CHAPTER VIII IVAN GROZNIE
The lapse of 500 years found the principles of settled hereditary government in much the same condition in Russia as they had been when the infant Sviatoslav succeeded to the throne of Kiev under the guardianship of his mother. Despite the fact that two of the late Sovereign’s brothers were yet living, Elena Glinski assumed the regency on behalf of her three-year-old son, supported by a knot of boyarin-princes, whom the circumstances of the time suddenly threw into prominence. The over-shadowing figures of the last two Moskovite monarchs had almost obliterated the fact that there were persons of importance in the land besides the members of the princely family. Now a whole crop of nobles emerges from the background, like a ready-made second chamber from the brain of an Abbé Sieyés. Ivan Oblenski, an offshoot of the House of Tchernigov, the Bielskis, the Glinskis, and the Shouyskies, form the aristocratic nucleus round which revolve the intrigues and faction vicissitudes which seem the natural accompaniments of queen-mothers and minorities. Necessarily the Princess Regent had a lover, in the person of Oblenski, and equally as a matter of course, the latter had personal enemies. Of these he proceeded to dispose with all expediency; Urii Ivanovitch, uncle of the Grand Prince, suspected of plotting against the Existing Order of Things, was lodged in a state dungeon, where he died of hunger some two and a half years later.[133] A more celebrated, if less august victim was the kniaz Mikhail Glinski, who had expostulated with his niece anent her unseemly intimacy with Oblenski, and was thrown into prison, where he “died unhappily.”
1534
From which it would appear that the old saying concerning the unwisdom of intervening between husband and wife might be applied with equal truth to a less recognised connection. Andrei Ivanovitch, Vasili’s remaining brother, took fright at the irreverent procedure of the Regent and her favourite (who caged Princes of the Blood as unconcernedly as though they were linnets or human beings), and stole off one day, with all his household and retainers, towards Novgorod.
1537
The farther he got from Moskva the more his courage rose, and ere long he had drifted into open rebellion against the boyarin-wielded authority. Numbers of disaffected landowners sped to his support, but the gates of Novgorod remained shut and the Oblenskie were hard upon his track with the best-mounted Moskovite cavalry. Andrei surrendered without striking a blow, and was escorted back to the city of his deep dislike, leaving behind him at intervals along the Novgorodskie road the swinging corpses of thirty of his adherents. His remaining followers died by torture or in prisons, and the latter fate disposed of the last surviving son of the great Ivan.
Meanwhile the success of Elena’s regency had justified the means taken to retain it. Vasili’s death had encouraged the King of Poland to renew with threatening insistency his demands for the restitution of the territories conquered by the late Prince and his father; refusal on the part of Moskva led to hostilities in which the Lit’uanian forces were unable to obtain any advantages, and a prolongation of the truce, on the terms “as you were,” ensued (1537). A skilful balancing of the conflicting interests which agitated the Krim and Kazan Hordes maintained the Moskovite peace in those directions, and a renewal was also effected of the truces with Sweden and the Livlander knights. Nor was the inner administration of the regency wanting in beneficial activity. The Kitai-gorod of Moskva (after the Kreml the most important quarter of the city, containing the houses of the boyarins and the principal bazaars and trading stores) was surrounded by walls and towers which added greatly to the security of the capital.[134] Vladimir, Tver, Novgorod, and other provincial towns were newly fortified and in some cases rebuilt; the state coinage was also put upon a more satisfactory footing. Under these circumstances the severities and loose morals of Elena Glinski might well be overlooked by her subjects. Her greatest offence was yet to come. She died.
Ap. 1538
Of poison, said many-tongued rumour, on which the only rational comment must be the useful Scotch verdict, “not proven.” Her untimely death left Oblenski in precarious possession of the supreme authority, which his enemies were already preparing to wrest from him. Foremost among these was the veteran Vasili Shouyskie, nick-named “the Silent,” the head of an important Souzdalian family. For seven days lasted Oblenski’s regency, and then himself and his sister were seized and thrown into prison, where the fashionable death-by-starvation awaited them. The silent Shouyskie assumed the regency, which he held till his decease in the October of the same year, when it passed to his brother, Ivan Shouyskie, who displayed his newly-acquired power by packing the Metropolitan Daniel off to the cloister, and installing in his place Ioasaf, hegumen (abbot) of the Troitza monastery. Hard and brutal was the rule of the Shouyskies; “fierce as lions,” bemoaned the Pskovskie chronicle, “were the voevodas, and as wild beasts their people against the peasants.” The only check on the absolute supremacy of the dominant family was the ever-present apparition of the kniaz, Ivan Bielski—Ivan and Vasili were fashionable names among the Moskovite aristocracy of that period—who was a formidable competitor for the possession of the regency. Bielski justified the nervous apprehensions of the Shouyskies (who had kept him in prison for several years and only released him at the intercession of the new Metropolitan), by taking advantage of the disaffection bred by their arrogance to oust them from the head of affairs. As Regent his rule was milder and less overbearing than that of the kniaz he had supplanted, and a firmer front was shown against the Tartars of Kazan and the Krim Horde, who were continually devastating the frontiers. Possibly the increased activity was rather forced by their side, for in the year 1541 both Hordes set themselves in motion against Moskva. The Krim Tartars brought a formidable force into the field, augmented by cannon, musketeers, and some squadrons of Ottoman cavalry—the first warriors of that nation who had fought against the Russians. The double danger stifled for the moment the bickerings of the Shouyskie and Bielski factions, and the Moskovites found themselves strong enough, when thus united, to repel the incursion of both Hordes. Safa-Girei and the Kazanese were chased out of the neighbourhood of Mourom, which town they had fruitlessly attacked; Saip-Girei, confronted by a powerful army on the yonder bank of the Oka, dared not attempt to force the passage, and retired to the Don. The jealousy which existed between the leading boyarins made it impossible for the Russians to follow up their advantage by a campaign in Tartar territory, and Ivan Shouyskie turned instead to his own advantage the employment of the troops which the war had placed at his disposal. Secretly supported by many of the notables of Moskva, and openly by those of Novgorod, he resolved upon a bold bid for the recovery of his ascendency.
1542
On a dark night in January Petr Ivanovitch Shouyskie rode into Moskva with a picked body of soldiers from Vladimir, and before morning the Kreml was in his hands. Bielski was seized in his bed, and the Metropolitan was disagreeably awakened by showers of stones hurtling through his windows and weapons hammering against his door. The chief of the Church barely escaped with his life to the shelter of the Troitza, an unpleasant exercise for an early morning in mid-winter. At daybreak Ivan Shouyskie entered the city and resumed his old position of authority.
[199]
Bielski and the Metropolitan were sent off to safe keeping at Bielozero, the lonely stronghold on the waters of the lake of that name, where the Grand Princes’ treasures and prisoners were securely stored away.[135] This time Shouyskie took good care that his rival should not emerge from prison to trouble him, and the soul of Bielski put on immortality.[136] A new Metropolitan, the second who had been nominated by the Shouyskies, was elected to fill the place of the shifty Ioasaf, who had leisure, in the seclusion of the Kirillov monastery at Bielozero, to reflect on the unwisdom of being all things to all men in sixteenth-century Moskva. The Novgorodskie had supported the coup d’etat, and their Archbishop Makarie was rewarded with the vacant post. In the meantime, while these various Ivans were ruling the State and crushing one another in turn, how fared it with the other Ivan in the background? The much-prayed-for princeling had not, since the death of his mother, spent a very happy or altogether comfortable childhood. The chief boyarins and their followers appear to have treated their Sovereign with a curious mixture of neglect, disrespect, and superstitious awe. Surrounded exclusively by the partisans of whichever faction happened to be uppermost, the friendless orphan could only brood in silent resentment over the wrongs he sustained at the hands of his temporary masters. The rude-mannered, tyrannical, gold-greedy Ivan Shouyskie was an especial object of his dislike. A letter written by the monarch in after days to Prince Andrei Kourbski, comments bitterly on the fact that though, in the lifetime of the Princess Elena, Shouyskie had possessed only one cloak, green silk trimmed with marten fur, “and that a very old one,” during his regency he was able to have cups of gold and silver fashioned him, with his initials graved thereon.[137] The despotic jealousy of Shouyskie and of his supporters in the State Council robbed the young Ivan of friends as well as treasure. For one of their number, a boyarin named Vorontzov, the Prince had betrayed a marked partiality, a dangerous compliment, which brought down on the recipient’s person the practically-expressed dislike of his fellow-councillors. In solemn conclave, and in the presence of Prince and Metropolitan, the angry men of State fell murderously upon the courtier whom the Sovereign had delighted to honour, and Ivan’s entreaties, backed up by those of Makarie, could scarcely obtain a mitigation of his fate to one of exile and imprisonment. The amusements of the boy Prince, besides religious devotions, at which he was an adept, and the more legitimate forms of hunting, consisted in chasing dogs and cats over the battlements of the Kreml, and in wild gallops with his allotted companions through the streets of Moskva, in which the old and unwary were ruthlessly trampled underfoot.[138] The days of his repression were, however, drawing to a close. The fearsome Regent Ivan died in 1543, and left a commission of his sons and relatives to replace him. But the reign of the Shouyskies was doomed. The manly exercise of the chase is a valuable school for inculcating self-reliance and a will to overcome the obstacles of life. It was straight from a day’s sport in the woods of Vincennes that the grand young Louis, whip in hand, strode in upon the Parliament of Paris and quenched it with an epigram; it was after the autumn hunting at Voloko-Lamsk that Ivan Vasilievitch first showed his teeth and gave evidence of that cold-blooded severity which was to gain for him the distinctive adjective “Groznie” (Terrible). At Moskva, where the Court had assembled for the festival of Noel, the Prince suddenly accused the ruling boyarins of misgovernment and abuse of their powers; many had been guilty, but he would content himself with one example. Calling to his kennel-men he bade them seize Andrei Shouyskie and throw him to the dogs. Out into the street they dragged the unhappy man, and there, before the mute, disconcerted boyarins and the long-time Shouyskie-ridden citizens, the Prince’s hounds worried the offending kniaz to pieces in the reddening snow. “The little tin gods” had missed “the hour when great Jove wakes”; Andrei Shouyskie paid dearly for the oversight. The youth of Ivan still necessitated a regency, and his mother’s relatives, the Glinskies, next came into power; but from the day of the red Noel no liberties were taken with the young monarch. His new counsellors, indeed, encouraged him in his savage inclinations, and the chronicles give instances of callous brutalities inflicted upon Russian subjects by both Ivan and the Glinskies. A party of Novgorodskie arquebusers, who had interrupted one of the Prince’s hunting expeditions with importunities respecting their pay, were punished for their presumption by being tortured to death, and a similar ghastly fate awaited some petitioners from Pskov, upon whom was poured blazing spirits, which ignited their hair, beards, and clothes.[139]
When Ivan was in his eighteenth year he celebrated with much pomp and circumstance the double event of his coronation and his marriage with Anastasia, daughter of Roman Zakharin-Koshkin, member of a family which had migrated from Prussia to Moskva in the fourteenth century.[140]
Jan. 16, 1547
In the hallowed Ouspienskie Cathedral the Metropolitan crowned him with the title of Tzar, which was here used for the first time at the coronation of a Russian ruler. The old style of Velikie-kniaz dies out from this moment, and as the customary chant, “In plurimos annos,” swells through those dim frescoed arches, the old order seems to pass away with the wafted incense fumes. A new figure is borne into Russian history amid the striking of bells and shouting of a myriad throated multitude. The Tzar comes!
The fact of Ivan’s coronation caused no immediate change in the government of Russia, which continued to be directed by the “Vremenszhiki,” or men-of-the-season, that is to say, by the Glinskies. That their administration was iniquitous to an insupportable degree may be gathered, not only from the possibly exaggerated accounts of the chroniclers, but from the fact that long-suffering Moskva was goaded to the brink of revolution. Ivan amused himself with his religious hobbies and other less respectable diversions, and only assumed the part of Sovereign when he wished to “make an example” of some offending subject. The purging of Moskva from the vampire brood that afflicted it, and the simultaneous “reformation” of the young Tzar, form a curious episode in the history of this time. The summer of 1547 was signalised by disastrous conflagrations in the capital, the first of which broke out on the 12th April; the last and most serious occurred in June. The flames on this occasion reduced to ashes a large portion of the Kreml, the Kitai-gorod, and the outer town, and destroyed 1700 of the adult inhabitants, besides children, “who were not counted.” Amid blazing streets and rolling smoke-clouds, falling roofs and crashing cupolas, panic and anarchy reigned supreme. The populace, rendered unreasonable by terror and hatred, loudly denounced the Glinskies as the authors of the calamity; in particular, Anna Glinski, Ivan’s maternal grandmother, was accused of sprinkling the streets of Moskva with a decoction of boiled human hearts, which apparently possessed inflammable qualities unknown to science. Urii Glinski, the Tzar’s uncle, was seized by the enemies of his party and slain in the sanctuary of a sacred building, and the infuriated townsfolk penetrated into the country palace at Vorobiev, whither Ivan had retreated, with a demand for more Glinskies. At this moment a thing happened which, in the accounts of the earlier Russian historians, recalls Edinburgh before the battle of Flodden. A “holy man of Novgorod,” one Silvestr, appeared on the scene and quietly annexed the soul of the Tzar. The people had attributed the conflagrations to the Glinskies; more critical and dispassionate examiners have been inclined to suspect the Shouyskie faction of complicity in the matter. Silvestr, however, put a different complexion on the affair and announced that the partial destruction of the town and burning of the 1700 inhabitants and unenumerated children was the work of God. As he supported this theory by producing “visions,” there could be no further doubt on the matter—none, at least, with Ivan, who saw the visions.[141] The conscience-stricken young man, convinced that the Glinski administration was as unpopular with heaven as it was with the Moskvitchi, since such heroic measures had been taken to displace it, surrendered himself, body and soul, into the hands of Silvestr, who, needless to say, made a clean sweep of the Vremenszhiki and replaced them with his own friends. Without ruthlessly disturbing the halo of romance and sanctity which has been fastened upon the man of Novgorod, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that the monk was an old acquaintance of Ivan—who was a frequent visitor to all the religious establishments within his reach—and took advantage of the popular excitement and general disorder to upset the palace intrigues of both the Glinski and Shouyskie factions. That Silvestr, and the equally nebulous layman, Adashev, whom he associated with him in the new government, exercised a restraining and beneficent influence on the young Prince may well be believed; with an opposition of watchful and resentful nobles in the background, circumspection was essential, and Ivan, who had seen a consuming fire, an angry populace, and a frowning Providence threatening him on all sides, was likely to be a docile pupil. For the time. The austere and monkish repression of the latest Vremenszhiki was the finishing touch necessary to perfect the education of the Terrible Tzar.
The early part of Ivan’s reign, and the whole of the preceding one, are characterised by the recurrence at irregular periods of a deliberate campaign against Kazan. The Russians seem to have borrowed the tactics of the wolves which inhabited their steppes and forests, and to have leisurely and persistently wearied their quarry down, without caring to rush in and dispatch it. Again and again did the Tzar summon from the far corners of his dominions an enormous army, trail forth his ponderous siege-pieces and sacred banners, take an affecting farewell of his capital, and march upon the Tartar city. The wooden walls were relentlessly battered down, the garrison reduced to the last extremity, and then the Moskovite hosts would return home in good order. The walls were easily rebuilt and the Kazanese would pursue the even tenor of their way. It would almost appear as though the Russians were loth to irrevocably destroy the only enemy against whom they warred with any comfort. A more feasible explanation is that the Kazanese supplemented their feeble defences by a judicious outlay of the metal which corrupts, and that some of the Moskovite voevodas did not return empty-handed from these abortive expeditions. In 1552 Ivan determined to set once more in motion the huge army which had been left quartered on the frontiers of Kazan, a locality which had had a demoralising effect on the troops, many of whom had shaved off their beards to please the Tartar maidens who for the time being under-studied their wives, “to prove,” remarked a scandalised messenger from the Metropolitan, “by the indecent nudity of your faces, that you have shame to be men.” Familiarity had bred contempt, and the dwellers in the city by the Volga’s shore scornfully refused to open their gates at the approach of the 150,000 footmen and the 150 cannon which the Tzar brought against them. The Moskovites prepared for a long and obstinate resistance, and by way of a beginning erected and dedicated three pavilion churches in their camp. Events justified their expectations; the Kazanese held out stoutly against both the assaults of the besiegers and the offers of the Tzar. August and September passed in continual sorties and battles without the walls, skirmishing attacks by the Kozaks in the tzarskie army, and mining operations by the German engineers. The overwhelming forces and superior artillery which Ivan was able to bring against the city at length beat down the heroic defence, and the triumphant Moskovites put their stubborn and still resisting enemies to the sword. The Tzar is said to have been moved to tears at the sight of so many Tartar corpses; “they are not Christians,” he observed, “but yet they are men.” The reduction of Kazan was an event of the first importance in Russian annals. It marked an epoch. “The victory of Ivan the Terrible is the first great revenge of the vanquished over the vanquishers ... the first stage reached by European civilisation in taking the offensive towards Asia.”[142] Prudence suggested that Ivan should remain on the scene of his conquest until his authority over the neighbouring districts was assured; a desire to return to his capital in the full flush of triumph prompted him to disregard more solid considerations. He was still very young. The newly-acquired territory was therefore left under the united protection of the Christ, the Virgin, the Russian intercessory saints, and Aleksandr Shouyskie. Ivan, on his homeward way, received the welcome intelligence that his wife had given birth to a son, the Tzarevitch Dimitri, first of a series of Ivanovitches so named. The prolonged rejoicings, banquetings, and thanksgivings which ensued at Moskva were followed by a disagreeable sequel; Kazan, despite the august protection under which it had been left, rose in revolt, and the Russian ascendency was seriously imperilled.
1553
The Tzar’s health at the same time broke alarmingly down, and another long minority seemed to threaten the State. The boyarins and princes, summoned to take an oath of allegiance to the infant Dimitri, showed a strong reluctance to bind themselves down in the manner required; the succession of Ivan’s child to the Tzardom would mean a Romanov regency and a repetition of the faction intrigues which had attended the early years of the present reign. Urii, the Tzar’s brother, appears to have been a weakling in mind and body, too feeble even to decorate with the divine attributes of monarch; in Vladimir Andreievitch, the Tzar’s first cousin, however, there existed a possible candidate for the throne, and even Silvestr and Adashev hesitated between the claims of the hereditary and collateral succession. The oath, whatever its value might be, was exacted from the unwilling courtiers, but Ivan’s recovery prevented the necessity of testing it. The convalescent Tzar, in spite of the remonstrances of his advisers, set off on a course of shrine visiting, taking with him his unfortunate offspring, who was scarcely of an age to stand such energetic piety. In fact he died on the journey. The pilgrimage of Ivan was, if the chroniclers and some of the later historians are to be believed, disastrous in another fashion. Among the religious establishments visited was the Piesnoshkie monastery, wherein was caged an interesting prisoner. Vassian, Bishop of Kolumna in the reign of Vasili, had been deprived of his episcopal office during the time of the regencies on account of his evil life; now, in the decrepitude of age, he is represented as harbouring with unquenched passion the unholy frettings of a sin-warped mind. Ivan desired an interview with the hoary reprobate; perhaps after a course of devotions among a community of irreproachable saints, living and departed, he was attracted by the rare personality of a sometime bishop who was no better than he should be. The monk-with-a-past seized the grand opportunity to poison the monarch’s mind against his boyarins, his relations, and his subjects, and Ivan drank in with greedy ears the vicious counsels of the unhallowed recluse. It is a fascinating picture, the aged priest who had eaten his heart out in helpless bitterness these many years, and chafed against the restraint of his prison-cell, given at last one deadly moment of revenge in which to work a superb evil against the society that had mishandled him. And as the Tzar went out from his presence a changed man, might not the ex-prelate have flung a crowning blasphemy at his heaven and chanted exultingly nunc dimittis? Ivan, indeed, in the hands of the chroniclers, is a creature easily swayed; a monk from Novgorod tells him to be good, and he straightway abandons the wrong-headed sins of his wayward youth and becomes an exemplary monarch, till a monk of Piesnoshkie gives him dark and evil counsel, and sends him forth upon the world with a cankered, blood-lusting soul.
The Tzar’s return to health was accompanied by a return of Moskovite prosperity. Another Tzarevitch, Ivan, replaced the dead Dimitri; Kazan was gradually Kozaked into submission, and received a bishop as a mark of special favour. Another conquest equally important was achieved without bloodshed. The Astrakhanese having insulted the envoys of Moskovy, a small but well-equipped army was sent against them, with the result that this khanate, once the head-country of the redoubtable Golden Horde, acknowledged Ivan’s sovereignty and yielded equal rights in the Volga fishery to his Great Russian subjects.
1554
The Nogai Tartars, occupying the intermediate steppes, submitted at the same time to the Moskovite dominion, and the Russian state, still cut off from the Black Sea, to which in the tenth century it had given its name,[143] wriggled its way down to the Kaspian.
The acquisition of the two Tartar sovereignties, while giving increased importance and security to Ivan’s dominions, and opening up a valuable trade with Persia and other eastern countries, did not tend to make Moskovy less Asiatic, or bring her closer into the European family. The Tzar’s political ambitions turned naturally towards the west. With a sagacity equal to that of his most celebrated successor, and in opposition to the advice of his counsellors, he wished to find a free outlet for communication with the great Empire-Republic (which, though decaying in organisation, was at this moment so instinct with life), and with Europe generally. The death of Sigismund of Poland (1548) and the accession of his son, Sigismund-August, had scarcely affected the grudgingly pacific relations between the two countries, though their common grievance against the Krim Tartars seemed to warrant the hope of a more cordial understanding. With Sweden the Moskovites waged one of those short inconclusive wars, in which neither party seemed to have any definite object in view, beyond the fact that they “lived unhappily” as neighbours.
1557
A forty years’ truce concluded the hostilities between these ancient enemies. It was about this time that some adventurous merchant-seamen of the city of London “discovered” Moskovy, by way of the White Sea, and opened up a commercial and diplomatic intercourse between the two isolated nations who were one day to come face to face with each other on the roof of the world. The country, however, towards which Ivan’s thoughts were chiefly turned was the uniquely governed Baltic land, comprising Estland, Livland, and Kourland, and the adjacent islands of Dago and Oesel. The extinction of the Prussian section of the Order had necessarily weakened the Livlandish branch, and the spread of Lutheran ideas had further added to the confusion which reigned throughout the Baltic burghs. Nowhere, perhaps, in Europe did bishops wield such extensive temporal powers, and the fact that local opinion ran strongly in the direction of the reformed principles and of secularisation made the immediate future of these districts a very open question. Ivan had a solution of the difficulty which he was not loth to put into practice. A grievance he undoubtedly had against the Livlanders, who had hindered his intercourse with the Hansa League and prevented free immigration of artificers and craftsmen from the Empire into Russia. Consequently he suddenly bethought him of the clause in the original truce with von Plettenberg, whereby an annual tribute from the town of Dorpat had been agreed to, and promptly lost sight of. The Tzar reminded the Livlandish envoys of this unremembered pledge, and refused to renew the truce until the arrears had been paid in full.
1557
The representatives of the Land-Master and the sovereign bishops argued and promised, but they did not pay, and Ivan prepared for war. Von Fürstenberg vainly endeavoured to rouse his subordinates and coadjutors to a sense of the coming danger. The Bishop of Dorpat hastily declined the offer of a few companies of lanzknechts, whose loosely disciplined habits he well remembered; he had forgotten the Russians.
1558
In January three divisions of Moskovite, Tartar, and Tcherkess troops, under the command of a Glinski, a Romanov, and an erstwhile Khan of Kazan, rode into the Order territory and wasted Livland and Estland to within four miles of Revel.[144] The outskirts of Dorpat were burnt, and the invaders returned from this preliminary winter campaign with a heavy spoil of cannons, church bells, treasure, and captives. A contemporary account accuses the Tartars of fiendish cruelties upon the hapless inhabitants who fell into their clutches; among other fantastically devised tortures, men were fastened on to the ground, holes punctured into their sides, and gunpowder poured therein, which being ignited, sent the victims into shreds.[145] Ivan’s object in sending war and desolation careering through the land was to bring the various factors which composed its government into subjection to his authority, as the Prussian State had been brought under the sovereignty of Poland. The Livlanders still imagined that peace might be bought, and at a Landtag held at Wolmar in March it was resolved to send envoys to the Tzar with an offer of 60,000 thalers. Ivan refused to receive the ambassadors, and the chances of reconciliation were still further lessened by an outbreak of hostilities between the opposing fortresses of Narva and Ivangorod, the former of which was captured by the Russians. The war recommenced with renewed vigour on the part of the invaders; the defending forces were too hopelessly disorganised to offer an effective resistance to the Moskovite attack. Churchmen and Ordermen, nobles and burghers, blamed each other mutually, and the luckless peasantry (who since their conversion to Christianity by the Sword Brethren had scarcely been surfeited with the peace and goodwill which had been officially promised them) suffered at the hands of all. Dorpat, Neuhausen, Ringen, and many other strongholds fell before the assaults of the Moskovites, and Ivan’s troops extended their ravages into Kourland. But meanwhile significant events had been taking place at the headquarters of the Order. Von Fürstenberg had resigned his office to a younger man, Gotthard Kettler, and this new chief had inaugurated vigorous measures whereby to save, if possible, some fragment from the ruin of the rapidly dissolving anachronism which had held together for over 300 years. The Kings of Poland, Sweden, and Denmark were appealed to for assistance, and a more spirited opposition was shown to the Tzar’s voevodas. A half-hearted irruption of the Krim Khan, Devlet Girei, into Moskovite territory towards the close of the year did not materially weaken Ivan’s grip upon the struggling provinces, but in the following May, through the mediation of the new King of Denmark (Frederick II.), an armistice of six months was granted to the distressed Livlanders.
1559
Kettler, the Archbishop of Riga (Wilhelm Hohenzollern), an