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. [Sidenote: 1471]

Bitter were the terms to which the Novgorodskie had to submit: a fine

of 15,000 roubles, the surrender of several contested dependencies, the

payment of a tribute to Moskva, an engagement to hold no intercourse

with the King of Poland or the Metropolitan of Kiev or any of the Grand

Prince’s enemies, the annulment of the acts of the Vetché, and the

recognition of Ivan as appeal judge in their civic litigation. Velikie

Novgorod had found her master.

The next and most important event of an important reign was produced

by an outside circumstance. The tidal wave of Islam which had swept

over the cradle of the Orthodox faith, had also cut short the sphere of

Papal influence, and threatened to make still further inroads on the

Catholic lands of South-Eastern Europe. As Venice mourned her damaged

trade so Rome sighed over her abbreviated authority and diminished

Peter’s Pence. Pope after Pope cast anxious eyes around the sovereigns

of Christendom to discover a possible champion against the Turk; but

the days of the Crusades were over. One card there remained for the

Vatican to play. Brought up in dependence on the Papal Court, and in

conformity with the Latin faith, were the heritors of the dead empire;

Sophie Paleologus and her two brothers, children of Thomas, brother of

the last Emperor, were, body and soul, at the disposal of the Pope

(Paul II.). Of the young Princes obviously nothing could be made, but

by proclaiming Sophie as heiress of Constantinople a husband might be

found for her who would be willing to break a lance with Mahomet for

the possession of his wife’s inheritance. Ivan of Moskva, whose remote

ancestors had turned their eyes so persistently towards the Tzargrad,

seemed a likely candidate for the hand of the orphan exile, and an

embassy from Paul sounded the Grand Prince on the subject. Ivan, whose

first wife, Mariya of Tver, had died in 1467, lent favourable ear to

the suggestion, and matters were satisfactorily arranged between the

high contracting parties. The question of religion does not appear to

have been raised as an obstacle, either by Paul or Sixtus IV., who

succeeded to the Papal throne while the negotiations were proceeding.

Whether Ivan’s ambassadors threw dust in the eyes of the Pontiffs,

whether the latter hoped to win him, by means of his bride, over to the

Latin faith, or whether the driving out of the Turk was for the moment

more important than the genesis of the Holy Ghost, it is difficult to

determine, but the betrothal was accomplished with the full blessing of

the Church. Of Sophie the information available is curiously unequal,

detailed on some points, vague to blankness on others. That, according

to the chronicles, she charmed all beholders with her presence--a

habit common with princesses--must be dispassionately compared with

a contemporary Italian account, which likened her to a disgusting

mountain of fat. That she left the Eternal City under the wing of the

Pope’s legate; that she passed through Viterbo and Sienna; that the

council of the latter city voted, by 124 voices to 42, fifty florins

to defray the cost of her reception; that she made her way through

Bologna and Nürnberg to Lubeck, and thence by sea to Revel; that she

was well received at Pskov, and also at Novgorod, at which place the

old bell of Yaroslav might yet salute the honoured guest; all this

may be gathered from the records of the past.[94] Reared amid the

warm and stately cities of Italy, with fond remembrance of the lost

glories of Constantinople, there was much that must have seemed

strange and wild, perhaps desolate, in the long sledge journey through

the unending snow-choked forests towards Moskva; Moskva, which, even

in its winter mantle, would compare but meagrely with most of the

cities the traveller had passed through. For in those days and at that

moment, with its cathedral in ruins, its buildings insignificant, and

its limits eked out with meadows and copses, the capital of the grand

principality did not make a very brave show.[95] The solemnity of

her reception was marred by an awkward incident, which showed that,

however the case might be at Rome, inter-Christian bitterness still

ruled strong at Moskva. The legate, it was understood, not content

with flaunting his scarlet robes in the face of the Orthodox, intended

to have the Latin Cross borne before him into the city. Should such

things be? Ivan held high counsel with his clergy and boyarins on the

subject; the majority were in favour of “shutting their eyes” when the

objectionable emblem should make its appearance on the scene, but this

ostrich-like expedient did not recommend itself to the Metropolitan

Filipp, who declared that if it came in at one gate he should go out

at another. Happily the Cardinal showed a more accommodating spirit,

and, when the situation had been explained to him by the Prince’s

messengers, consented to have the Cross smuggled through in a sledge.

This concession smoothed over the difficulty, and the catastrophe

of the whole bridal train being kept waiting for days in the snow

outside Moskva till one or other of the churchmen gave way, was happily

averted.[96] [Sidenote: 1472] From the moment that Sophie Paleologus

became mated with Ivan comparatively little is heard of her; her

personality is swallowed up in that of the Grand Prince. But the

influence of the Greek Princess can be traced in many of the important

developments of this reign. Born amid the extravagant ceremonial of

the Byzantine Court, and treasuring the memory of those splendid myths

and vanities, the more perhaps because they were wholly lost, the

exile transplanted to the rugged soil of Moskovy the ideals that had

waxed to fantastic growth on the humid shores of the Bosphorus. The

Velikie-kniaz of yore, moving freely among his boyarins and subjects,

develops gradually into the heaven-born Sovereign, a being removed

from contact with the ordinary sons of earth, withdrawn from profane

touch into a Holy of Holies of pomp and ceremony. Here again Ivan

was manifestly fitted to assist in working out this evolution. His

cold-blooded, calculated policy, his pitiless, passionless judgment,

his baleful glance, which is said to have caused women to faint, were

meet attributes of a majesty that was accounted something more than

human.

Under the influence of the new Byzantine and Italian ideas which the

Grand Prince imbibed from the inspiration of his consort and her

Court followers, Moskva received new buildings and adornments, a new

Cathedral of the Assumption (Ouspienskie Sobor), a new Kreml, new

ordnance, new coinage. Received also new laws, new punishments; the

old repugnance against taking life, expressed in the testament of

Monomachus, gave way to artistically conceived executions and tortures.

Heretics were put to death in a manner that the Inquisitors of Western

Europe might have been proud to own--roasted gently in a cage, for

example, or, if allowed to live, deprived of their unruly tongues.

Knout and axe made their appearance in the penal code, flesh and blood

cheapened in the market of civil life. Such were the results of the

union of the last of the Caesars with the first of the Tzars. The

outward expression of this alliance was the adoption on the Prince’s

seals of the double-headed eagle, the arms of the defunct eastern

empire; a cognisance which had, since the days of Karl the Great, been

also the distinguishing device of the western empire.[97]

In his capacity of appeal judge of Novgorodian suits, Ivan found his

influence over the affairs of the city daily growing stronger; an

accident furnished him with the pretext for bringing the republic

wholly under his authority. By a clerical error in a petition his style

was written Sovereign (Gosoudar), instead of Lord (Gospodin). A nod is

as good as a wink to an Argus-eyed prince. Ivan thanked the citizens

for their voluntary submission and assumed the new title. Novgorod

rose in angry rebellion against this last blow at her independence;

the faction of Martha lifted its head anew, and the eyes of all men

turned towards the King of Poland. But from that quarter came no help.

Kazimir was engaged in a struggle with Matthias of Hungary on the

one hand and the Teutonic Order on the other, and had, moreover, to

maintain his son Vladislas on the throne of Bohemia; hence he was not

in a position to court the hostility of the Prince of Moskva. Novgorod

had to front alone the overwhelming forces which Ivan led against her.

The Archbishop Theofil flitted backwards and forwards between the

city and the Prince’s camp, but saw never a sign of yielding on that

impassive countenance; saw only fresh troops arriving to swell the

monarch’s array. The unequal struggle could have but one end. “Who can

resist God and Great Novgorod?” The proud sphinx-riddle had at last

been answered, and the republic perished, strangled in the toils of

autocracy. [Sidenote: 1477] As Gosoudar Ivan entered the humbled city

the sovereign functions of vetché and posadnik were abolished, and the

whole province of Novgorod was added to the domain of Moskva. Loaded

with an enormous booty, wrenched by way of fine from the citizens, the

Grand Prince returned to his capital, bearing with him as prisoners

many of the merchants and boyarins of the disaffected party, and the

bereaved Martha, the Helen of this smitten Troy. Bearing also a yet

more notable captive, the great bell of Yaroslav, which for many a

hundred year had hung like a watchful sprite in its beetling belfry,

had clanged, boomed, and sobbed its summonses to council, strife, or

revelry, had roused the sleepy monks in many a marsh-girt monastery,

and witched with muffled echoes the seals of Lake Ilmen--this voice

of Novgorod’s liberty was borne away in the conqueror’s train, to be

hung in the new Ouspienskie Cathedral at Moskva, and eat out its life

in droning solemn flatteries on Moskovite high-days. Perchance as they

lifted it down from its long-accustomed tower it clashed forth one last

discordant knell, a passing-bell for the soul of the great republic.

Whatever hopes the Roman Pontiffs had built on the marriage they had

negotiated, they were doomed to be disappointed. Sophie Paleologus, so

far from converting her husband to the Latin faith, had adopted the

Orthodox religion almost as soon as she entered Russia,[98] and the

decrees of the Council of Florence were worse than abortive as far

as Moskva was concerned. Nor was it likely that Ivan, saddled with

his own subjection to the sword of the Prophet, was going crusading

against the Ottoman power in South Europe. Popular tradition, indeed,

gave his wife credit for turning his energies towards the off-throwing

of this same Mongol yoke, which was incompatible with the new ideas

of princely dignity. The initiative, however, appears to have come

from the other side. Akhmet, Khan of Astrakhan, either sensible of the

growing independence of Moskva, or acting at the instance of the King

of Poland, seized upon a moment when Ivan was embroiled in a quarrel

with his brothers (Boris and Andrei the elder) to march against this

too-uplifted vassal. [Sidenote: 1452] Kazimir 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.

[Sidenote: 1485] The little principality, which had been for centuries

a thorn in the side of Moskva, was swallowed up in the Grand Prince’s

dominions, and Kazimir had the mortification of seeing his enemy grow

stronger instead of weaker as a result of this diplomatic skirmishing.

If the Polish King counted on wearying Ivan into some rash or negligent

act of open hostility or wanton enterprise he knew not his man. The

Moskovite never undertook a task greater than his forces were able

to accomplish, or attempted to hold more than he could with safety

manage. Hence his resources were never exhausted, and the long period

of pent hostility was turned on his part to solid advantage. [Sidenote:

1487] The small appanages of Rostov and Yaroslavl shared the fate of

Tver and Novgorod, Viatka was reduced to submission, Perm and the

silver-yielding region of the Petchora were added to the sovereignty,

and Kazan, long a scourge to the Volga Russians, fell into the power

of the Grand Prince. Ivan set a vassal Khan on the throne of this new

dependency, reserving for himself the title of Prince of Bulgaria.

A new title, indeed, was becoming necessary to describe the august

being who was emerging from the cocoon state of a Prince of Moskva,

and Ivan henceforth begins to style himself Tzar in his foreign

correspondence.[100]

The growing power and importance of the Moskovite state, emerged

from its Tartar thraldom and hallowed by its connection with the dead

Byzantine past, brought it more into contact with the western world

from which it had drifted so far apart. Like the hero of the Dutch

romance, revisiting the haunts of early life after his protracted

slumber, Russia was renewing the relations she had held with

Christendom before her opium-sleep in the shadow of the Khans. The

wily and patient kniaz had a double purpose to serve in encouraging

intercourse with the western princes: in the first place, to seek fresh

allies against the arch-enemy, Poland; in the second, to procure for

his beloved capital a share of the progress and civilisation which

was then illuminating Europe. Embassies and presents were exchanged

with the Emperor (Frederick III.) and with the young Maximilian, “King

of the Romans.” The death of Matthias (1490) and the election to the

Hungarian crown of Ladislas, King of Bohemia and son of Kazimir,

placed Maximilian in direct opposition to the House of Yagiello, and

Ivan was ready to join with the Habsburg in an attack on the common

enemy. [Sidenote: 1491] The hostilities in Hungary were, however,

cut short by a peace based on one of the “family compacts” so dear

to the House of Austria, and Ivan, in his turn, saw the power of his

foe wax stronger in spite of his diplomatic efforts. In another and

more unexpected direction the Grand Prince established relations of

friendship; the Ottoman power had already stretched its grasp over

Kaffa and the fertile lands of the Krim peninsula, and Mengli-Girei was

enrolled among the vassals of the Sultan Bayezid II. With this pacific

occupant of the Throne of the Faithful Ivan exchanged courtesies--a

sorry miscarriage of the hopes of the match-making Pontiffs. Doubtless

the Russian Prince saw in the Sultan a possible ally against the new

King of Hungary, who might one day unite on his head the crowns of

Poland and Lit’uania. Not in this direction, however, were travelling

the energies of the house of Yagiello. Kazimir seemed bent on providing

his numerous sons with separate kingdoms and principalities; having

failed in his attempt to divide the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, he

tried to secure the succession of his second son, John-Albert, to the

Polish throne, and recommended another son, Alexander, to the boyarins

of the grand duchy. Having thus, in marked contrast to the life-work of

his great rival, done all that he could to ensure the disintegration of

his sovereignty, the King comfortably sickened of a fatal disease and

passed away with the famous _moriendum ergo_ on his lips. [Sidenote:

1492] Subsequent events fell in with his testamentary wishes. The

Lit’uanians elected Alexander as Grand Duke, and the Polish Diet,

after many stormy sittings, recognised John-Albert as its sovereign--a

recognition possibly influenced by the arrival on the scene of

deliberation of 1600 armed men enlisted on that Prince’s behalf.[101]

The enfeeblement of Lit’uania by reason of its separation from Poland

invited the long-nursed hostility of the Grand Prince and his faithful

ally, Mengli-Girei. The latter ravaged the Lettish territories in

the south, while the forces of the former harried all along the

Moskovite border. Many of the boyarins and petty princes subject to

Alexander passed over to the service of a monarch who was of their

own nationality and religion, and the Grand Duke had to signalise

his accession by buying off the hostility of Ivan with the surrender

of some frontier lands. [Sidenote: 1494] On these terms an “eternal

peace” was accommodated between the two countries, and the following

year a matrimonial alliance was effected between Alexander and Ivan’s

daughter Elena. Whatever chance might have existed of durable concord

between a weak state holding conquered territory and a strong state

to whom that territory has once belonged was extinguished by the

irritating stipulations with which this marriage contract bristled.

Uncomfortable as a neighbour, Ivan was incompatible as a father-in-law;

the safeguards which had been insisted on against any tampering with

the Princess’s Orthodoxy were supplemented by minute regulations with

regard to her worship, her household, even her dress. She might visit

a Catholic church as a curiosity--twice; she was to eschew Polish

costumes, even her cooks were of Russian selection. In fact, her Court

was to be an Orthodox Moskovite oasis in the Lit’uanian desert.[102]

Alexander found he had sacrificed his domestic independence without

obtaining any compensating security for his dominions; the restless

Hospodar of Moldavia and the Krimskie Khan continued to harry the

Podolian and Galician lands, and the Moskovites were openly aggressive

towards the Grand Duke’s subjects. Ivan, indeed, at this period

seems to have rated the power of the Yagiellos cheaply, and to have

permitted himself a diversion in the affairs of North-western Europe.

Whether he had secretly nursed designs against the merchants of the

Hansa League, who continued to maintain a flourishing commerce at

Novgorod after the civic glories had departed from her, or whether

for once his coldly-measured policy was influenced by an unpent

passion, the facts scarcely indicate. [Sidenote: 1495] The spark that

roused, or gave plausible ground for, his sudden resentment against

the unsuspecting traders was the torture of two Russian subjects at

Revel--who were boiled to death for coining false money and otherwise

misconducting themselves--coupled with an insult to the Grand Prince.

Ivan revenged himself by swooping down on the famous Hanse factory

at Novgorod, confiscating all the merchandise therein stored, and

seizing the persons of forty-nine merchants of Lubeck, Hamburg,

Munster, Dortmund, Revel, Dorpat, etc. By this raid he enriched himself

with a sum computed at a million gulden, but the Hansa trade with

Novgorod and Pskov was diverted to Revel and the Livlandish towns.[103]

Skandinavian affairs next engaged the Grand Prince’s attention, and

the embarrassments of Sweden offered an opportunity for wiping off old

scores with that ancient enemy. Under the administration of the Regent

Sture the Swedes had broken away from the Kalmar Union, and refused

to acknowledge as their sovereign Johann, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein,

and King of Denmark and Norway; with this monarch Ivan entered into

an active alliance, and the bleak uplands and marsh-choked forests

of Finland became the scene of an obstinate war. Ivangorod, the

newly-built Russian frontier fortress and the Swedish outpost of Viborg

were in turn besieged by the belligerents, and the Finns experienced

the calamities to which border peoples are particularly liable. Neither

side gained any important advantage, and the war was brought to a

sudden termination by the election of Johann to the crown of Sweden.

The influence of Byzantine ideas which had permeated the Moskovite

Court showed itself in a series of sinister developments, which closely

reproduced the palace intrigues for which the Greek capital had been

infamous. [Sidenote: (1490)] By the death of the young Ivan, son of

the Grand Prince by his first wife, the heirship in the direct line

had devolved upon the former’s infant son, Dimitri; a formidable

competitor existed, however, in Vasili, eldest son of Ivan by his

second marriage, and herein lay the constituents of a pretty succession

dispute, in which of course the two mothers, Elena of Moldavia and

Sophie Paleologus, urged with inconvenient insistency the claims of

their respective sons. The law of hereditary succession was an exotic

plant on Russian soil, and men’s ideas were not yet sufficiently fixed

to remove all question of doubt on the subject. For a comparatively

newly established Court matters were carried through with remarkable

correctness of detail. Plots were discovered--or imagined, tortures

extracted confessions, guilty boyarins yielded up their lives on the

banks of the river Moskva, Sophie and her son were disgraced, and the

child Dimitri solemnly crowned as Ivan’s successor. The latter decision

may have been influenced by a desire to “keep in” with the Hospodar

Stefan, rather than by any scrupulous regard for hereditary rights, but

at least it shows how little the heirship-of-the-Cæsars idea had taken

hold of Moskovite minds. [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: July 1500]

The superiority in warfare which had distinguished the Letts under

their early princes seemed to have been lost at this juncture, and

the first collision between the opposing forces--on the plain of

Mit’kov, by the banks of the Vedrosh--resulted in a complete victory

for the Moskovites.[106] The hetman and many Lit’uanian pans were taken

prisoners, and there was joy in the bulb-topped city. The position of

the long-time enemies was exactly reversed; the Moskovite and Tartar

armies swept all before them in the open country, but the fortified

citadels of Polotzk, Smolensk, Vitebsk, and other border strongholds

resisted the attacks of the invaders, as the Kreml had defied those

of Olgerd and Vitovt in bygone days. In the south-west the Krim

hordes, led by Mengli-Girei’s son, burnt Kremenetz, Lublin, and many

other towns and gorodoks. Unable to make a respectable resistance to

his enemies on either side, Alexander engaged himself in a feverish

activity of negotiation. In January 1501 ambassadors from Ladislav of

Hungary-Bohemia and Albert of Poland journeyed to Moskva on a fruitless

errand of mediation. Urgent remonstrances were dispatched from Vilna

to Moldavia, begging the _Athlete du Christ_ to be athletic in any

other direction than that of the grand duchy, while anxious endeavours

were made to enlist the aid of the German Order against the victorious

Moskovite. The office of Land-Master of Livland was filled at this

moment by the able warrior Walter von Plettenberg, and though crippled

in power and dominion since the disastrous field of Tannenberg, the

knights were still a formidable fighting force. Little reason had

they to love the Yagiellos, but at this moment Teutonic feeling was

more inflamed against the phœnix-growth of the new Russian power that

had arisen from the ashes of Mongol devastation. The Order saw the

hand that armed Pskov and Izborsk against its territories; the Hansa

merchants thought of the violence done to their trading rights at

Novgorod; and the empire felt jealous of the rival sovereignty, owning

neither Pope nor Kaiser, which threatened to make the late Emperor’s

fatuous monogram more illusory than ever.[107] Taking advantage of

this latent hostility, Alexander was able to bring about an offensive

alliance between himself and the Order, into which also entered the

sovereign ecclesiastics of Riga, Revel, Dorpat, Oesel, and Pilten. This

new phase of the struggle was heralded by the arrest of 200 Russian

merchants at Dorpat, a belated reprisal for the affair of Novgorod.

Ivan dispatched towards the Livlandish border an army of Moskovites

and Pskovians, computed to have been 40,000 strong. Against this array

von Plettenberg could only bring into action, at a locality 10 verstas

from Izborsk, a force of 4000 knights and some irregulars. The Germans,

however, were well supplied with artillery, and the noise, perhaps more

than the execution, of their fire-belching implements of war caused a

panic among the Russians, who fled in confusion. And here it may be

remarked that the Russian warriors of that period were somewhat liable

to these sudden stampedes; as a contemporary observer neatly remarks,

“They make the first charge on the enemy with great impetuosity, but

their valour does not seem to hold out very long, for they seem as if

they would give a hint to the enemy, as much as to say, ‘if you do not

flee, we must.’”[108] Without straining a point it may be assumed that

this liability to panic was in some measure due to the superstitious

coddling of their religion, which depicted angels and saints and

Bogoroditzas as ready, on suitable occasions, to interfere with effect

on their behalf; consequently if the enemy stood his ground for any

length of time the disheartened warriors experienced an uneasy _lama

sabacthani_ feeling that all was not well with them in the desired

quarter, and demoralisation ensued. The stubbornly contested field of

Koulikovo scarcely furnishes the exception which “proves the rule,” as

on that occasion the Metropolitan had announced that victory would only

be attained after much fighting.[109]

This ignominious collapse left Pskov to receive the full fury of von

Plettenberg’s attack, and the citizens in desperation prepared to

make a more creditable stand behind their walls than they had done in

the field. But the threatened blow did not fall; a pestilence of some

severity broke out among the “iron men,” and the army of the Order was

obliged to return to quarters.

Another change came over the complexion of affairs. John-Albert had

terminated an inglorious reign by a fit of apoplexy in the month of

June, and on the 23rd October the Polish Diet elected Alexander to

the vacant throne. This event did not strengthen his hands as much as

might have been expected. The Polish pans and nobles were a turbulent

self-seeking class, and were not likely to rush recklessly to the

defence of Lit’uania while their new monarch stayed quietly at home and

tampered possibly with their precious privileges. Ivan on the other

hand, undeterred by the reverse near Izborsk, prosecuted the war with

persistent energy. Employing the best possible method for heartening

his troops against the Teutons, he sent them ravaging into Livland

on the heels of the retreating army. Another victory was obtained

over the Lit’uanians, while Shikh-Akhmet, who had made a diversion

against Mengli on the east, was chased out of his dominions by the

allied Moskovite and Krim forces. Thus darkly for Alexander closed

the year 1501. Ivan had maintained his ground in every direction, and

had inflicted grievous harm on the allies of Poland. His Russian and

Tartar cavalry had raided unchecked round Neuhausen, Marienburg, and

the cathedral lands of Dorpat, the autumn floods and consequent state

of the roads preventing the heavy-armed knights and their heavier

artillery from taking the field. With the first frosts the invaders

withdrew across the border, followed by the indefatigable Land-Master,

who at last was able to abandon his enforced inaction. His hastily

gathered forces were, however, outmatched by the superior numbers

of the marauders, and in an encounter at Helmet (25th November) the

Germans were beaten back and 300 of the episcopal troops of Dorpat left

upon the field.[110]

The war dragged on throughout the early months of the new year; a

waiting game obviously suited Ivan’s plans and there was none to force

his hand. The dread of Russian-Tartar raids made the Livlander prelates

and burggreves chary of sending off their lanzknechts to the support

of the Land-Master, and von Plettenberg was for a long time unable

either to clear his borders of the freebooting bands, or to carry the

hostilities into the enemy’s country. From Alexander came no help, only

couriers with promises. The King was prodigal with his messengers and

tireless in sketching plans of campaign for himself and his allies; the

only detail which he allowed himself to neglect was the carrying out of

his share of the preconcerted action. This omission placed his friends

in awkward predicaments; Shikh-Akhmet was a miserable fugitive, von

Plettenberg found himself facing the whole Moskovite fighting strength,

except that detachment which was leisurely besieging Smolensk. Autumn

witnessed a quickening of the situation. Still trusting to Alexander’s

fly-blown promises, the Land-Master assumed the aggressive and trained

his ponderous artillery against the walls of Pskov. The burghers saw

their battlements and ramparts crumble away beneath the thundering

cannonade of the mighty siege-pieces, and day by day weaker grew the

defences which divided them from their bitterest enemies. But while no

Polish troops put in an appearance, the hearts of the besieged were

gladdened by the sight of the tossing manes of thousands of Tartar

horses and the conical head-dress of thousands of Ivan’s warriors.

The advancing Russian host was large enough to smother the slender

following of von Plettenberg, but the iron-sheathed German knights and

footmen were capable of offering a stout resistance to the arrows and

even the trenchant sabres of their opponents. The Land-Master withdrew

his force to the shores of the Smolina Lake, where, on the day of the

Exaltation of the Cross (14th September) the Black Cross warriors

commenced one of the most brilliant battles of their crowded annals.

For three days they held the field against the stubborn attacks of

the whirlwind-sweeping squadrons; “with blood and dust,” says an old

chronicle, “both steed and rider were bedecked, so that none might tell

the colour”; and when finally exhaustion and discouragement deterred

the Russians from renewing the attack, the Iron men were able to claim

the victory. But the willing horse had worked itself to a standstill;

von Plettenberg was obliged to lead his scarred and weary followers

homeward, and if the Moskovites were too crippled to re-commence their

raids, at the same time the Livlanders were forced out of Russian

territory.[111]

Meanwhile in another direction had fallen a long impending blow,

no further to be averted by the eloquent epistles of the Complete

Letter-writer. The redoubtable Hospodar, nursing against Poland

the remembrance of recent wrongs, and profiting by her present

embarrassments, burst suddenly into Galicia, and gleaned where the

Tartars had harvested. Several towns fell with little resistance

into his hands, and were annexed to his Moldavian dominions. Not in

accord with Ivan was this invasion undertaken, for the question of

the succession to the Moskovite throne had caused a rupture between

the two princes. Mengli-Girei was, in fact, the pivot on which the

anti-Polish alliance turned; the Grand Prince was not on good terms

with the Hospodar, and the latter could not be considered as otherwise

than hostile to the Turkish Sultan, but Mengli was the friend and ally

of all three. The winter of 1502-3 found matters in much the same state

as they had been twelve months earlier. The Grand Prince’s troops had

been obliged to raise the siege of Smolensk, but they still retained

the lands they had seized at the commencement of the war, still held

their own in the Baltic districts. A candidate for the blessings

traditionally allotted to the peacemaker now appeared in the person

of the Pontiff, who sought to bring about an accommodation between

the contending sovereigns. The splendid profligate who occupied the

throne of S. Peter was not actuated by a constitutional or professional

abhorrence of bloodshed--under his pontificate the Eternal City had

been a shambles rather than a sheepfold,--but for the present the

smiting of the Infidel seemed to him more urgent than the harrying of

the Orthodox, especially as the Orthodox seemed well able to retaliate.

With an uncrushed and unappeased enemy on their flank, it was clearly

impossible for the kings of Hungary and Poland and the Teutonic Order

to join in the crusade by which the Borgia fondly hoped to sweep the

Ottoman from Europe. Hence the apparition of this very soiled dove

masquerading with an olive branch in its crimson beak.

Ivan was undoubtedly master of the situation, and was able practically

to dictate his own terms, which he proceeded to do notwithstanding

the clamour of the crowd of envoys and ambassadors--Papal, Hungarian,

Polish, Teutonic, and Livlandish--who had gathered at Moskva. In the

first place, the Grand Prince would not hear of an “eternal peace,”

but limited the negotiations to the arrangement of a six-years’ truce

(25th March 1503 to 25th March 1509). With some slight remissions the

Moskovites retained the lands they had laid hands on during the war;

Tchernigov, Starodoub, Poutivl, Novgorod-Severski, Briansk, Toropetz,

and others, in all nineteen towns, seventy districts, twenty-two

gorodoks (townlets), and thirteen villages, were ceded by Alexander to

his uncomfortable father-in-law.[112] The Livlanders, who had played so

important a part in the war, were left as much in the lurch by their

graceless ally during the negotiations as they had been throughout the

fighting, and the conditions they were obliged to accept to participate

in the truce were far from favourable. The Russian merchants were

to be liberated from their prisons at Dorpat; the bishop of that

see was to resume payment of an old tribute of wax and honey to the

Grand Prince, and a Greek church was to be erected in the town. The

Livlander prisoners were not released by the Moskovites, and against

these concessions and disadvantages could only be set a clause which

restricted the fishery rights of the Pskovians in Lake Peipus to the

east shore.[113]

The Khan of the Krim steppes was not directly included in the truce,

though Alexander innocently supposed that Ivan’s ally was implicated

in the general pacification; the Grand Prince privately took care to

prevent Mengli-Girei from sharing this impression, and the Tartar

hordes continued to disquiet the Lit’uanian provinces.

Short though the term of the truce was, it outlasted the two principals

who within a few months of each other attained that eternal peace

which in life they had been unable to compact for. Ivan, in fact, had

but obtained a breathing space in which to arrange the affairs of his

family and gosoudarstvo before closing his long reign of forty-three

years. While the war was yet being waged he had definitely broken with

the Moldavian or Dimitri party, knowing well that Stefan could neither

relinquish nor Alexander forgive the loss of the towns which the former

had wrested from Poland, and hence that no imprudence on his part would

unite his two family connections against him. Dimitri had been stripped

of his prospective title and guarded as a prisoner in his palace,

while the names of himself and his mother were struck off from the

prayers of the Church. This step was followed by the proclamation of

Vasili as the Grand Prince’s successor. The death of Elena in 1505, and

of the Hospodar a year earlier, left the youth Dimitri in a forlorn and

friendless condition.

In the winter of 1505 (27th October) Ivan ended his long and remarkable

reign. The sovereignty which he relinquished was scarcely to be

recognised as the same which had been bequeathed to him by Vasili

the Darkened. From a struggling principality it had shot up into a

monarchy, struggling still, but for empire, not existence. The terrible

humiliating Mongol yoke, which had been such a bitter reality when

Ivan’s world was young, seemed now the almost forgotten bogey of a

dimly-remembered past. A revolt of the Khan of Kazan, the last event

of the old man’s reign, served only to emphasise the fact of the

altered relations between Tartar and Moskovite. Perm, the regions

of the Petchora, and the vast boreal territories which had belonged

to the republic of Novgorod more than doubled the extent of the

Grand-principality, which had been further swelled by the absorption of

Tver and Viatka, and the conquest from Lit’uania of the Russian lands

east of the Sojh. The standing and importance of the Moskovite State

likewise had kept pace with its expansion during this long reign, and

the policy of the Kreml was a matter of interest not merely to Sarai

and Riazan and Vilna as heretofore, but to Buda, Constantinople, Wien,

and Rome, to Krakow, Kjöbenhavn, Upsal, and Koenigsberg.

Such was the inheritance which Vasili III. Ivanovitch received from the

cold hands of his father; from his mother (who had died in 1503) he

derived the reflected glory which centred in the last of the Paleologi.

Embarrassments too were not wanting to disquiet the opening days of the

new reign. Besides the revolt of Kazan, the suspended hostilities with

Poland and Livland threatened the future repose of the State. The alert

and provident von Plettenberg was husbanding his resources against a

renewal of the war, and was, moreover, receiving considerable Teutonic

and Catholic support. A loan had been subscribed on his behalf by the

cities of Lubeck and Rostock, and the Pope had diverted to his use

a share of the receipts accruing from the sale of indulgences--an

ingenious device which at the same time equipped the gentlemen of God

against the heretics, admitted more souls to swell the triumph-song

of Heaven, and, incidentally, enriched the coffers of Holy Church.

Financial aid was also forthcoming from Maximilian, who granted to the

Land-Master a three years’ privilege to exact tolls from all ships

entering Livlandish harbours (1505).[114] The policy of the Emperor at

this moment halted between an angry suspicion of the house of Yagiello,

which drew him towards a good understanding with Moskva, and a jealous

solicitude for the German colony on the Baltic, which pulled him in

the opposite direction. Alexander, relieved of the nightmare incubus

of his terrible father-in-law, lost no time in resuming his plaints

and proposals to the new sovereign. Would Vasili restore the filched

territories to Lit’uania and peace to the two countries? To which the

Grand Prince replied that he was willing to conclude peace on the

condition that Kiev and Smolensk were ceded to him. Clearly the time

was not yet ripe for negotiation.

In August of 1506 the King of Poland followed his great rival to the

grave, cheered on his death-bed by the rare news of a victory over the

Krim Tartars. Sigismund, another son of Kazimir, obtained the double

election to the Polish-Lit’uanian throne.

Meanwhile Vasili was engaged in dealing with the defiant Kazanese,

not with conspicuous success. The Moskovite army, led by the Grand

Prince’s brother Dimitri, after having in turn been repulsed by the

enemy and victorious in a second attack, was finally taken by surprise

and irremediably routed, abandoning in its flight several cannon.

Preparations for another expedition were countermanded owing to the

submission of the Khan. This pacification was of timely service to

Moskva, for relations with Poland became suddenly strained and the

truce ceased to be effective. The firefly who led both parties into the

uncertain issue of open hostility was a Polish pan, Mikhail Glinski,

celebrated for his recent victory over the Krim horde. Of Tartar

extraction and German education, this restless spirit had attached

himself to the Lit’uanian Court, where his success, or the ambition

ensuing therefrom, gained him many enemies. The accession of the new

king brought matters to a head, and Glinski demanded justice between

himself and his detractors. Sigismund procrastinated, and the aggrieved

noble went over, with all his followers, to the service of Moskva,

plundering and slaying as he went. Vasili took the interesting waif

under his protection, and the border regions were soon well alight

with the fires of war. Russian and Tartar troops followed the beck

of the stark strife-kindling free-lance, who had the satisfaction of

surprising in his palace near Grodno the pan Jabrzczinski, the foremost

among his calumniators. “Have I found thee, O mine enemy?” With savage

glee he inflicted the death penalty on his foe, and went on his way

exulting. [Sidenote: 1508] In the month of June Sigismund appeared on

the scene with a formidable army and chased the invaders out of his

territory. The result, however, of the whole affair was favourable to

Moskva; a peace was effected between the two countries which confirmed

Vasili in the possession of his father’s conquests and recognised

Glinski and other disaffected Lit’uanians as Moskovite subjects. The

Order, as usual, was left to take care of itself, and von Plettenberg

saw himself with some alarm standing single-handed against Moskva, with

only a few more months of the truce to run. Vasili, however, raised

no difficulty in the way of a good understanding with the Germanic

knights and Livlandish prelates, whom it was to his interest to detach

from the Polish alliance, and a fourteen years’ peace was concluded on

mutually satisfactory grounds. [Sidenote: 1509] Thus the Grand Prince

obtained a respite from the exhausting neighbour-war, which gave him

the opportunity to resume the great work of consolidation within his

own frontiers.

Delivered by the fourteen years’ peace from the state of insecurity

which had been almost normal with them for nearly a century,

the Pskovians might possibly have looked forward to a season of

tranquillity and prosperity. Tranquillity they were certainly to have,

but it was to be the repose of decay, not of belaurelled affluence. The

Grand Prince, also delivered from the embarrassments of a foreign war,

revived the designs which had long been harboured at Moskva against

the independence of Pskov. Betaking himself and his Court to Novgorod

in the autumn of 1509, he summoned thither the posadniks, boyarins,

and notables of the city on the Peipus to give an account of their

grievances against the Governor, Ivan Obolenski, who had rendered

himself unpopular. Scarcely had the deputed citizens arrived than they

were arrested and shut up in the famous archiepiscopal palace, which,

after having furnished a prison for many a subject-ridden kniaz, now

became a place of detention for those who were under the sovereign’s

displeasure. Without a struggle Pskov yielded to the fate of her “elder

sister” Novgorod. [Sidenote: 1510] The vetché was dissolved and the

city bell borne down from the Troitza tower. Vasili was faithfully

moving in the path marked out by his predecessors.

The domestic affairs of the Grand Prince’s Court were tinged, as

indeed was the whole Moskovite life at this period, with a strong

Asiatic leaven. Already in his father’s lifetime a bride had been

chosen for him by a method which recalls the wooing of a sultan or

a rajah rather than that of a Christian prince; 1500 of the most

eligible damsels of the realm were gathered together for inspection,

and their number gradually weeded down to ten. These were medically

examined, and a “selection of the fittest” was made in the person

of Solomonia, daughter of a boyarin of no very high standing. By an

irony of circumstance this carefully picked consort disappointed

the expectations which had been formed of her, and the prophecies

and flatteries which lie in wait for the birth of a royal heir were

baulked of their delivery. The absence of a successor in the direct

line did not ameliorate the lot of the Grand Prince’s nephew, Dimitri.

Since the accession of the new monarch the seclusion of the possible

rival had become a close imprisonment, and his death was not unduly

postponed. In Oriental State affairs, as indeed in those of Western

Europe during the Middle Ages, it is a safe axiom that the inconvenient

die young. Dimitri died. Unavoidably, the chronicles of the day

suggested foul play, and he would not have been the only Russian Prince

of the Blood who was conducted by an expeditious “royal road” through

this vale of tears.

Owing to the renewed importance of Russia in the affairs of

Christendom, and the observations handed down to posterity by the

ambassadors and commercial agents who penetrated into the bleak and

reputedly barbarous regions of “Muscouvie,” the appearance and life

of the isolated capital in this century stands out with a hitherto

unwonted clearness. Hemmed in on all sides with thick forests, from

whence, down the Moskva river, was floated the timber of which

the houses were mostly built, the city stood in a setting of open

meadows, swarming with hares and roebuck, which were reserved for the

Grand Prince’s exclusive hunting. Fields and gardens and monasteries

straggled so far into the outskirts (or slobodas) that it was difficult

to tell exactly where the line of demarcation lay; for besides the

Moskva on one side, and the ditch-like Neglina on the other, there were

“no useful defences in the shape of walls, fosses, or ramparts.”[115]

The Kreml, or citadel, and in time the inner quarters of the town,

were however strongly fortified. As is frequently the case in cities

with Oriental characteristics, squalor and magnificence were strangely

jumbled together. Mean huts and booths were interspersed with

cupola-crowned churches and public buildings, which, designed for the

most part by Byzantine and Italian artists, presented a quaint and

not unpleasing confusion of eastern and western architecture. Despite

the “forty times forty churches” which were springing up all over

Moskva, the cleanliness which is supposed to accompany godliness was

conspicuously absent. “This city” wrote the Imperial ambassador at

the Court of Vasili, “is so broad and spacious, and so very dirty,

that bridges have been constructed here and there in the highways and

streets and in the other more distinguished parts.” Here, then, in this

straggling wood-built metropolis, this germ-cell of the Russian Empire,

dwelt the Grand Princes who were slowly evolving into Great White

Tzars; amid a surrounding of cathedrals and mud, holy ikons and squalid

hovels, dedicated gates and buildings topped with quaint bulbous domes

and cupolas, gold, blue, and silver, moved the rulers of the Moskovite

state. Hedged round with dreary ceremonial, waited on by courtiers and

chamberlains and servants, clad in long flowing robes that smacked more

of Bagdad than of Rome or Wien, the sovereigns of “all Russia” dwelt in

a world apart from outside influences, and could only measure things by

their own standard.

As in a rookery at the approach of nesting-time certain early birds may

be seen quietly pursuing their constructive operations amid the turmoil

and racket of their less provident fellows, so all over Europe at this

epoch, amid the anarchy which attended the decay of feudalism, the work

of building was in full progress. The Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns in

the Empire, the Valois in France, the Tudors in England, the Moskovite

princes in Russia, were piecing together the foundations of what were

eventually to be the five Great Powers of a transformed Europe. In

the early years of the sixteenth century it seemed not improbable

that the Yagiellos would create, out of the chaos of Polish, Magyar,

Czech, Lettish, and West Russian lands, a personal dominion which might

crystallise into an empire. But as in a rookery, to return to the

simile, certain unfortunately situated nests suffer from the plundering

attentions of competing builders, so the house of Yagiello was doomed

to see its carefully collected materials snatched away in the predatory

acquisitions of the Austrian archdukes, the Markgrafs of Brandenburg,

and the Grand Princes of Moskva. And not only had the kings of Poland

fallen among thieves, as it were, but their hands were more or less

tied by their dependence on the most selfish of all governing classes,

an anti-monarchical aristocracy.

Between Poles and Moskovites neither truce nor treaty could long be

effective, and war soon broke out anew; Sigismund had at last succeeded

in detaching the Krim Tartars from the Russian alliance, or, more

probably, the nomads had followed their own lawless inclinations in

bursting upon the rich cornlands of Riazan, “more fertile than all the

other provinces of Russia.” The event served as a pretext for Vasili to

march his troops into Lit’uania and besiege Smolensk. The moment was

favourable for a rupture. The King of Hungary was tottering towards

his grave, and two rival parties were more than anxious to constitute

themselves guardians of his youthful son and his two kingdoms. In this

struggle Sigismund found himself opposed to the Austrian Archduke,

Maximilian, head of the Holy Roman Empire; more formidable, perhaps,

in the former capacity than in the latter. Besides this embarrassment,

the relations between Poland and the military Order were, to say the

least, strained. The election (in 1511) of Albrecht, of the House of

Brandenburg, to the office of Grand-Master, had given new vigour to

the knights, who, since the disaster of Tannenberg, had been chafing

against the Polish suzerainty. With the support, moral and material,

of the Emperor, the Markgraf Joachim, and the Grand Prince of Moskva,

it seemed possible that this over-lordship might be thrown off.

[Sidenote: Dec. 1512] Under these circumstances Vasili set forth in

mid-winter, attended by his brothers Urii and Dimitri, by Mikhail

Glinski, and numerous boyarins, and trailing after him in sledges

his unwieldy artillery, served by German gunners, to undertake the

siege of Smolensk. From contemporary accounts this important border

city does not appear to have been very elaborately fortified, but its

defences were sufficiently strong to withstand the Grand Prince’s

attack, and in March the invading army returned to Moskva to avoid the

dangers and discomforts of the approaching thaw. In the summer of the

same year Vasili reiterated the attempt with no better result; the

Russians at this time were not particularly skilled in the arts of

sieges. The question of the Hungarian regency and eventual succession

still agitated the Courts of Wien and Krakow, although Ladislas had

not yet joined the “quiet people,” and in February 1514 an Imperial

ambassador appeared at Moskva for the purpose of clinching a treaty

between Maximilian and Vasili. The reciprocal agreement which was drawn

up between the two parties is important from the fact that, in the

German copy, the word “Tzar” was rendered “Kaiser”--the first occasion

on which the imperial title was applied to the Russian monarch.[116]

[Sidenote: 1514] Three months later Vasili’s lieutenants at Novgorod

concluded a treaty with the Hanseatic League, by which commercial

relations were restored to their old footing. In June of the same year

the importunate Grand Prince resumed his attack upon Smolensk, and

reaped the reward of perseverance. The King of Poland, who had made

no effort to succour the beleaguered city, attributed its loss to

treachery, and vented his chagrin on the governor, a Bohemian named

Solohoub, whom he put to death. The Russian accounts give the credit

of the victory to the Moskovite artillery--which ought certainly to

have got its range by that time--and to the pacific overtures of the

citizens, headed by their Bishop Varsonof.[117]

The loss of this important place roused Sigismund to a more aggressive

line of action than he had hitherto taken. Konstantin Ostrojhski was

despatched against the enemy with a force of 30,000 men; a force which,

though numerically far weaker than that at the disposal of Vasili, was

better equipped, better provided with artillery, and, above all, better

generalled. In the latter department the Moskovites sustained a severe

loss by the defection of the unstable Glinski, who, disappointed in

his expectation of obtaining the government of Smolensk in return for

services rendered, made arrangements for deserting to the cause of his

former sovereign. Sigismund was not loth to receive the strayed lamb

back to his fold, but a misfortune, in the shape of a well-mounted band

of the Grand Prince’s troops, overtook the transient pan before he had

reached the Polish lines. Vasili rewarded his treason with rigorous

imprisonment, deeming, perhaps, that he would be more valuable as a

hostage than as a corpse. The two armies now faced each other from

either bank of the Dniepr; the Russians were about 80,000 strong, and

had, in addition to superiority of numbers, the further advantage of

being on the defensive. This advantage, however, was thrown away by

the inaction of the Moskovite voevodas, who stood helplessly looking

on while Ostrojhski threw a bridge across the river and safely brought

over his heavy artillery. [Sidenote: 1514] On the 8th September[118] at

Orsha, on the left bank of the Dniepr, was fought a terrific battle,

in which the hordes of Moskovy went down in hopeless rout before the

well-armed knights and well-served artillery of the Polish-Lit’uanian

army. Allowing for exaggeration, the losses on the side of the

vanquished were enormous. Sigismund, in the exultant letters he

despatched to Pope, Cardinals, and the Doge of Venice, announcing the

victory, estimates the Moskovite slain at 30,000, and particularises

a large number of distinguished prisoners.[119] The disaster to the

Moskovite arms roused the spirit of the Polish faction within the walls

of Smolensk. The time-serving Bishop, who had been largely instrumental

in the surrender of the town to Vasili, flattered himself that he might

again dispose of its destinies, and, with the connivance of several

boyarins, sent an invitation to the Polish general to come and possess

himself of the place. The Moskovite voevoda, a member of the princely

family of Shouyskie, was not, however, a _quantité négligeable_ in the

city, and the wily ecclesiastic’s schemes were sharply checkmated. When

Ostrojhski came before the gates of Smolensk he might mark a grisly

row of corpses strung up on the battlements, the centre of interest

for flapping bands of crows and daws; these were the bodies of his

luckless co-operators, who had been seized and executed by order of

the governor, with the exception of Varsonof, whose equally guilty but

more holy person was secured in a prison. The Polish hetman, thwarted

in his hopes of peaceable possession, was likewise unsuccessful in an

attempt to carry the city by assault, and the brilliant victory of

Orsha had no more substantial result than the re-occupation of a few

border posts.

[Sidenote: 1515]

The death of Mengli-Girei and the accession of his son Makhmet to the

Krim khanate, scarcely affected the relations between Moskva and the

Horde, for the new Khan’s influence had for some time been dominant.

Neither Vasili nor Sigismund could count on the support or even the

neutrality of the Tartar chief, who took advantage of the hostility

between Lit’uania and Moskva to ravage the lands of each with perfect

impartiality. Another shift in the political balance deprived the Grand

Prince of a more exalted though equally unreliable ally; a new family

compact had been patched up between the Kaiser and the Kings of Hungary

and Poland, and Maximilian was now as anxious to compose the quarrel

in the east as he previously had been to inflame it. The continued

successes of the Turks could not fail to inspire uneasiness in a prince

who was scheming to acquire a preponderance in the lands of south-east

Europe, and the Emperor wished to engineer a powerful alliance, German,

Italian, Hungarian, and Polish, against this undesirable neighbour. The

idea was obviously unworkable as long as Moskva hung threateningly on

the Polish flank, hence the solicitude which the Habsburg felt to bring

about a peace between the two Slav powers. For this end an Imperial

ambassador, one Sigismund, Baron von Herberstein, left Germany at the

end of 1516 on a mission of mediation to the Moskovite Court, where

he arrived in April the following year, after a heroic journey over

innumerable lakes and marshes “slippery with snow and ice,” over frozen

rivers, and, towards the end, across ice rendered rotten by melting

snow-water; much of the “way” lying too through a country desolated by

skirmishing bands of Poles and Russians. [Sidenote: 1517] The chances

of successful negotiation were not improved by an autumn campaign

which Ostrojhski carried on, with disastrous result, in the district

of Pskov; the small burg of Opotchka, valiantly defended by Vasili

Saltikov, held out for fifteen days against the vigorous assaults of

Polish, Lit’uanian, and Bohemian troops, and was eventually relieved,

on the 18th October, by two converging Moskovite forces which drove

Ostrojhski off the field. Notwithstanding this side-play the Polish

envoys had joined Herberstein at Moskva, and were seeking to arrange a

peaceable understanding between the Grand Prince and their master. Each

side put forward absurdly unwarranted claims--Vasili, for instance,

stipulated for the cession to Moskovy of Kiev and Polotzk, among other

places, while the Poles demanded, in addition to Smolensk, a half-share

of Novgorod, Pskov, and Tver. The real bone of contention was Smolensk,

and as neither party would bate their pretension to the possession of

that city, the negotiations came to an abortive end in November.

If Herberstein’s efforts for the termination of the war were not

crowned with success, his long and arduous journey was in other

respects by no means barren of result. It is mainly owing to

observations made on this, and on a subsequent embassy, that a picture

has been preserved of the life at that gloomy Court, which was partly

Asiatic, partly Archaic European.[120] In the _Rerum Moscoviticarum

Commentarii_, Maximilian’s ambassador set forth to the western world

his experiences in the remote and desolate region beginning to be

known as Muscouvie, much as an explorer in a more travelled age would

retail the account of his wanderings in Central Africa. The Moskva of

Vasili Ivanovitch was a curious compound of primitive Russian squalor,

Byzantine splendour, the rude hospitality of feudal Christendom, and

the dark and tortuous restraint of an Oriental capital. The state

banquets, or rather the solemn and awful occasions when the Grand

Prince invited the foreign ambassadors to dine with him and his

dvoryanins (courtiers), are good examples of the conglomerate of

ceremonial, simplicity, and patriarchal domesticity which obtained at

the Moskovite Court. The Grand Prince and his brothers with the highest

boyarins sat together at one table; at another, opposite, sat the

distinguished guests of the evening, while round the hall were ranged

tables for the remainder of the company. Bread was solemnly served out

from the Prince’s table to such as he wished to compliment, and the

feast invariably opened with the consumption of brandy and roast swans.

The dishes were borne in and out by servants sumptuously attired, and

in addition to brandy, mead, beer, and Greek wines were served in

goblets which, like all the other appointments, were of pure gold. In

such ponderous dissipations, in occasional coursing matches in his

hare preserves round Moskva, in watching his foreign gunners exercise

their skill with the heavy uncouth field-pieces at stated periods, and

of course in elaborate religious ceremonies, did the Gosoudar of all

Russia fill up the round of his private existence. The coursing seems

to have been as cautious and “safe” as the Moskovite state-policy.

“When the hare shows herself, three, four, five, or more dogs are

slipped, and set after her on all sides; and when she is taken, there

is loud hallooing, as if they had taken a large wild beast.” “Moreover,

about an hundred men stood in long array, one half of whom were

dressed in black, and the other in yellow; not far from them stood

all the other horsemen, to prevent the hares from running through and

escaping.”[121]

While the Imperial negotiations had been dragging out their span

of stately uselessness, Vasili had effected a diplomatic stroke on

his own account. The Grand Master Albrecht, despairing of receiving

adequate support from the Emperor, in his present frame of mind,

against the aggressive policy of the Polish monarch, turned his eyes

towards the schismatic heretic who was playing so large a part in the

affairs of east Europe. The common bond of hostility to Sigismund drew

together the interests alike of Grand Prince and Grand-Master, and

the plenipotentiary of the latter, Dietrich von Schönberg, was able to

conclude a close alliance between Moskva and the Prussian section of

the Order. [Sidenote: 1517] Various causes contributed to delay the

threatened struggle between Sigismund and the knights; chief of which

was the restraining influence of the Kaiser, whose narrow family policy

did not at present lend itself to a war between Teuton and Pole for the

possession of the Baltic provinces. The death of Maximilian, however

(January 1519), removed this obstacle, and the outbreak of hostilities

was only postponed by a sudden and victorious incursion of the Krim

Tartars upon Podolia and Lit’uania. The respite enabled Albrecht

to enlist fresh support in men, money, and material, from several

quarters. Von Plettenberg raised on his behalf a considerable number of

troops and a heavy contribution to the war-chest; the King of Denmark,

the Elector of Brandenburg, and the Grand Prince of Moskva helped to

swell the resources of the venturesome Grand-Master, while on the other

hand Sigismund knitted together all the available military force of the

Yagiellos to crush the insubordination of this ambitious vassal. In the

last days of the year 1519 broke “the long-threatened wild war-storm

over the Order-lands.”[122] The Polish monarch marched against the

presumptuous warrior monks with an army “twelve miles wide,” swelled by

Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian contingents. Against this formidable

array the undaunted Hohenzollern--worthy scion of an illustrious

House--rode forth “on New Year’s Day, a dark stormy winter’s day,”

with all the following he could muster. [Sidenote: 1520] A wild and

devastating war ensued, in which whole provinces were cruelly wasted,

and the skill and courage of the Order knights were pitted in unequal

struggle against the overwhelming might of Poland. In the open country

and in the villages and unprotected towns the invaders wrought havoc

unchecked, but in the fortified strongholds the Teutons made desperate

resistance. Reinforcements from Denmark helped the Grand-Master to

put a better complexion on the struggle; the beleaguered garrisons of

Balga and Braunsberg held out stoutly, and the Order lanzknechts were

able to break into Mazovia, and requite on that province the gruesome

savageries which had made a desert of the bishopric of Pomesania. At

this juncture Vasili undoubtedly threw away the opportunity of his

lifetime. Since the breakdown of the negotiations with Poland, his

troops had waged a fitful border war with varying success. [Sidenote:

(1518)] The neighbourhood of Polotzk had been laid waste, but an attack

on that town had failed; Moskovite armies had penetrated as far as

Vilna, and hunted the Lit’uanian forces before them. [Sidenote: (1519)]

Now, however, when Sigismund was experiencing an increased difficulty

in coping with the opposition of the Grand-master, and dreading

moreover an attack from some of the German princes, Vasili, instead

of leading an army into Samogitia, concluded with his hard-pressed

adversary a six months’ truce. [Sidenote: 1520] The following year

a “Waffenstillstand” for four years was arranged between the German

Order and the Poles, while at the same time Moskovy was drawn aside

from the western war by a recurrence of the troubles with Kazan, which

indeed wore a serious aspect. The Krimskie Khan, Makhmet, had displaced

the Russian vassal of the Volga Horde, and established in his stead

his own brother, Saip-Girei. This defiant action was followed up by

an invasion of the grand principality by the Krim Khan, who crossed

the Oka and defeated a hastily gathered Moskovite force under kniaz

Dimitri Bielski and the Grand Prince’s brother, Andrei. The victorious

Tartars were reinforced by the Kazanese, led by their new Khan, and

the combined host marched upon Moskva, burning and plundering in wild

unholy triumph which recalled the fearful days of the Mongol mastery.

Vasili “the courageous” fled before the approaching storm. An unkind

report was afterwards circulated to the effect that he hid himself

under a haystack.[123] Such an accusation is not to be accepted

lightly, though the Russians of that period were not given to poking

fun at their sovereign. Possibly the account of Moskovite panic and

German staunchness which Herberstein sets forth in his commentary is

not altogether uncoloured by national prejudice. One Nikolas, a native

of Spire, was placed in command of the Kreml artillery and made the

necessary dispositions for withstanding a siege, but the crowds of

burgers and countryfolk who had rushed into that sanctuary would have

rendered a protracted defence impossible. Threatened with an outbreak

of pestilence at any moment--the time was midsummer and the place

Moskva--the besieged were glad to buy off the Tartars with the promise

of tribute from the Grand Prince to the Krim Khan; a promise which

was unauthorised and need not be adhered to. The invaders withdrew,

bearing with them captives computed at the almost incredible number of

800,000. A treacherous attempt upon Riazan was foiled by the alertness

of another German, “one Johann Jordan, an artilleryman ... who came

from the Innthal.”[124] With the receding of the Tartar waters back

came the affrighted hares to their feeding-grounds around Moskva, and

back came Vasili Ivanovitch to his palpitating capital, to deal out

judgment upon those responsible for the disaster on the Oka. A somewhat

delicate matter. The kniaz Bielski had no doubt mismanaged the whole

affair, but on the other hand the Grand Prince’s brother had been the

first to yield to the homing instinct which sometimes asserts itself

on the field of battle. Under the circumstances the only thing to do

was to fasten the blame upon one who, if less responsible, was also

of less exalted position, and a noble who had run a good second to

Andrei Ivanovitch was accordingly thrown into prison. The matter of the

haystack does not appear to have been gone into.

[Sidenote: 1522]

During the greater part of the following year the Moskovite army

remained in camp at Kolomna, awaiting a fresh attack from the Krimskie,

who, however, remained within the shelter of their wide-stretching

steppes. Negotiations were going on at the same time with Poland, and

in December a truce of five years was effected, which left Smolensk

still in the hands of the Grand Prince.

The strife between Poland and the Order now entered upon a new

development of great historical importance. The Roman Papacy, ever

glowering at the irruption of the Faithful (or the Infidel, according

to Christian label), into the domains of Christendom, sought to raise

enthusiasm and money among the piously disposed princes and people

of the Empire and neighbouring lands, in order to float a crusade

against the Ottomans. Among the expedients for obtaining the latter

commodity which met with the approval of Christ’s Vicegerent, was the

barter of indulgences, conducted in such wholesale manner that none

but the very poor, who could not afford luxuries, were excluded from

the attainment of eternal glory. Adversity and competition have an

unmistakably broadening effect, and the sixteenth-century camel went

through the eye of the once exclusive needle with absolute comfort,

and took all its relations, dead and living, with it if so minded. The

enterprising Pontiff, however, experienced the bitter perversion of

fate which too often mocks the best directed efforts; not only did the

traffic in souls fail in its original purpose of financing a crusade,

but its injudicious prosecution among the cities of Northern Germany,

where men had grown somewhat doubtful of the accumulated truths of the

Church, resulted in the springing up of a new enemy, more formidable

even than Islam. Without going into the dogmatical issues involved in

the agitation which sprang out of the original “monks’ quarrel,” it is

necessary to note that the “Reformation” owed much of its success to

the secularising theories which it put forward, and which exercised

a fascinating influence upon the princes and petty sovereigns of

the Empire. The Houses of Wettin and Hohenzollern especially, lent

favourable ear to the new doctrines, and the Grand-Master Albrecht,

while roaming Germany in search of possible assistance against his ever

imminent enemy, came in contact with the leaders of the anti-Catholic

movement, from whom he imbibed principles which he immediately

proceeded to put into practice.[125] The fundamental stumbling-block

to a composition with Poland was the question of homage insisted on

by Sigismund as due from the Grand-Master of the Order. Albrecht had

made gigantic efforts to resist this obligation, and to preserve the

independence of his office, but he now saw a way by which both his

own ambitions and the requirements of the King of Poland might be

accommodated. This was nothing less than the secularisation of the

Order-lands into a hereditary duchy, dependent on the Polish crown;

Albrecht, needless to say, being the proposed Duke thereof. The

suggestion, which offered a solution to what had seemed a hopeless

quarrel, met with approval from Sigismund, and was embodied in the

Peace of Krakow (April 1525), whereby the Grand-Master was transformed

“from the head of a Catholic religious order into a Lutheran temporal

prince.”[126] The required oath of vassalage was tendered by Albrecht

and in return the King presented him with a new blazon for his new-born

duchy of Prussia; “the old Order changeth,” and the black cross is laid

aside for a black eagle, crowned, beaked, and membered gold. In days to

come, what time the white eagle of Poland shall droop its failing wings

in feebleness, this sable eaglet which it has helped to hatch, grown

lusty with maturity, shall snap its hungry beak in unison with the

other birds of prey that hover round the doomed one. For the present,

it is worthy of remark that the first political result of the religious

schism which was to plunge the greater part of Europe, and especially

the Empire, into a paroxysm of strife, was the closing of a long and

bitter quarrel in the Baltic lands. As regards the immediate effect

of the disappearance of the Order from Prussia, Moskva was chiefly

concerned in the isolation which that event entailed upon the Teutonic

colony in Livland and Estland. In return for the valuable help von

Plettenberg had afforded the Grand-Master during the war, the latter

had already granted him complete independence from the control of the

Prussian executive; hence, when the secular revolution was effected,

the knights of Livland retained their organisation and temporal

possessions.[127]

While Sigismund had been employed in bringing East Prussia under

his domination (West Prussia was already an integral part of the

Polish dominion), Vasili had composed his differences with his Tartar

neighbours. Makhmet-Girei had diverted his warlike tendencies towards

the subjection of the khanate of Astrakhan; Kazan, after being several

times overrun and almost conquered in a series of campaigns (in which

the Moskovite voevodas displayed such scandalous slackness that

corruption was openly hinted at), concluded a truce of five years

with the Grand Prince. The latter, meanwhile, had struck an astute

blow at the prosperity of Kazan by prohibiting Russian merchants from

attending the great summer fair held annually at the Tartar city,

and by establishing a rival fair at Makar’ev, in the province of

Nijhni-Novgorod.[128]

At a moment when the western Church was offering a spectacle of

dissension and rampant heresy, Vasili occasioned a mild scandal in

the Orthodox communion by consecrating his unfruitful consort to

the service of heaven, and taking unto himself another wife. Twenty

years of conjugal felicity had not been crowned with the desired

offspring, and the Grand Prince, weary of waiting for the overdue

answer to reiterated prayers, took steps to remedy the breakdown in

the succession. Solomonia was bundled off to a convent near Souzdal,

where she received the veil, enforced, according to current rumour, by

a whipping.[129] [Sidenote: 1526] Vasili 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. [Sidenote: 1533] For

reasons of state it was desirable that the sovereign’s critical

condition should be kept from the knowledge of the general public,

and especially from the foreign ambassadors. Therefore the suffering

monarch was sledge-borne in a painful journey to Moskva, at a season

when the falling snow and young ice rendered travelling laborious and

unsafe. With the exception of his brothers, Urii and Andrei, Mikhail

Glinski--restored to liberty and princely favour--and a few boyarins,

none were admitted to the Grand Prince’s presence, but the rumour of

his mortal sickness soon spread. The dying man played to the end his

cold impassive game of statecraft, and his last hours were employed

in arranging safeguards and regulations for the government during

the minority of his successor. As the third day of December drew to

a wintry close the crowds gathered in the streets and stood round

the silent palace, and that night no one slept in Moskva. Dark-robed

ecclesiastics emerged from their retreats and swarmed into the house

of death like vultures swooping upon a dying beast. And as the huddled

crowds watched and waited without, a curious scene was being enacted in

the grim bed-chamber. With notable exceptions, it had been the custom

for Russian Grand Princes to receive on their deathbed the tonsure,

monastical habit, and a new name; this custom the Metropolitan wished

to adhere to in the case of Vasili, while Prince Andrei and another

layman desired that he should die, as he had lived, a sovereign and

not a monk. At midnight, while prince and boyarin were endeavouring

to snatch the black neophyte’s robe from the Vladuika, and while the

latter solemnly and vehemently cursed them “in this world and the

next,” Vasili Ivanovitch drew his last breath. It was the first time in

the course of his career that he had shown any impatience. Hastily they

thrust the all-important garment on the corpse, and called it Varlam;

but the baptismal name had a clear minute’s start. The great bell

of Moskva boomed out to the watching multitudes the news that their

sovereign was dead. A new day dawned, and another reign had begun.

During the reigns of Vasili and Ivan the Great a new factor in Russian

history comes into notice, and afterwards develops into no little

importance. This was the appearance in two distinct localities, which

may be roughly designated as the lower basins of the Dniepr and the Don

respectively, of organised bands of “steppe-folk,” who were neither

exactly Russian nor Tartar, nomad nor settled, and who were known

under the vague appellation of Kazaks, or Kozaks. The name “has been

variously derived from words meaning, in radically distinct languages,

an armed man, a sabre, a rover, a goat, a promontory, a coat, a

cassock, and a district in Circassia”; an equal uncertainty hangs over

the origin of the race, or rather races. Perhaps the clearest account

of the etymology and ethnology of the Kozak is that given by a Russian

author in a history of the peoples of the Don region. “Kazak signifies

alike volunteer, horseman, freebooter. Malo-Russians, mingled with

remains of peoples known under the common name of _Tcherni Kloboukie_,

under the name of Kazaks, constituted one people, who became to all

intents and purposes Russian ... their fathers dwelling from the

tenth century in the neighbourhood of Kiev, were themselves already

almost Russian. Increasing more and more in numbers, maintaining among

themselves the spirit of independence and fraternity, the [western]

Kazaks organised a Christian republic, and established themselves

between the lower basins of the Dniepr and Dniestr, building villages

and fortresses.”[132] The causes which drove these Slav and Turko

outcasts into the wild steppe-land and scarcely accessible islands

of the Dniepr, and welded them together in an origin-obliterating

union, were first the Mongol invasion, and secondly the gradual

establishment of irksome and far-reaching central authorities both in

Moskovy and Lit’uania. The absolutism of the one monarchy, and the

Catholic persecution of the other, sent men in search of liberty, to

swell the ranks of those whose fathers had fled from the insecurity

and degradation of a Tartar-haunted land. Similar causes--hostility

to the surrounding khanates and impatience of the certain taxes and

doubtful protection of the Moskovite government--were responsible for

the existence of the Don Kozaks, among whom, however, there was a

strong Tcherkess (Circassian) strain, while the Russian element was

proportionately weaker. But the great factor in this double evolution

was undoubtedly a physico-geographical one. The nature of the steppes

themselves, those vast-stretching, level, grass-grown wolds, spread in

seeming endlessness under the boundless sky, those solitudes where

a man and his horse might lose themselves from all pursuit, called

as irresistibly to the lustre after freedom as ever the Highlands

of Scotland to the Saxon-hating Kelts, or the Tcherni-Gora to the

unconquered Slavs of the Balkan coast. And having lured, it held, and

holding, moulded. The Kozak and his wiry steed became as much a part of

the fauna of the great Russian plain as the wolves, the hawks, and the

steppe-eagles that hunted and roamed throughout its wide expanse.

[Illustration: SKETCH MAP of GRAND-PRINCIPALITY OF MOSKVA with

GRAND-DUCHY of LITHUANIA AND BALTIC PROVINCES. ]

FOOTNOTES:

[91] Rambaud.

[92] Rosebery, _Pitt._

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

[94] Le père Pierling, _La Russie et l’Orient_.

[95] _Iz Istorie Moskvui._

[96] S. Solov’ev. Karamzin. Pierling.

[97] Unlike their compeers in Western Europe, who attached high

importance to matters heraldic, the Russian princes were somewhat

“fancy-free” in the employment of armorial bearings, and their devices

took more the nature of barbaric totems than of feudal blazonry. Only

in the reign of Vasili the Darkened had the S. George-the-Conqueror

and dragon become the fixed stamp on the seals and coins of Moskva;

an earlier form of this was a simple mounted figure, similar to that

borne by the Grand Dukes of Lit’uania. The coins of Dimitri Donskoi

are adorned in some cases with the image of a cock, above which is

portrayed a small animal, which might represent a fox, beaver, or

marten. Previous to this the tokens were usually stamped with a rude

representation of the reigning prince or of a local saint.

[98] Le père Pierling, _La Russie et l’Orient_.

[99] Gennad Karpov, _Istoriya Bor’bui Moskovskago Gosoudarstva s’

Pol’sko-Litovskim, 1462-1508_.

[100] The title Tzar, formerly reproduced in West European spelling

as Czar, was, on the strength of a surface resemblance, assumed to

be derived from Caesar, and given the equivalent value of the German

_Kaiser_. With the Russians Tzar simply meant king or ruler, and was

indiscriminately used for the Greek Emperors, the Tartar Khans, and

the Syrian and Jewish potentates mentioned in the writings of the Old

Testament; Caesar was rendered Kessar. The word _korol_, which also

signifies king in their language, was perhaps borrowed from the Magyar

_kiraly_, the Kings of Hungary being for a long time the only monarchs

so designated with whom they had any dealings. The double-headed

eagle, adopted at almost the same time as the title of Tzar, although

the recognised symbol of “empire,” was not originally used with that

significance in Russia; the device was employed (in the same way that

the lilies of France were incorporated with the English arms) to show

that the Prince of Moskva had married the heiress of the eastern

empire, and for a long time the eagle occupied a secondary position to

the S. George and dragon cognisance of Moskva on the seals and coins of

the Grand Princes. The imperial idea was a plant of foreign conception

and growth, and, indeed, at the time when the title Tzar first crept

into use, the style of Emperor of all the Russias might have been borne

with almost as much reason by the King of Poland as by the Prince of

Moskva.

[101] Schiemann, _Russland, Polen, u. Livland_.

[102] Karamzin.

[103] _Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen_; Sartorius, _Geschichte des

Hanseatischen Bundes_; S. Solov’ev, _Istoriya Rossie_.

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

[105] The wolves. S. George occupies the delicate position of

patron-saint of the wolves as well as of flocks and herds.

[106] Karpov, _Istoriya Bor’bui_, etc.

[107] A.E.I.O.U.

Alles Erdreich ist Oesterreich unterthan.

Austria est imperare orbi universo.

[108] Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, _Rerum Moscoviticorum

commentarii_.

[109] It is hardly necessary to state that these remarks do not apply

to the Russian soldier of modern history, who has displayed his best

qualities under adverse circumstances.

[110] Schiemann.

[111] Schiemann, Karpov.

[112] S. Solov’ev.

[113] _Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen._

[114] _Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen._

[115] Herberstein.

[116] Karamzin.

[117] S. Solov’ev; Karamzin.

[118] Karamzin gives the date as 8th of October. The day is fixed by

Sigismund’s letter to Leo X., written on 18th September, in which he

mentions the battle as taking place on “_die natali beatissime virginis

Marie, que erat VIII. Septembris_.”

[119] _Acta Tomiciana_, tom. III.

[120] Much that appeared eastern or barbarous to outsiders was in fact

only a survival of customs and costumes that had long died out in the

west. Russia, cut off by many causes, already set forth, from the march

of progress in occidental Europe, retained many things which had there

been cast aside.

[121] Herberstein.

[122] Johannes Voigt, _Geschichte Preussens_.

[123] Herberstein.

[124] Herberstein.

[125] Voigt.

[126] Freeman, _Historical Geography of Europe_.

[127] Schiemann; Voigt; _Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen_.

_Note._--The German branch of the Order elected a new Grand-Master

after the defection of Albrecht, and continued, at Mergentheim in

Franconia, its existence as a religious organisation, till the

beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Napoleonic maelstrom

swept it away in common with many other worn-out institutions.

[128] Karamzin.

[129] Herberstein.

[130] Herberstein; Karamzin.

[131] Karamzin.

[132] V. Bronevskago, _Istoriya Donskago Voyska_.