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But the sins of Vladimir's pagan manhood lived after him. Seven sons, by various legitimate mothers, claimed the succession to his dominions, and there ensued such bloody anarchy as the handsome Teutonic princes, no matter what gods they worshipped, knew how to create. As usual the fitter to survive in such a world--the more lusty and less scrupulous--emerged from the struggle, and Prince Iaroslaf, one of the heroes of early Russian history, reunited the various regions under his rule.

Iaroslaf has been compared, not quite ineptly, to Charlemagne. From Novgorod, which his father had left him, he cut his way to Kieff, and definitely made the southern city the metropolis of the country. Kieff was enriched and adorned with a splendour which, in the mind of the Russians, rivalled that of Constantinople. The southern rivers now bore thousands of Greek artists and architects, musicians and scholars, priests and courtiers, to the new capital of barbarism. Four hundred churches soon shone like gilt mushrooms in the summer sun, and the grateful clergy discovered that a monarchy which rested on a divine foundation in Constantinople could hardly have an inferior basis in Kieff. Iaroslaf, it is true, was not a monarch in title, Russia had no constitution or political organisation. It was still semi-barbaric in culture and judicial procedure. The duel, the ordeal, and the payment of blood-money still flourished, and literacy existed only in the form of feeble lamps here and there in the vast darkness. It must be remembered that Constantinople itself was, with all its splendour of gold and mosaics and jewels and silks, half barbaric in its moral complexion. The most sordid and brutal crimes disgraced its palace-life on the shores of the Sea of Marmora, and the most revolting penalties of vice and crime were publicly inflicted. The discovery by modern apologists that there was a glow-worm here and there does not relieve the terrible gloom of the Dark Ages.

The burden fell most heavily upon the scattered peasantry. Not only were the "legitimate" taxes wrung from them, but the military leaders exacted tribute to support their own splendour and pleasure. The feudal system, which now prevailed over the remainder of Europe, was not introduced. The land was still the possession of the people, and military chiefs remained about the court instead of raising, as they did where stone abounded, massive provincial castles from which they might enslave the peasantry and even defy the ruler. But in their excursions the soldiers behaved as wantonly as feudal barons of the west, and the people sank under the burden. Slavery still flourished in Christendom, and many a Slav found his way to the distant market at Constantinople. Moreover, under the degenerate Greek influence there was introduced the practice of flogging and torture which the rough chivalry of the northerners had hitherto avoided.

To say that the unity of faith, the protection against invaders, and the introduction of art and a small amount of mediocre culture compensate for these evils is an historical mockery. The death of Iaroslaf at once revealed the insecurity and selfishness of the regime he had established. It was followed by two hundred years of civil warfare and murderous confusion. Eighty-three struggles which seem worthy of the name of wars devastated Russia during those two centuries, and over the enfeebled frontiers the waiting tribes repeatedly poured while the guardians of the Russian people slew each other for their petty principalities. Sons, legitimate and illegitimate, abounded in that world of blond warriors, and the successful chief provided for each out of his dominion. Titles were disputed, or the old title of the longer sword was boldly advanced. A dozen large principalities were carved out of the princedom of Iaroslaf, and fragments of these were constantly detached by heredity and restored by war.

It is not my intention to follow the grisly chronicles over this prolonged anarchy and select for admiration the heroic butcheries of some strong-armed soldier. For our purpose it suffices to notice that the mass of the Russian people were, as a rule, the passive and suffering spectators of this brutal pandemonium. During the summers they sowed and gathered their corn and flax, and the long winters occupied them with the making of clothes and the quest of fur. The Mir was still the centre of every village. But a tithe of its produce had now to go to sustain this costly petty monarchy, a tithe to support the whitened monasteries and gold-domed churches, and a tithe to repair the damage when the tornado of civil war or some fierce band of Asiatics had passed over their district. There were, we shall see, provinces of Russia where the larger intelligence of the townsmen saw that the proper thing to do was to form a strong republic, armed in its own defence. These still hated "tyranny" and sustained the old tradition of the race. But the greater part of the Russian people were not sufficiently developed to perceive this, or were too scattered to achieve it, and they sank under the military power they had invited to serve them.

A few pages borrowed from the story of this dark period of anarchy will suffice to explain how Russia was prepared for the later schemes of the Moscovites. Kieff remained "the mother of Russian cities," and it was natural that, as its princes founded petty princedoms here and there for their descendants, the more ambitious of these should invent a title to the rule of the metropolis itself or found rival cities. One of the chief of these new principalities was Suzdal, on the Volga and the Oka. Here, at the extremity of the Russia of the time, a large dominion was created out of the marshes and forests, and braced by incessant conflicts with the neighbouring Finns. George Dolgoruki, who, after failing to get Kieff, had founded this principality, regarded it as in an especial sense his own creation and possession, and his monarchic sentiment was strengthened.

Kieff still had an immeasurably greater splendour, and was in closer touch with Constantinople. Andrew raised a large army and led it south against the metropolis. A three days' siege was followed by three days of such pillage that Kieff lost forever its supremacy. Even the churches and monasteries were looted, and the golden treasures of both palace and cathedral were carried off to enrich the aspiring city of Vladimir. Flushed with this and other triumphs Andrew then turned his arms against the republic of Novgorod, where the old democratic spirit was best preserved, and, after fierce fighting, compelled it to accept a prince of his own nomination. He extended his rule in other directions, setting a conspicuous example of autocracy and ambition to the Princes of Moscow who would later issue from his blood. But Russia was not yet reduced to the state of servility which Andrew's design of supremacy required. In 1174 his powerful boyars rebelled and assassinated him, and the oppressed people rose in turn and vented their democratic sentiment in the pillage and slaughter of the rich.

This is but one outstanding figure amidst the host of brutal soldiers or scheming princes who fill the chronicle of the time with blood. It is a wearisome repetition of the same process. A strong or unscrupulous man unites a large part of Russia under his sway, then a group of less strong, but not less ambitious, sons and grandsons fight for the spoil over the helpless bodies of the peasantry. Those who succeed must reward their boyars and the clergy, and the land of Russia passes more and more into the hands of large proprietors and is worked by slaves. "If you want the honey, you must kill the bees," was the characteristic remark of one of these descendants of Rurik, as he despatched his victims; and the little restraint which their new faith imposed upon them may be gathered from the flippant retort of another princeling, who was accused of breaking an oath solemnly made over a cross: "It was only a little cross."

Even Novgorod, we saw, felt the heavy hand of Andrew of Vladimir, and the remainder of Russia steadily lost its vitality under the drain of civil war. Upon this distracted and enfeebled population there now fell an autocratic ruler of the most arbitrary character. The year 1237 is, in the chronicles, one of calamities and portents. The fires which so often devoured the timber settlements of the Slavs were more numerous and destructive than ever. Drought and famine made haggard faces over large regions, and from the sky a terrifying eclipse and other portents seemed to mock their prayers for deliverance. As the dreadful year passed a new evil broke upon them. Into the southern principalities poured crowds of fugitives from the east, who told that immense hordes of ferocious and inhuman horsemen were covering the land and completing its desolation. Toward the close of the year the first wave of the Tatars shook the southern frontiers of the Slavs.

Asia had, as well as Europe, its adventurers, and the baleful dream of conquest had lit the imagination of a Tatar chief, Dchingis Khan, amidst the dreary wastes of Siberia. Gathering about him the rough tribes of his race, a swarm of hardy shepherds who knew not what a house, much less a city, was, he led them against the civilisation of the south. His men lived in the saddle, and each was a master in the use of the bow, the sabre, and the lance. Camels and buffaloes bore their scanty possessions, and they moved with all the speed of devouring nomads. The villages of Manchuria, the tame and placid cities of China, and all the wide spaces of central Asia were successively overrun and forced to pay tribute. From the civilised Chinese the wonderful and profoundly ignorant barbarian quickly learned the art of gathering taxes and enjoying luxury, and he moved further west in a vague design of conquering the earth.

This strange and terrifying horde, a cloud of fiercely yelling centaurs with troops of animals which no Russian had ever seen, first fell upon the southern Russians in 1224. Their method was to press the peasantry into their service and attempt to disarm the towns with hollow assurances of friendship, but, in whatever way the town was taken, there followed a merciless slaughter and a thorough pillage. The Russians, alarmed by the reports of the outlying tribes, sent out a great army to meet the Mongols on the steppes, and were crushingly defeated. The Mongols had, however, retired to Asia, where their dominion was not solidly established, and it was a vaster army, under a new Khan, that appeared in the south of Russia in 1237.

From 1237 to 1240 the Khan Batu led his army of 600,000 men, with appalling destruction, across the various principalities of Russia. Weakened by their feuds, severed by their selfish rivalries, the various provinces fell one by one under the feet of the merciless invaders. Rape, murder, fire, and pillage were the invariable sequels of success. The Russians appealed to the nations of the nearer west to help them to dam this Asiatic flood, but the Latin Christians were not minded to stir themselves for semi-barbarians who did not respect the Pope. When the Khan passed over the prostrate body of Russia and advanced still further, in his determination to conquer an earth of which he knew less than a child in a modern infant-school, the Poles and Hungarians at length spread their barrier of steel across his path. But the check did not now profit Russia. Batu retired upon Russia, built a city, Sarai, on the banks of the Volga , and began a life of organised parasitism upon the unfortunate people. The comparative unity brought about by their Norse defenders had prepared the way for the Khan. The Khan was to prepare the way for the Moscovite.

Again we may ignore the crowded details, the rise and fall and eternal feuds of petty princes, of the Russian chronicle. What matters is that the entire country which was then known as Russia was overspread by a network of tax-gatherers, and the people learned to tremble at the commands of a distant autocrat. At Sarai the Mongols established a court of barbaric magnificence, and this in time declared itself independent of the Tatar Empire in Asia and sought the nourishment of its luxury in Russia. The western sovereignty came to be known throughout Europe as the Golden Horde, and the western nations heard with indifference the cynical extravagance and the occasional brutality with which it treated schismatic Slavs.

No prince could now don his tattered dignity in Russia without the august permission of the semi-civilised ruler on the Volga, and a system was soon evolved which enabled the courtiers and concubines of the Khan to share the good fortune of their lord. In the constant disputes about succession claimants to the various Slav principalities made the perilous journey to Sarai, and the richness of the presents they brought sufficed to illumine the obscurity of their titles. Occasionally a prince whose loyalty to the Mongols was suspected was summoned to Sarai, and not a few who could not pass the humiliating tests left their bones among the Mohammedan Tatars. To those who bent their backs or tendered the cup with servile respect the Khan was gracious. They returned with power to extort the taxes for the Tatars and a large additional sum for themselves. If their people or rival princes were restive, a troop of the dreaded Tatar horse was put at their disposal, and the lash and the sabre cowed every attempt at revolt. The spying and flogging with which the servants of the Khan protected their master's interests were copied by the Slav-Norse princes. The Byzantine civilisation had itself introduced many devices of autocratic barbarism, for the jails of Constantinople, especially the dungeons of the superb imperial palace, witnessed ghastly tortures and mutilations. The cruelty of the Asiatic completed this machinery of the later Tsars; and the Princes of Moscow were the readiest of all to be the tax-gatherers of the Khan and the pupils of his unscrupulous ministers.

The scattered Slavs had, after the three or four years of terror, returned from the forests to their burned villages and their plundered towns. The gold and silver had gone from their churches: the inmates of their nunneries were the playthings of the Asiatic officers: their democracy was a mockery. Their industry soon healed the torn face of the country, but lands and lives now belonged to the foreign master. One-tenth of all their produce must be paid in taxes, and they might at any time be summoned to do military service. Kieff was in large part a ruin; Suzdal, Moscow, Riazan, and other cities were despoiled. Even Novgorod and Pskoff had, after a bloody resistance, to present their fleece to the shearer.

The miserable condition of the Slavs was further darkened by the behaviour of their Christian neighbours on the west. The Swedes, pleading that the men of Novgorod hindered the conversion to the true faith of the remaining pagans of the north, induced the Pope to declare a holy crusade, with the customary spiritual and temporal advantages, against Russia, and a zealous army advanced against Novgorod. It was shattered, but the Catholic zeal of the west was not extinguished. The Knights of the Sword, the German order which enforced baptism as truculently as the early Mohammedans had enforced the Koran, next appeared on the Russian frontier, and took Pskoff. The Teutonic adventurers were not less formidable in white mantle and red cross than they had been in the dress of the pagan Norsemen, and were hardly less ferocious, but they had to retreat before the stalwart Novgorodians. In the fourteenth century, however, the united Lithuanians and Poles crossed into Russia and added to the miseries of the people. Only half a dozen of the Russian principalities could hold out against the invaders. The Tatars were now in decay, and the red spears of the Lithuanian knights were even seen as far south as the Black Sea.

THE name Moscow has up to the present entered so little into the chronicle that we must retrace our steps and briefly consider its origin. Three successive types of rulers prepared the way for the Romanoff dynasty: the Norsemen, the Tatars, and the Princes of Moscow, or the Moscovites. We have now to see how the third class rose upon the ruins of the Tatar dominion, maintained the evil machinery of subjection which it had constructed, and brought "all the Russias" under a new despotism.

In the year 1147 the Prince of Suzdal, George Dolgoruki, found a village, the site of which is now covered by the opulent Kreml, on the banks of the Moscowa, and is said to have conceived an affection for it. His patronage cannot have extended far, since we find that it remains an obscure village, or small town, for more than a century. It then passed, with a few other towns, to a son of the heroic Alexander Nevski, who enlarged his little principality and bequeathed it to an even less scrupulous brother.

George Danielovitch laid claim to the principality of Tver and took very powerful arguments to enforce his claim, in the shape of handsome presents, to the Mongol court at Sarai. He got his title, a sister of the Khan for wife, and a Mongol army; but he did not get the principality, and the Khan, scenting a larger bargain, summoned both claimants to Sarai. There George ended the argument by having his rival assassinated. He in turn was assassinated, and a terrible feud subsisted for half a century between Moscow and Tver. Ivan, the successor of George, secured another Mongol army to reduce Tver, induced the Khan to remove his rival to another world, and entered upon a series of annexations and purchases which made Moscow the centre of a fairly large dominion, the seat of an archbishop, and a prosperous soil for churches and monasteries; for the piety of all these lords of Moscow was even more conspicuous than their craft and insidious truculence.

Nor was this lack of unity the only reproach which we may bring against the princes who had torn the land in their selfish struggles for supremacy. Round the whitened monasteries and gilded shrines the feuds of the princes had gone on without intermission for so many centuries that the blood ran thin in the veins of Russia. It had neither the vitality nor the organisation required to meet its external foes, and every few years some hostile army scattered the customary desolation over the country. On every side, also, were troops of free lances and brigands, who constantly swooped upon the miserable peasantry. It is the claim of the orthodox historians that the Moscovite princes we have now to describe rescued Russia from this degradation, and we must examine their methods, their motives, and their attainments.

Ivan ascended the petty throne of Moscow in the year 1462. The city of Moscow was at that time still little more than a large cluster of mud-huts, with a few streets of merchants, about the princely palace and the rich shrines. Ivan looked to his revenues and before long was confronted with the firm refusal of the citizens of Novgorod to pay the tribute he demanded. The Grand Prince proceeded with his habitual craft. Instead of setting out to enforce his demands, he formulated a complaint that the Russian people of Novgorod were oppressed by a wealthy faction, and that this faction contemplated an alliance with the heretics of Poland. We may assume that there was some truth in the charges. Novgorod, still democratic and independent, still proud of the popular parliament on its market-place, was full of factions. In such a city a mutual hostility of rich and poor was inevitable, and Ivan's agents seem to have encouraged the aggrieved workers to appeal to him against what were represented to be the oligarchs. The wealthier and more powerful faction was led by a woman named Marfa, and may very well have contemplated an alliance with Poland against the ambitions of Moscow.

It will be gathered that the power of the Mongols had now sunk too low to arrest the progress of Moscow. On an earlier page we have seen how Timur had come from Asia and chastised the Khans who had dared to set up an independent sovereignty in Europe. For some reason Timur did not overrun Russia as his predecessor had done. The clerical traditions of Russia attribute the escape to one of the miracles which seem to have been so frequent in that age, but the superior attractions of the new Ottoman Empire in the south, which was then displacing Greece and taking over its treasures, may be regarded as a more satisfactory explanation.

Ivan's troops, which did not share the timidity of their high commander, next reduced Bulgaria, and the death of his brothers enabled Ivan to add still further, and with less title, to his dominions. His brother Andrew was, in 1493, accused of the usual perfidy and corresponding with the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. He was thrown into prison, and there he conveniently died. Ivan summoned his bishops and monks and, as the tears trickled down his gaunt face and grey beard, confessed that he had sinned in sanctioning the cruel treatment of his brother. But he added Andrew's territory, and that of two other brothers, to his large dominion.

In the following year the lover of peace attacked the joint kingdom of Lithuania and Poland, which had so long afflicted Russia. Ivan had married his daughter to the Polish king, and had strictly stipulated that she should have entire freedom to practise the true religion amongst the adherents of the Pope. In 1494 Ivan found that this agreement was grossly disregarded, and his beloved daughter ran some peril of her soul. Later Russian historians have learned from the daughter's letters that she had no complaint except against the interested intrigues of Ivan himself. However, a holy war was proclaimed, and a good deal of western Russia was wrested from the Poles and added to the Moscovite dominion.

Ivan was by nature autocratic. He did not make counsellors of his boyars, as had been the custom, and they were compelled to learn the art of silence in presence of their master. But it was Ivan's wife who directed this disposition and created a Court in harmony with it. The Turks had taken Constantinople and had driven the remnants of half a dozen rival Greek royal families, and all that remained of Greek culture, into Italy. Amongst the fugitives was the clever and ambitious niece of the last emperor, Sophia Palaeologus. The Pope, who saw in this heavy chastisement of the Greek schism a ray of hope of the reunion of Christendom, fathered the homeless princess and sought for her a useful marriage. Ivan accepted her and the Papal dowry. They were married early in his reign , and her forceful ambition was behind many of the schemes of conquest we have reviewed. It was especially she and the clergy who forced upon the prince his inglorious campaign against the Tatars.

But we may see her influence especially in the growing splendour and despotism of the Moscovite court. Bred in the sacred palace by the Bosphorus, where there still lingered, until the Turk came, some remains of the most imposing court of the old world, she was made impatient by the thin coat of gilt which covered the Russian barbarism. Accustomed to a city of marble palaces, with walls of mosaic or porphyry, with bronze gates guarded by hundreds of silk-clad servants, and gold and silver vessels so heavy that they had to be lifted on to the tables by mechanical devices, she knew how to use the increasing wealth of her husband's kingdom. He was now the successor of Constantine and the Roman Emperors. The two-headed eagle, which had been the blatant emblem of Greek vanity, passed with the hand of Sophia to Moscow, and was emblazoned on the banners and plate of the new dynasty. Ivan did not take the title of "Tsar." His grandson would complete his work.

In the court the oppressive servility and childish pageantry of the Byzantine palace were encouraged. Golden mechanical lions barked before a golden throne, as they had done at Constantinople, and filled the visitor with mingled admiration and disdain. A very numerous guard of nobles, in high white fur caps and long caftans of white satin, with heavy silver axes on their shoulders, protected the sacred person of the monarch, and crowds of courtiers in cloth of gold or bright silk, with costly necklaces round their necks, vied with each other in flattery of speech and humility of demeanour. Yet these glittering aristocrats still carried a spoon in their jewelled girdles, for knives and forks were not yet substituted for fingers at a Russian feast.

Riazan was the next victim. The familiar crime of corresponding with heretics--with the Khan of the Crimea--was charged against its prince, and the fertile province was added to the Moscow principality. Vassili recovered territory also from the Tatars and the Lithuanians. Russia expanded rapidly, and the splendour and autocracy of the court proportionately increased. There was now only one court for the innumerable descendants of the earlier princes and boyars, and the sternness of the competition for rewards made the nobles more and more sycophantic. Even less than his father did Vassili ask the counsel of his boyars.

The death of Vassili in 1533 led to a romantic and important interlude. Vassili's first wife had been thrust into a convent on the ground that she could not furnish an heir to the brilliant throne. Whether or no it is true that she disturbed the solitude of the cloister with the pangs of motherhood, it seems clear that the chief motive for the divorce was that Vassili had fallen in love with the very pretty and capable daughter of a Lithuanian refugee, Helena Glinski. Helena gave birth to two sons, but the eldest was only three years old at the time of his father's death. The mother vigorously grasped the regency and held power from the furious boyars. Only the Master of Horse, Prince Telepnieff, was allowed to share her despotism, as he shared her affection. The nobles split into factions, and they presently found that the easy-going princess could use the most truculent machinery of despotism. When the heads of a few of them had fallen, they poisoned Helena and her lover, and there followed a sordid scramble for power and plunder.

Now of the two children of Helena one was the boy who would live, even in the history of Russia, as "Ivan the Terrible." Ingenious historians have found a milder meaning for this epithet, or discovered that Ivan underwent some strange degeneration in his later years. But the boy who was brought up amidst dogs and grooms, who for sheer pleasure cast his dogs from the walls of his palace and watched them writhe, who stabbed his favourite jester for the most trifling fault, is the same Ivan who in later years soaked petitioners in brandy and set fire to them. His impulses were barbaric, and the unhappy features of his education had stimulated rather than curbed them. He was eight years old at the time his mother was murdered, but he was clever, observant, and self-conscious. He saw the boyars plunder the palace, which was now his, and fleece the long-suffering country. He noticed that any servant to whom he became attached was removed or murdered. He read much, and he grew up rapidly in his solitary world.

And during the Christmas festivities of 1543 Ivan, then thirteen years old, summoned his boyars before him and let loose upon them an unexpected storm of reproach. Andrew Chiuski, the most powerful of them, he handed over at once to his groom-attendants--one wonders how far they had inspired this precocious display--and the great noble was soon dispatched. One account runs that by Ivan's orders he was torn to pieces by the hounds: others say that the grooms acted without orders. Other nobles were banished. The short golden age of the boyars was over. The shadow of a sterner autocracy than ever began to creep over the court.

Ivan had himself crowned in January, 1547, and he chose the title, which now first appears, of "Tsar of all the Russias." Shortly afterwards he announced that he would marry, and his servants arranged the kind of matrimonial parade which had been customary at Constantinople when a prince was to wed. A preliminary survey was made of the daughters of all the nobles of the kingdom, and fifteen hundred of the most healthy and beautiful of them were brought to Moscow and crowded into the palace. A medical examination ensured that they were virtuous enough to wed a prince who was already expert in every variety of vice, and Ivan made the round of the trembling maids. He chose the lovely daughter of a small noble named Roman, a man of either Prussian or Lithuanian extraction. Anastasia Romanovna became the first Tsarina and the founder of the fortune of the Romanoff family. It was in the same year that Ivan had some deputies, who came from Pskoff to set out the grievances of the town, soaked in brandy and set afire.

The boyars were still powerful. In the same year, 1547, a fire destroyed a great part of Moscow, and the nobles charged it to the account of the Tsar's maternal relatives. The homeless people heard with horror that the Glinskis had stewed human hearts and watered the streets with the magic brew, and they fell upon the Glinski palaces. Even the young Tsar wavered for a moment, and the boyars gained ground. Three years later, however, he summoned a great assembly of all orders of the people--except "the Christians," who counted no longer--in the Red Square in front of the Kreml and impeached the boyars. Reforms were introduced in the holding of land and the administration of justice, and an arrangement was made for the presentation of complaints.

Ivan was still young, and the insolence of the boyars continued. In 1553 he was dangerously ill, and he was aware that they plotted to put a cousin of his upon the throne instead of reserving it for his infant son. Ivan was, like his grandfather, not a man of much personal courage, and he continued nervously to tolerate the opposition and corruption of the nobles. In 1560 he impeached and disgraced their leaders, Sylvester and Adacheff. His wife Anastasia had died, and he suspected poison. A state of intolerable friction and danger now set in, and in the middle of the winter of 1564 all Moscow was alarmed to see a great imperial cort?ge leave the palace and retire to the country. Ivan had packed on waggons his plate and treasures, his furniture and sacred ikons; and his court and followers went with him on his strange adventure. The correspondence which followed ended in a curious compromise. Ivan virtually divided Russia into two parts. The greater part of it was to be ruled by the boyars, the remainder by himself and his court.

But the young Tsar had reserved the right to punish treason, and on his return to Moscow he created the machinery by which he could do so. He formed a special guard of a thousand picked boyars and sons of boyars, and the dog's head which he gave them as emblem indicated his disposition. A reign of terror followed. Thousands of nobles and their followers were slain with every circumstance of brutality. Such legends grew out of the red terror that we handle them with some reserve, but we have a document in which Ivan coldly commends to the prayers of the Church 3,470 victims--nobles and priests, men, women, and children--of his new policy. Prince Vladimir and his mother were killed; and there is no grave reason to doubt the story that they were murdered in Ivan's presence, and that he then had their maids stripped, whipped through the streets, and shot or cut down as they ran. Naked exposure and scourging were common incidents of the terror.

Ivan, we must remember, was not a burly monster, cruel from his own indifference to suffering. He was rather a nervous, calculating man, shrinking behind soldiers chosen for their brutality, coldly following a policy of terror. When he had sacked the shops and palaces, and ravaged the whole territory of Novgorod, he turned upon Pskoff. It is recorded to his credit that he murdered none in that innocent city, but he relieved it of its wealth and banished many of the leading citizens. He entered Moscow with all the pomp of a great Roman conqueror, and soon set up his bloody tribunal in the capital. Hundreds were executed, and the most barbarous torture was inflicted even upon women.

That was in 1570, and from that time onward Ivan ruled his empire by the knout and the knife. His end was as inglorious as his reign. Anastasia had given him two sons, Ivan and Feodor. The three legitimate wives and various illegitimate partners whom he took after Anastasia's death do not seem to have much enlarged his family, and Prince Ivan grew up in confident expectation of the throne. He was on such good terms with his father that one tradition speaks of them as exchanging mistresses. In 1581, however, the Tsar was annoyed with his son's wife, and, with his customary lack of restraint, he struck her with the iron-shod staff which he usually carried. She was pregnant, and the blow was fatal. His son expostulated, and the Tsar again used his staff, or spear, and inflicted a fatal wound. For a time he professed acute remorse. He shed floods of tears and declared that he was unworthy of the throne. His supporters, lay and clerical, did not share his momentary estimate of himself, and he then, it seems, entered upon a period of worse debauch than ever. We cannot very confidently pierce the darkness which falls over the palace after 1581, but it seems to have rivalled in vice the Golden House of Nero. In 1584 Ivan died.

Russian historians are apt to claim that Ivan was a great man marred by a cruel disposition and an environment which fostered it. No one will doubt either the savagery of his disposition or the barbarity and peculiar pressure of his environment, but his constructive work hardly entitles him to be called great. His domestic reforms seem to have been made out of antipathy to the boyars, and we should probably not be far wrong in attributing his other services to Russia mainly to a selfish motive. He broke the remaining power of the Finns and Mongols, slew or sold into slavery whole tribes of them, and made Russian provinces of their territory. He conquered Astrakhan and its territory, and extended the rule of Russia in the direction of Persia. He, after a long struggle, beat the Livonian Knights, and secured respectful peace from Poland and Sweden.

The greatest part of his policy was his endeavour to bring Russia into contact with the west. From Livonia to Hungary a line of fanatical Catholic powers shut out Russia from intercourse with the advancing civilisation of the west. Ivan could hardly realise the historical law that isolation means stagnation, but he did see clearly that everything new and valuable--such as muskets and cannon--came from the west. Early in his reign, in 1553, some English merchants sailed round by the Protestant north to Russia, and Ivan became passionately eager for an alliance with England. There is good ground to believe that his envoys begged for him the hand of Queen Elizabeth herself! Her contemptuous refusal, softened by diplomacy, angered him for a time, but in later life he asked at least the hand of her cousin, Mary Hastings. He had just taken on his sixth consort, and neither Mary nor Elizabeth liked the prospect. The English court, which wanted the profit of trade with Russia, was embarrassed, but as it was in the same year that the Tsar killed his son and entered upon his last sombre phase the difficulty did not remain long.

We have now seen how the Moscovites had made the new Russia--the autocratic and imperial Russia which succeeded the democratic and smaller country of the Slavs. How much "the genius of the Slav people" had to do with the creation of that autocracy the reader will now understand. We have also seen the children of a certain Roman, the Romanoffs, enter the chronicle, and we have next to see how they mount the imperial throne and found a lengthy dynasty.

THE second son of Ivan the Terrible, who now became the Tsar Feodor, was a piquant contrast to his father and brother. Not wives and mistresses, but the ornate services of the Church or long private devotions, occupied his hours. He was as meek as his father had been truculent, and the nobles began to raise their heads once more. His uncle, Nikita Romanoff, brother of the first Tsarina, naturally held the first place in his confidence and relieved him of the profane task of governing his dominions.

But the pious Feodor had married, and his wife Irene had a masterful and ambitious brother, Boris Godunoff. The Godunoffs are said to have descended from a Tatar chief, who had embraced Christianity and settled in Moscow. Irene was devoted to her brother, and she used her influence over the feeble-minded Tsar to promote him. Before long the palace was split into two factions, and the familiar struggle for power and wealth set in. Nikita Romanoff was a man of ability, but he had a more astute rival. Boris Godunoff secured two measures which greatly increased his support in Moscow and the country.

The first measure won for him the gratitude of the clergy. The Russian Church was still in effect the Greek Church. Its supreme head was the Patriarch of Constantinople, who sustained his tattered dignity among the Mohammedans. Boris induced this man to create a Patriarch of Moscow, and he thus won the increasing favour of the clergy. His other measure was one of great and terrible significance for the poor "Christians." The expansion of Russia had created large new estates, and the great land-owners continually attracted peasants away from the smaller estates. But the small land-owners, who formed the yeomanry or cavalry of the Empire, were not a body to be despised, either in the interest of the country or of an aspiring politician. It is said that in 1592 Boris played for their support by issuing an imperial decree which forbade the peasants to go from one estate to another. Some Russian historians deny this. If the document is genuine, they say, it meant only that Boris legally fixed a practice which had gradually arisen, on account of the mischief of these peasant-migrations. However that may be, there is no doubt that Boris Godunoff legally established serfdom in Russia at a time when it was being abandoned elsewhere. The peasants grumbled and suffered, but they now had upon their backs an autocracy that treated their wishes with entire contempt.

As the reign of Feodor wore on, and no son appeared, Boris pushed his ambition to greater lengths. The heir to the throne would now be the young Prince Dmitri, the son of Ivan the Terrible's seventh wife. Early in the reign of Feodor the nobles had compelled Dmitri's ambitious mother to take her infant son and her relatives to a remote provincial estate, and from that exile the mother and her kin nervously studied the failing health of Tsar Feodor and the condition of his wife. The subjection of women in Russia does not seem to have extinguished their ambition, and there was at the court itself the usual party, out of power, which espoused the hope of a possible dynasty. The court seethed once more with sordid passion.

In 1591 the Dmitri faction at court was shattered by the announcement that the young prince was dead. Boris ordered an inquiry, and as a result he announced that, owing to the carelessness of his mother in supervising him, Dmitri had committed suicide. With becoming zeal the virtual Regent forced the mother to enter a nunnery and consigned her relatives to various prisons. Moscow at large, reflecting that the tragedy removed an important obstacle from Boris's path to the throne, preferred to believe that his servants had murdered the prince. That is the general opinion of historians, but there are some who maintain that the child was not murdered at all, and that the adventurer who will presently enter the story was really Dmitri.

For the present, at all events, the way was cleared, and the death of Feodor in 1598 left the throne vacant. The nobles and people offered their allegiance to the Tsarina, but Irene, suddenly discovering a remarkable distrust of her powers and dislike of the world, fled to a nunnery. Boris had, with equal modesty, retired to the same nunnery, but his supporters worked for him, and presently the convent was sought by an impressive procession of the clergy , the boyars, and the people of Moscow, offering the crown to Boris. He declined an invitation which seemed to him to come from too small a section, and the general council of the Empire was then convoked, and it repeated the offer. After a further mockery of resistance he accepted and became Tsar Boris.

I have said that Boris Godunoff was as able a man to fill the autocracy as could have been found at that time, and he endeavoured to complete the plans of Ivan the Terrible. He kept in check Sweden and Poland, consolidated the gains in Asia, and maintained close and profitable relations with Queen Elizabeth. He encouraged Russian students to go to western countries for the completion of their education. But we are concerned with the rise of the Romanoffs and may summarise other matters.

Three years after the accession of Boris a dreadful famine spread over the land. It lasted three years, and so great was the destitution that in later years horrible stories were whispered of parents devouring their own children. Streams of the suffering country-folk poured into Moscow, and, as its own provisions were soon exhausted, the streets of the capital were filled with pale and emaciated ghosts. It is said that hundreds of thousands died in Moscow alone, and throughout the land the superstitious people spoke of the sin of Boris Godunoff in murdering the heir to the throne. The nobles themselves stirred, and Boris put into operation the usual machinery. The Romanoff family seemed to be an especial source of danger, and the chief representative of that family, Feodor Romanoff, was thrust into a monastery and buried under the monkish title of Philaret. His wife was compelled to enter a nunnery and assume the name of Marfa.

The scattered feeling of discontent at length gathered round the person of a singular adventurer. In the summer of 1604 the news spread through Russia that Dmitri, the third son of Ivan the Terrible, was not dead, but was approaching Moscow with a Polish army to oust the usurper and put an end to their miseries. Gregory Otrepieff, who is generally believed to have been "the false Dmitri," had been a roving monk who had turned brigand with a band of Cossacks. From the southern steppes he had gone to Poland, and there, it was announced, he had, believing himself to be at the point of death, revealed to a Jesuit confessor the secret of his birth and shown the priest a jewelled cross which proved his identity. The Jesuits were still in their melodramatic phase of secret conspiracy for the Church, and may well have invented, or embroidered, the story. They pressed Dmitri upon the Catholic king and nobles of Poland, and in October he crossed the frontier of Russia with an irregular force. Would the Jesuits add to their many triumphs the submission of Russia to the Vatican after so many centuries of resistance?

But the rise to power was not so speedy as the fall from it, and both give us some measure of the ignorance and barbarism of the times. Otrepieff was a clever and accomplished man, but he either lacked, or disdained to use in so credulous a world, the art of tact. He brought a Polish wife whose suite laughed at the uncouth ways of the Russians. He himself too openly railed at the backwardness of the country, surrounded himself with foreigners, and acted with scandalous independence. He was plainly, as his adventures would indicate, a sceptic, and he snapped his fingers at the Pope and the Jesuits the moment they had secured the throne for him; but he was no more respectful to the clergy and religious forms of Russia. He disdained monks and ikons, asked no blessing on his table, and refused to follow any of the court-traditions. And within a month of his entrance into the Kreml the adventurer lay dead upon the stones of its courtyard. People, amazed at their own credulity, now exclaimed that he was a sorcerer, and the spell had to be broken by blowing the ashes of his burned corpse from the mouth of a cannon.

The succession to the throne had now been interrupted, and a ruler had to be chosen. Vassili Chuiski, a military noble of distinguished family, a bald myopic man of little energy, secured the suffrages of Moscow and mounted the throne. But while the sluggishness of communication enabled Moscow thus to choose a sovereign for the entire country, it left the provinces in such a state of confusion and unsettlement that any rebel could find support there. Another Dmitri arose, and was accepted. People recollected that the real Dmitri had, like a true Russian, worn a beard, while Otrepieff had had none. The new claimant had a beard. A regiment of nobles in one province, an army of disaffected peasants and brigands in another, raised the standard of the new adventurer and united their forces within sight of Moscow. There the nobles quarrelled with and deserted their baser comrades, and the new claimant ended on a gallows.

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