
carried to a successful conclusion in the streets of Paris in the small hours
of the 24th August, was not received in Poland with the same complacency
with which it was hailed at Rome, and the French candidature received a
severe check. For months the name of the Duke of Anjou was in evil odour
among the electors, and the sleepless efforts of Montluc were directed to the
task of whitewashing his employer from the red stain of S. Bartholomew.
The long-drawn-out proceedings which delayed the Diet of election, and
which gave Poland an entirely new constitution, altering the whole course
of her history, also gave time for the feeling against the Valois to die down;
the French agents made good use of the respite and the Anjou cause steadily
gained fresh adherents, till on the eve of the election scarcely any other
candidate was seriously considered. Thus it came to
1573
pass that, by an irony of fate, the stormy sittings of the
Diet of Warszawa, which lasted for the greater part of
April and May, resulted in bestowing the Polish crown on the prince who,
of all the competitors, least coveted it. And in fact the hotly-contested prize,
as it came out of the long interregnum, was scarcely a brilliant possession;
“it was not the heritage of the Yagellos intact that the Bishop of Valence
would have to take back to the brother of Charles IX., but a crown
despoiled of a part of its privileges, and, under the title of king, nothing in
truth more than the life-presidency of a republic.”[168] The terms of the
celebrated Pacta conventa, to which every succeeding king would be
required to give his adhesion, were, among others, that the king should have
no voice in the election of a successor; must respect the religious liberty of
the Dissidents; must neither undertake a war nor impose taxes without

consent of Diet; nor marry nor divorce a wife without the same sanction;
and that no foreigners should hold any public office.
A throne pent in with such conditions would scarcely be attractive in the
eyes of the tyrant of Moskva, and Ivan seems to have used his influence less
to promote the candidature of himself or his son than to secure the election
of the Austrian Archduke. That he should be anxious to have the Empire for
a near neighbour might appear strange; his real concern was lest a good
understanding between a Franco-Polish King and the Sultan should lead to
his own undoing. It was perhaps, however, an indirect effect of the
influences of the free election on the banks of the Vistula that led the Tzar
to disband his feared and hated Opritchniks (1572). While the Poles were
yet in the throes of settling the procedure of their Congress, Ivan took
advantage of the settled state of affairs in his own dominions and the
embarrassed condition of his neighbours to make a further attack on the
Swedish garrisons in Estland. With an army of 80,000 men he burst into a
land whose inhabitants were complacently engaged in celebrating the
festival of Christmas week, and changed the scenes of carol and carousal
into those of litany and desolation. Wittenstein was captured after a brief
resistance, during which the Tzar’s abiding favourite, Maluta Skouratov,
lost his life. His fall was avenged, according to the Livlandish chronicles,
by a holocaust of the prisoners, Swedes and Germans, who were burned
alive on a pile of faggots.[169] A fit and seemly deed, if true, for the man
who had exchanged with the Emperor Maximilian sentiments of pious
horror at the affair of S. Bartholomew. Further Moskovite successes, and
one of those wordy correspondences in which the Tzar revelled, were
followed by a curious truce with Sweden, to run for two years (July 1575 to
July 1577), and limited in scope as well as in duration, since it was only to
effect a suspension of arms between the neighbouring provinces of
Novgorod and Finland. Estland was still to be disputed at the sword’s point.
For mysterious reasons of his own—possibly to lull German and Danish
susceptibilities—Ivan continued to place Magnus of Holstein, his vassal
“King,” in the forefront of his Baltic policy, and the unwilling Princeling
was carried off to Moskva to be solemnly wedded to Mariya, daughter of
Vladimir Andreivitch. Having made her an orphan the Tzar might well
think it incumbent on him to provide her with a husband, but Magnus was
scarcely overjoyed with a dowry of some inconsiderable presents and the
government of the township of Karkus—to which dimensions his kingdom

had shrunk. The campaign in the Baltic debatable lands
1575-6 resulted in a further strengthening of the Russian
foothold in that quarter; Pernau was stormed and taken
with a loss of 7000 men; Helmet, Ermes, and other places in Livland
surrendered to Ivan’s voevodas, and the stronghold of Habsal, in Estland,
fell into their hands. From his western neighbours the Tzar had met with no
opposition in his sea-ward course; the Poles, after the prolonged and
elaborate labours of their king-choosing, had been again confronted, under
extraordinary circumstances, with the dangers and difficulties of an
interregnum. Never more than half reconciled to the eastern exile which his
restricted Polish sovereignty entailed, Henri de Valois no sooner heard that
he had succeeded to the crown of S. Louis (his brother had died on the 30th
May 1574) than he fled precipitately from the kingdom over which he had
reigned for barely seven months. Once more the shadow of the Habsburg
loomed over the land, and there seemed indeed no suitable candidate with
which to oppose the Austrian nomination. The Papal, Imperial, and
Moskovite influence, as well as that of the Archbishop of Gniezno and the
principal senators, pointed in the same direction; the Szlachta alone held out
against the Archduke and his father. The Habsburg hopes were destined,
however, to be again falsified, and a new rival sprang up against them in
Stefan Batory, Voevoda of Transylvania. This vigorous prince, whose high
qualities had secured him his sovereignty on the death of the last of the
Zapolya dynasty, speedily became the favoured choice of the Szlachta and
Dissident party, and, as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, his election would
guarantee the Poles from Turkish hostility. On the other hand they were
threatened with the Tzar’s displeasure if they did not elect either
Maximilian or his son, the Archduke. To the Poles, if not to the Lit’uanians,
the Moskovite was a lesser bugbear than the Turk, and the popular vote was
for Batory. The Archbishop and the Senate adhered to the Austrian cause,
and the Diet (held at Warszawa, December 1575) resulted in a double
election. The battle was not necessarily to the strong, but the race was
undoubtedly to the swift; in April of the following year the dilatory
Habsburg wrote to inform his brother of Moskva that “we, in December
last, with great glory and honour, were elected to the kingdom of Poland
and grand duchy of Lit’uania.” Ivan replied to Maximilian that he
congratulated him on his election, but had since learned that Stefan Batory
was at Krakow, crowned, and married to the Princess Anne Yagiello (sister

of Sigismund-August). Stefan had shown as much hurry to arrive in his
kingdom as Henri had displayed in escaping from it, and his accession was
an accomplished fact; the death of the Emperor in the ensuing October
removed the chance of a civil contest. The new King,
1576 though brought up under Catholic influences, was
supposed at the time of his candidature to be of the
Protestant communion; he adapted his religion, however, to harmonise with
that of the majority of his subjects, and of the wife whom it was politically
expedient he should marry, and during his reign was the protector of the
Jesuit party in Poland.[170] To Ivan and to Russia his elevation boded
trouble, and the Tzar appears to have realised the danger and to have taken
a bold but well-considered step to meet it. While Stefan was engaged in
breaking down the armed resistance of the burghers of Dantzig, who would
have none of him, the forces of Moskovy were sent in overwhelming
strength into the Baltic provinces, and stronghold after stronghold wrested
from Swede and Pole alike. Even the Holsteiner and German troops were
treated as enemies—Duke Magnus was in temporary disgrace—and the
country-folk were in some instances punished with brutal severity, flogged,
burned alive, and in other ways made to suffer for the obstinate resistance
of a foreign garrison. As a display of armed strength and resolution the
campaign would have been valuable had it been followed up by a demand
for a definite peace with Poland, coupled with a threat of immediate
invasion of that country. Ivan had sufficient troops at his disposal to have
overrun Kourland and parts of Lit’uania and to have forced peace or an
unseasonable war upon Stefan. Instead of which, after having roused
against himself the enmity of all the interests involved in the mastership of
the disputed provinces—Swede, Pole, Dane, and German—he suspended
hostilities and returned to Moskva, there to renew the bloody process by
which he periodically thinned out his circle of boyarins and courtiers.
Mikhail Vorotinski, the conqueror of Devlet-Girei, and
1577
one of the most illustrious of the Russian voevodas,
was tortured nigh unto death on a charge of sorcery, and
died while being conveyed to Bielozero. Leonidas, successor to Pimen in
the archiepiscopate of Novgorod, was sewn up in a bear-skin and worried to
death by hounds. Other noted Moskovites were executed in various
manners at the same period. While the Tzar’s seemingly blind rage was
striking down some of his most capable voevodas, his adversary was

straining every nerve to ensure success in the coming struggle. Drawing as
exhaustively as was prudent on the resources of his kingdom and grand
duchy, Stefan at the same time applied for external support in many
directions; from Transylvania came troops, from Brandenburg cannon, from
Sweden active co-operation, while the Pope and Sultan individually blessed
the enterprise. In August 1579 the storm burst; the King, having formally
declared war on Ivan, marched upon Polotzk, and the decisive moment had
arrived when it would be seen whether the new-grown Russian
gosoudarstvo would be able to maintain its high-water mark of western
expansion, or whether all it had gained during the embarrassments and
weakness of its neighbours would be lost at the first recoil. The composite
army of Stefan probably consisted of better fighting material than any the
Tzar could send against him, but the advantage of numbers and resources
lay overwhelmingly with the Moskovite. Allowing for the large detachment
which it was necessary to keep in the neighbourhood of the Oka to guard
the capital from a possible Tartar attack, Ivan had still sufficient forces
wherewith to have returned again and again to the relief of Polotzk, and to
have extended the war at the same time into undefended parts of Lit’uania
and Polish Livland. This plan was indeed partially put into operation;
20,000 Asiatic horsemen were dispatched into Kourland, and
reinforcements were sent to the Russian garrisons in Livland and
Ingermanland (which was threatened by the Swedes). But the scheme of
campaign stopped short at this point; the constitutional timidity of
Moskovite war policy asserted itself, and Ivan remained with the bulk of his
army in deplorable inactivity at Pskov, while Polotzk and the neighbouring
stronghold of Sokol, bravely defended but perseveringly attacked, fell into
the hands of the invader. The harrying of the provinces of Sieversk and
Smolensk wound up the Polish campaign for the year. Accustomed to
winter warfare, the light troops of Moskovy might have taken advantage of
the cold season to have inflicted retributive damage on their enemies, but
the Tzar, thoroughly alarmed at the military vigour of this upstart opponent,
wasted his opportunity in fruitless negotiations and in soft answers which
failed to turn away wrath. Stefan, having allayed the grumblings of his
barely tractable subjects, marched in the ensuing summer against Velikie-
Louki, which, after a spirited defence, was carried on the 5th September.
Throughout the winter the war continued in the Baltic
1580 lands, where Poles, Swedes, and Danes—Magnus had

early thrown off his allegiance to Moskva—captured several places from
the Russians. Ivan, who had retired to the gloomy sanctuary of his beloved
Aleksandrov, continued his proposals for peace in a correspondence with
Stefan, which gradually assumed an angrier tone. “Man of blood!” breaks
forth this astonishing letter-writer, “remember that there is a God.”
Amid the troubles pressing upon him from without, the sovereign still
found time for marrying and giving in marriage. The
(1575) bride for whose espousal he had obtained the
dispensation of the Church had proved sterile, at least
she had not increased his family, and she was, like his father’s first wife,
dispatched to a convent, while another Anna replaced her; on this occasion
the episcopal blessing was not asked for. Now, while
1580 the flames of disastrous war were blazing over the lands
which a century of patient effort had reclaimed from the
west, Ivan celebrated at Aleksandrov his nuptials with Mariya, daughter of
the boyarin Thedor Nagoi, and those of his second son, Thedor, with Irena,
sister of the voevoda Boris Godounov.
The insatiate Stefan continued to employ both pen and sword against his
hard-pressed adversary. In a letter rejecting Ivan’s renewed offers of peace,
with which he prefaced a new campaign, he taunted the Tzar with his ill-
sitting correctitude; “You reproach me with having mutilated the dead; it is
false, but certain is it that you torture the living.” Entering thoroughly into
the style and spirit of Ivan’s controversial essays, he further recommended
him to re-read the fiftieth Psalm in order to acquaint himself with the duty
of a Christian. The Tzar had found his match.

As in the two preceding years, the month of August
1581 brought with it Batory, thundering his cannon this time
against the walls of Pskov. The reputation of the great
captain had drawn to him warriors from many lands, and the white-eagle
standard flapped in the van of an army, 100,000 strong, mustering in its
ranks Poles, Letts, Magyars, Austrians, Kourlanders, Prussians, Lubeckers,
Danes, and Scots. The ancient city on the Peipus shore, which for many a
stormy hundred years had been a bulwark of the Russian land against the
aggressions of the west folk, opposed a heroic resistance to the mighty
efforts which were made for its subjection, and the flood of Polish conquest
received a timely check. The stupor of fear and helplessness which seemed
to have settled down on the Tzar and his voevodas neutralised to a great
extent the effect of this stubborn defence; the Swedes captured Habsal,
Narva, and other places of less importance in Estland, and later, led by de la
Gardie, one of those brilliant soldiers with whom France periodically
fascinated the world, penetrated into Russian territory and took Ivangorod,
Yam, and Kopor’e. Soon after these disasters Ivan
Jan. 1582 effected a ten years’ truce with Batory, a composition
being brought about largely by the diplomatic efforts of
Pope Gregory XIII., who was fascinated, as many an astute Pontiff had
been, with the prospect of alluring Russia into the Catholic fold. The terms
of the truce were ruinously disadvantageous to the gosoudarstvo, and Ivan
could scarcely have been forced to sacrifice more if he had staked and lost a
series of pitched battles against his foe. Velikie-Louki was restored to him,
but Polotzk remained in the hands of the victors, and Livland, snatched
piecemeal from the Teutonic knights and contested inch by inch for a
quarter of a century, was yielded at one wrench to Poland. The patient and
persistent efforts of a long reign, the dogged struggle towards the shores of
the Baltic and free intercourse with Western Europe, were relinquished as
the price of a temporary and uncertain peace, and the Moskovite Empire
was thrown back upon itself, like a conquered Titan thrust down into his
chasm. And in another direction Ivan had with his own hand fatally
shattered, in a fit of unrestrained passion, the dynastic hopes and strivings
which had been advanced and safeguarded with such ruthless severities.
Side by side with the gloomy Tzar in his later years, partaker of his
amusements and debauches, sharer of his labours of State, had grown up the
young Ivan Ivanovitch, designed to carry on the holy line of Moskva when

his father should be no more. And in one respect at least he had shown
himself an apt pupil; he had already married three wives “without having
been a widower.”[171] It was no part of the Moskovite theory of government
that the Princes of the Blood should expose their sacred persons in the
forefront of their country’s battles, and the young Ivan does not appear to
have departed from the prevailing custom of passive aloofness; the
humiliations and losses which the Russian State was suffering at the hands
of Batory stung the Tzarevitch, however, into a desire to show a bolder
front to the oppressor, and he requested his father to let him lead an army to
the relief of Pskov, then the centre-point of the Polish attack. A natural and
proper request, under the circumstances, but to the suspicion-haunted old
Tzar, on that fatal November day, it was the bursting-in of the dreaded
summons, “the younger generation knocking at the door.” Wildly he
accused his son of desiring to supplant him, wildly struck at him with his
terrible iron-tipped staff; Boris Godounov, rushing in to save the Tzarevitch,
received most of the blows, but one had crashed upon the youth’s head,
which would never now wear the crown of all the Russias. The heavy thuds
suddenly ceased and a wail of anguish rang through the silent palace:
“Unhappy me, I have killed my son!” The terrified attendants, rushing into
the chamber, found the wretched father weeping over the body of the dying
Tzarevitch. In one moment of blind fury the primeval ape-instinct had
leaped forth and had destroyed the weaving and toiling of a lifetime of
specialised effort. Ivan Ivanovitch died a few days later (19th November
1581) from the effects of the blow, and Greek monks at Constantinople,
Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria chanted subsidised prayers for the
repose of his soul. As in the preceding generation, the next heir (Thedor)
[172]
was a weakling, and the Tzar’s mad act had opened up the possibility
of his throne passing to one of the boyarin families upon whose repression
so much savage ingenuity had been expended. The dreary outlook with
which the old man was confronted may have largely influenced his supine
surrender to Polish demands, and the equally humiliating truce with
Sweden, effected a year later, by the terms of which not only Estland, but
Narva, Ivangorod, Yam, and Kopor’e were left in the possession of the
victors. Moskovy was still further shut in from the sea,
1583 and the Peipus, which had been a Russian lake, became
a natural barrier between three converging monarchies.
One ray of success and aggrandisement pierced through the miasma gloom

that shrouded the Moskovite land and gathered thickest around the tzarskie
palace. In the last quarter of a century which had witnessed the opening up
of far scarce-dreamt-of regions by daring European explorers, the century
of Cortez and Pizarro, of the bold sea-captains who shed lustre on “the
spacious days of great Elizabeth,” the Russian Tzarstvo was swollen by the
haphazard conquest of the vast Sibirian “province;” a province which
“comprises about a thirteenth part of the globe, and is almost 3,000,000
square miles larger than the whole of Russia in Europe, including both
Poland and Finland.”[173] Nor was this huge region of the north, this “land
of the long nights,” as the Chinese had called it in the remote past of their
history, a barren and unprofitable possession; mines of salt, copper, and
silver, forests stocked with valuable fur-bearing animals, and watered by
navigable rivers and large fish-yielding lakes, and in some districts tracts of
fertile arable land, compensate for the awful desolation which spreads over
the greater part of it during the long winter. For many centuries the
Russians had tapped at the outer fringe of this unexplored wilderness, and
the enterprising folk of Novgorod had brought some of its produce into
their markets; the later Grand Princes had put forward claims to a shadowy
sovereignty over the principality or khanate of Sibir (a town on the Irtuish),
and Ivan himself had kept an eye on this ultima Thule of the Moskovite
forests. The Stroganovs, descendants of a merchant family of Tartar
extraction who had settled in the oblast of Perm, were granted powers of
administration over as much territory as they could reclaim from the tribes
on their frontier, and a system of patient pioneering was carried on for some
twenty years. The happy idea of utilising the restless military energies of
the Don Kozaks, who were a scourge alike to their Tartar and Russian
neighbours, in more thoroughly exploiting the Sibirian country, occurred to
the administrators of the Moskovite outpost; an invitation was sent to a
band of these freebooters, who had made their own country too hot to hold
them, to turn their weapons against the “infidels” who were resisting the
encroachments of the White-Russian traders. The
1579
Kozaks, headed by a chief named Ermak, responded
readily to an offer which promised them full indulgence
of their fighting and marauding instincts, with the additional advantage of
official sanction. They were outlaws most of them, and would have been
put to lingering deaths if they had strayed into the clutches of Moskva, and
the Tzar was highly scandalised at their employment in his service; he

showed himself, however, to be of a forgiving disposition when, with a few
hundred followers, the intrepid Ermak had conquered for him the vast
north-eastern province. The Kozak chief, still
1581 struggling to hold and extend the territories he had won,
received as a mark of Ivan’s approval a cuirass which
had once adorned the monarch’s person. As if symbolical of the ruin which
so often attended the Tzar’s favour, the present was the contributing cause
of Ermak’s destruction; plunging one night into the waters of the Irtuish, to
escape from a surprise attack of his enemies, the weight of the armour bore
him down, and he sank in the icy flood. Ivan’s reign had opened
auspiciously with the conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan; it closed with the
acquisition of Sibiria, by which Russia made her first giant stride into Asia.
Amid the state and domestic troubles which shadowed
Oct. 1583
the Tzar’s old age, and while he was endeavouring to
bring about a marriage between himself and one of the
English aristocracy (Lady Mary Hastings), the woman who was still his
wife presented him with another Dimitri—a puny princeling, born surely in
an evil hour, whose ghost was to haunt the land for many a woeful year. A
few months later Ivan’s health began to fail, and when, from the Red
Staircase of the great palace at Moskva, he observed a comet in the winter
sky “of which the tail had the form of a cross,” he beheld in it the presage
of his death. Sickening rapidly, he expired somewhat abruptly, while
engaged in a game of chess with one of his courtiers, on the 18th March
1584.
The great death-dealing Tzar was dead himself at last, the child that had
been so fervently prayed for had gone back, in the fulness of his years,
whence he had come. They tonsured the grim corpse that frightened them
still, and called it Jonah, in the name of the Kirillov monastery; but they
buried it as the Orthodox Tzar, Ivan Vasilievitch, in the Cathedral of
Mikhail the Archangel, amid the striking of the great bells of the Kreml and
the sobs and lamentations of the people.
Among Russian historians Ivan IV. has found apologists as well as writers
who have held him up to execration and condemned his statecraft and his
cruelties alike. Even while examining critically the evidence against him on
the latter score, the result arrived at is that he was probably as “terrible” as
he is painted. Chronicles and historical accounts were still largely in

ecclesiastical hands, and scant justice would be done to the memory of a
man who had married six or seven wives. The Church might forgive his
hates, but never his loves. Nor can the evidence of Kourbski be accepted as
unbiassed in the matter of Ivan’s character. Other contemporary witnesses
there are, however, whose testimony points in the same direction, and who
were in no way interested in libelling the Tzar. Horsey, who was on terms of
good fellowship with him, wrote, “The Emperour liueth in feare, daily
discouers Treasons, and spends much time in torturing and execution.” A
Venetian attached to the Polish Embassy at Moskva in 1570 described the
Tzar as “the greatest tyrant who has ever existed,” and mentions a
delinquent voevoda being thrown to a savage bear, “kept for that purpose.”
The cruelties and oppressions practised by the Russian monarch were
widely commented on during both the Polish elections, and the reports
largely militated against his candidature. Finally the document in the
Kirillov monastery, in which the Tzar complacently prays for the souls of
3470 of his victims, would, if authentic, show that the extent at least of his
executions has not been exaggerated. Nor is this gloating savagery, blended
as it was with a rational and understandable policy, difficult to comprehend.
Ivan the Terrible was the outcome of a long line of Moskovite princes, men
who had been actuated by one ruling idea, which idea was in him so
developed and specialised that he was nothing short of a monomaniac. The
idea was that Moskovy, and God, and Gosoudar were scarcely
distinguishable entities, bound up in indissoluble bonds. With the
substitution of other countries, other sovereigns in other days have fallen
into the same confusion. Jealous, awe-inspiring, pain-inflicting, terrible—
such was the conception of a God among peoples in most parts of the
world, such was the character which came naturally to the holy, Orthodox,
Moskva-bred Tzar. The religious side of Ivan’s nature was always
prominent; his prostrations in the churches, his zeal in monastic regulations,
the pious reflections which formed so remarkable a part of his
correspondence, the solemn forebodings over Kourbski’s soul, were all
indications of a mind steeped in dogmatic belief.
Grim and dreary, mean and monstrous, as the Moskovy of this period
seems, with its Aleksandrovskie sloboda, its gibbets, axes, impalements,
and boiling cauldrons, its man-devouring hounds and blood-splashed bear-
dens, its Kromiesniki and dumb driven population, its gutters running red
and carp growing bloated on human flesh, and above all, everywhere, those

glittering crosses; yet not in Eastern Europe alone could “such things be.” A
brilliant writer, drawing his materials from the history of mediæval Italy
both before and after the Renaissance, has “pictured the awful and beautiful
forms of those whom vice and blood and weariness had made monstrous or
mad: Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife, and painted her lips with a
scarlet poison that her lover might suck death from the dead thing he
fondled; ... Gian Maria Visconti, who used hounds to chase living men, and
whose murdered body was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved
him; ... Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of
death, and who had a passion for red blood as other men have for red wine;
... Sigismondo Malatesta, ... the Lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at
Rome as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a
napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d’Este in a cup of emerald;”[174] ...
these examples, garnered from one corner of Western Europe, show that
humanity and inhumanity are sometimes convertible terms under sunny
Italian skies, as well as amid dark pine-forests and snow-piled wastes. The
century which produced the Moskovy of Ivan the Terrible was not barren of
sinister deeds in other parts of Christendom, and Russia was at least free,
perhaps by very reason of its stifling autocracy, from the horrors which
attended the great religious upheaval in the West; when Paris and the
French provinces were glutted with Huguenot blood; when Alva was
dealing out “confiscation, imprisonment, exile, torture, and death” to the
Protestants of the Netherlands; when the Calvinists of Geneva were burning
Servetus alive for “heresy” and roasting men and women to death for
“witchcraft”; when Calvin himself was suggesting to the Lord Protector
Somerset that both Catholics and Protestant sectaries “alike well deserve to
be repressed by the sword”; and when, in Northern Germany, banishment
and—in the case of the Chancellor Crell—the scaffold were being
employed by the Lutherans to stamp out Calvinism.
S. Solov’ev, E. A. Solov’ev, Polevoi, Schiemann, Karamzin,
Pember.