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Historic Tales: The Romance of Reality. Vol. 08 (of 15), Russian

by Charles Morris · English · Gutenberg #25625 · 506,775 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Historic Tales: The Romance of Reality. Vol. 08 (of 15), Russian

Author: Charles Morris


        
Release date: May 27, 2008 [eBook #25625]
                Most recently updated: January 3, 2021

Language: English

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[Illustration: THE KREMLIN.]




  Edition d'Elite


  Historical Tales

  The Romance of Reality


  By

  CHARLES MORRIS

  _Author of "Half-Hours with the Best American Authors," "Tales from the
  Dramatists," etc._


  IN FIFTEEN VOLUMES

  Volume VIII


  Russian


  J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

  PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON




  Copyright, 1898, by J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
  Copyright, 1904, by J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
  Copyright, 1908, by J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.




_CONTENTS._

                                                          PAGE

  THE ANCIENT SCYTHIANS                                      5

  OLEG THE VARANGIAN                                        14

  THE VENGEANCE OF QUEEN OLGA                               21

  VLADIMIR THE GREAT                                        29

  THE LAWGIVER OF RUSSIA                                    41

  THE YOKE OF THE TARTARS                                   49

  THE VICTORY OF THE DON                                    55

  IVAN, THE FIRST OF THE CZARS                              60

  THE FALL OF NOVGOROD THE GREAT                            64

  IVAN THE TERRIBLE                                         74

  THE CONQUEST OF SIBERIA                                   80

  THE MACBETH OF RUSSIA                                     85

  THE ERA OF THE IMPOSTORS                                 101

  THE BOOKS OF ANCESTRY                                    110

  BOYHOOD OF PETER THE GREAT                               114

  CARPENTER PETER OF ZAANDAM                               123

  THE FALL OF THE STRELITZ                                 132

  THE CRUSADE AGAINST BEARDS AND CLOAKS                    142

  MAZEPPA, THE COSSACK CHIEF                               149

  A WINDOW OPEN TO EUROPE                                  155

  FROM THE HOVEL TO THE THRONE                             165

  BUFFOONERIES OF THE RUSSIAN COURT                        174

  HOW A WOMAN DETHRONED A MAN                              184

  A STRUGGLE FOR A THRONE                                  195

  THE FLIGHT OF THE KALMUCKS                               202

  A MAGICAL TRANSFORMATION SCENE                           220

  KOSCIUSKO AND THE FALL OF POLAND                         226

  SUWARROW THE UNCONQUERABLE                               231

  THE RETREAT OF NAPOLEON'S GRAND ARMY                     241

  THE DEATH-STRUGGLE OF POLAND                             248

  SCHAMYL, THE HERO OF CIRCASSIA                           258

  THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE                          267

  THE FALL OF SEBASTOPOL                                   276

  AT THE GATES OF CONSTANTINOPLE                           284

  THE NIHILISTS AND THEIR WORK                             293

  THE ADVANCE OF RUSSIA IN ASIA                            300

  THE RAILROAD IN TURKESTAN                                311

  AN ESCAPE FROM THE MINES OF SIBERIA                      319

  THE SEA FIGHT IN THE WATERS OF JAPAN                     329




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.


  RUSSIAN.

                                                           PAGE

  THE KREMLIN                                    _Frontispiece._

  CATHEDRAL AT OSTANKINO, NEAR MOSCOW                       40

  GENERAL VIEW OF MOSCOW                                    55

  CHURCH AND TOWER OF IVAN THE GREAT                        78

  KIAKHTA, SIBERIA                                          84

  CHURCH OF THE ASSUMPTION, MOSCOW, IN WHICH
  THE CZAR IS CROWNED                                      109

  ALEXANDER III., CZAR OF RUSSIA                           122

  DINING-ROOM IN THE PALACE OF PETER THE GREAT,
  MOSCOW                                                   136

  PETER THE GREAT                                          142

  ST. PETERSBURG HARBOR, NEVA RIVER                        156

  SLEIGHING IN RUSSIA                                      160

  A RUSSIAN DROSKY                                         189

  THE CITY OF KASAN                                        199

  SCENE ON A RUSSIAN FARM                                  223

  RUSSIAN PEASANTS                                         249

  MOUNT ST. PETER, CRIMEA                                  267

  THE WALLS OF CONSTANTINOPLE                              290

  THE ARREST OF A NIHILIST                                 297

  DOWAGER CZARINA OF RUSSIA                                300

  GROUP OF SIBERIANS                                       320




_THE ANCIENT SCYTHIANS._


Far over the eastern half of Europe extends a vast and mighty plain,
spreading thousands of miles to the north and south, to the east and
west, in the north a land of forests, in the south and east a region of
treeless levels. Here stretches the Black Land, whose deep dark soil is
fit for endless harvests; here are the arable steppes, a vast fertile
prairie land, and here again the barren steppes, fit only for wandering
herds and the tents of nomad shepherds. Across this great plain, in all
directions, flow myriads of meandering streams, many of them swelling
into noble rivers, whose waters find their outlet in great seas. Over it
blow the biting winds of the Arctic zone, chaining its waters in fetters
of ice for half the year. On it in summer shine warm suns, in whose
enlivening rays life flows full again.

Such is the land with which we have to deal, Russia, the seeding-place
of nations, the home of restless tribes. Here the vast level of Northern
Asia spreads like a sea over half of Europe, following the lowlands
between the Urals and the Caspian Sea. Over these broad plains the
fierce horsemen of the East long found an easy pathway to the rich and
doomed cities of the West. Russia was playing its part in the grand
drama of the nations in far-off days when such a land was hardly known
to exist.

Have any of my readers ever from a hill-top looked out over a broad,
low-lying meadow-land filled with morning mist, a dense white shroud
under which everything lay hidden, all life and movement lost to view?
In such a scene, as the mist thins under the rays of the rising sun,
vague forms at first dimly appear, magnified and monstrous in their
outlines, the shadows of a buried wonderland. Then, as the mist slowly
lifts, like a great white curtain, living and moving objects appear
below, still of strange outlines and unnatural dimensions. Finally, as
if by the sweep of an enchanter's wand, the mists vanish, the land lies
clear under the solar rays, and we perceive that these seeming monsters
and giants are but the familiar forms which we know so well, those of
houses and trees, men and their herds, actively stirring beneath us,
clearly revealed as the things of every day.

It is thus that the land of Russia appears to us when the mists of
prehistoric time first begin to lift. Half-formed figures appear,
rising, vanishing, showing large through the vapor; stirring,
interwoven, endlessly coming and going; a phantasmagoria which it is
impossible more than half to understand. At that early date the great
Russian plain seems to have been the home of unnumbered tribes of varied
race and origin, made up of men doubtless full of hopes and aspirations
like ourselves, yet whose story we fail to read on the blurred page of
history, and concerning whom we must rest content with knowing a few of
the names.

Yet progressive civilizations had long existed in the countries to the
south, Egypt and Assyria, Greece and Persia. History was actively being
made there, but it had not penetrated the mist-laden North. The Greeks
founded colonies on the northern shores of the Black Sea, but they
troubled themselves little about the seething tribes with whom they came
there into contact. The land they called Scythia, and its people
Scythians, but the latter were scarcely known until about 500 B.C., when
Darius, the great Persian king, crossed the Danube and invaded their
country. He found life there in abundance, and more warlike activity
than he relished, for the fierce nomads drove him and his army in terror
from their soil, and only fortune and a bridge of boats saved them from
perishing.

It was this event that first gave the people of old Russia a place on
the page of history. Herodotus, the charming old historian and
story-teller, wrote down for us all he could learn about them, though
what he says has probably as much fancy in it as fact.

We are told that these broad levels were formerly inhabited by a people
called the Cimmerians, who were driven out by the Scythians and went--it
is hard to tell whither. A shadow of their name survives in the Crimea,
and some believe that they were the ancestors of the Cymri, the Celts of
the West.

The Scythians, who thus came into history like a cloud of war, made the
god of war their chief deity. The temples which they built to this deity
were of the simplest, being great heaps of fagots, which were added to
every year as they rotted away under the rains. Into the top of the
heap was thrust an ancient iron sword as the emblem of the god. To this
grim symbol more victims were sacrificed than to all the other deities;
not only cattle and horses, but prisoners taken in battle, of whom one
out of every hundred died to honor the god, their blood being caught in
vessels and poured on the sword.

A people with a worship like this must have been savage in grain. To
prove their prowess in war they cut off the heads of the slain and
carried them to the king. Like the Indians of the West, they scalped
their enemies. These scalps, softened by treatment, they used as napkins
at their meals, and even sewed them together to make cloaks. Here was a
refinement in barbarity undreamed of by the Indians.

These were not their only savage customs. They drank the blood of the
first enemy killed by them in battle, and at their high feasts used
drinking-cups made from the skulls of their foes. When a chief died
cruelty was given free vent. The slaves and horses of the dead chief
were slain at his grave, and placed upright like a circle of horsemen
around the royal tomb, being impaled on sharp timbers to keep them in an
upright position.

Tribes with habits like these have no history. There is nothing in their
careers worth the telling, and no one to tell it if there were. Their
origin, manners, and customs may be of interest, but not their
intertribal quarrels.

Herodotus tells us of others besides the Scythians. There were the
Melanchlainai, who dressed only in black; the Neuri, who once a year
changed into wolves; the Agathyrei, who took pleasure in trinkets of
gold; the Sauromati, children of the Amazons, or women warriors; the
Argippei, bald-headed and snub-nosed from their birth; the Issedones,
who feasted on the dead bodies of their parents; the Arimaspians, a
one-eyed race; the Gryphons, guardians of great hoards of gold; the
Hyperboreans, in whose land white feathers (snow-flakes?) fell all the
year round from the skies.

Such is the mixture of fact and fable which Herodotus learned from the
traders and travellers of Greece. We know nothing of these tribes but
the names. Their ancestors may have dwelt for thousands of years on the
Russian plains; their descendants may still make up part of the great
Russian people and retain some of their old-time habits and customs; but
of their doings history takes no account.

The Scythians, who occupied the south of Russia, came into contact with
the Greek trading colonies north of the Black Sea, and gained from them
some little veneer of civilization. They aided the Greeks in their
commerce, took part in their caravans to the north and east, and spent
some portion of the profits of their peaceful labor in objects of art
made for them by Greek artists.

This we know, for some of these objects still exist. Jewels owned by the
ancient Scythians may be seen to-day in Russian museums. Chief in
importance among these relics are two vases of wonderful interest kept
in the museum of the Hermitage, at St. Petersburg. These are the silver
vase of Nicopol and the golden vase of Kertch, both probably as old as
the days of Herodotus. These vases speak with history. On the silver
vase we may see the faces and forms of the ancient Scythians, men with
long hair and beards and large features. They resemble in dress and
aspect the people who now dwell in the same country, and they are shown
in the act of breaking in and bridling their horses, just as their
descendants do to-day. Progress has had no place on these broad plains.
There life stands still.

On the golden vase appear figures who wear pointed caps and dresses
ornamented in the Asiatic fashion, while in their hands are bows of
strange shape. But their features are those of men of Aryan descent, and
in them we seem to see the far-off progenitors of the modern Russians.

Herodotus, in his chatty fashion, tells us various problematical stories
of the Scythians, premising that he does not believe them all himself. A
tradition with them was that they were the youngest of all nations,
being descended from Targitaus, one of the numerous sons of Jove. The
three children of Targitaus for a time ruled the land, but their joint
rule was changed by a prodigy. There fell from the skies four implements
of gold,--a plough, a yoke, a battle-axe, and a drinking-cup. The oldest
brother hastened eagerly to seize this treasure, but it burst into flame
at his approach. The second then made the attempt, but was in his turn
driven back by the scorching flames. But on the approach of the youngest
the flames vanished, the gold grew cool, and he was enabled to take
possession of the heaven-given implements. His elders then withdrew from
the throne, warned by this sign from the gods, and left him sole ruler.
The story proceeds that the royal gold was guarded with the greatest
care, yearly sacrifices being made in its honor. If its guardian fell
asleep in the open air during the sacrifices he was doomed to die within
the year. But as reward for the faithful keeping of his trust he
received as much land as he could ride round on horseback in a day.

The old historian further tells us that the Scythian warriors invaded
the kingdom of Media, which they conquered and held for twenty-eight
years. During this long absence strange events were taking place at
home. They had held many slaves, whom it was their custom to blind, as
they used them only to stir the milk in the great pot in which koumiss,
their favorite beverage, was made.

The wives of the absent warriors, after years of waiting, gave up all
hopes of their return and married the blind slaves; and while the
masters tarried in Media the children of their slaves grew to manhood.

The time at length came when the warriors, filled with home-sickness,
left the subject realm to seek their native plains. As they marched
onward they found themselves stopped by a great dike, dug from the
Tauric Mountains to Lake Maeotis, behind which stood a host of youthful
warriors. They were the children of the slaves, who were determined to
keep the land for themselves. Many battles were fought, but the young
men held their own bravely, and the warriors were in despair.

Then one of them cried to his fellows,--

"What foolish thing are we doing, Scythians? These men are our slaves,
and every one of them that falls is a loss to us; while each of us that
falls reduces our number. Take my advice, lay aside spear and bow, and
let each man take his horsewhip and go boldly up to them. So long as
they see us with arms in our hands they fancy that they are our equals
and fight us bravely. But let them see us with only whips, and they will
remember that they are slaves and flee like dogs from before our faces."

It happened as he said. As the Scythians approached with their whips the
youths were so astounded that they forgot to fight, and ran away in
trembling terror. And so the warriors came home, and the slaves were put
to making koumiss again.

These fabulous stories of the early people of Russia may be followed by
an account of their funeral customs, left for us by an Arabian writer
who visited their land in the ninth century. He tells us that for ten
days after the death of one of their great men his friends bewailed him,
showing the depth of their grief by getting drunk on koumiss over his
corpse.

Then the men-servants were asked which of them would be buried with his
master. The one that consented was instantly seized and strangled. The
same question was put to the women, one of whom was sure to accept.
There may have been some rare future reward offered for death in such a
cause. The willing victim was bathed, adorned, and treated like a
princess, and did nothing but drink and sing while the obsequies lasted.

On the day fixed for the end of the ceremonies, the dead man was laid in
a boat, with part of his arms and garments. His favorite horse was slain
and laid in the boat, and with it the corpse of the man-servant. Then
the young girl was led up. She took off her jewels, a glass of kvass was
put in her hand, and she sang a farewell song.

"All at once," says the writer, "the old woman who accompanied her, and
whom they called the angel of death, bade her to drink quickly, and to
enter into the cabin of the boat, where lay the dead body of her master.
At these words she changed color, and as she made some difficulty about
entering, the old woman seized her by the hair, dragged her in, and
entered with her. The men immediately began to beat their shields with
clubs to prevent the other girls from hearing the cries of their
companion, which might prevent them one day dying for their master."

The boat was then set on fire, and served as a funeral pile, in which
living and dead alike were consumed.




_OLEG THE VARANGIAN._


For ages and ages, none can say how many, the great plain of Russia
existed as a nursery of tribes, some wandering with their herds, some
dwelling in villages and tilling their fields, but all warlike and all
barbarians. And over this plain at intervals swept conquering hordes
from Asia, the terrible Huns, the devastating Avars, and others of
varied names. But as yet the Russia we know did not exist, and its very
name had never been heard.

As time went on, the people in the centre and north of the country
became peaceful and prosperous, since the invaders did not cross their
borders, and a great and wealthy city arose, whose commerce in time
extended on the east as far as Persia and India, on the south to
Constantinople, and on the west far through the Baltic Sea. Though
seated in Russia, still largely a land of barbarous tribes, Novgorod
became one of the powerful cities of the earth, making its strength felt
far and wide, placing the tribes as far as the Ural Mountains under
tribute, and growing so strong and warlike that it became a common
saying among the people, "Who can oppose God and Novgorod the Great?"

But trouble arose for Novgorod. Its chief trade lay through the Baltic
Sea, and here its ships met those terrible Scandinavian pirates who were
then the ocean's lords. Among these bold rovers were the Danes who
descended on England, the Normans who won a new home in France, the
daring voyagers who discovered Iceland and Greenland, and those who
sailed up the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople, conquering
kingdoms as they went.

To some of these Scandinavians the merchants of Novgorod turned for aid
against the others. Bands of them had made their way into Russia and
settled on the eastern shores of the Baltic. To these the Novgorodians
appealed in their trouble, and in the year 862 asked three Varangian
brothers, Rurik, Sinaf, and Truvor, to come to their aid. The warlike
brothers did so, seated themselves on the frontier of the republic of
Novgorod, drove off its foes--and became its foes themselves. The people
of Novgorod, finding their trade at the mercy of their allies, submitted
to their power, and in 864 invited Rurik to become their king. His two
brothers had meantime died.

Thus it was that the Russian empire began, for the Varangians came from
a country called Ross, from which their new realm gained the name of
Russia.

Rurik took the title of Grand Prince, made his principal followers lords
of the cities of his new realm, and the republic of Novgorod came to an
end in form, though not in spirit. It is interesting to note at this
point that Russia, which began as a republic, has ended as one of the
most absolute of monarchies. The first step in its subjection was taken
when Novgorod invited Rurik the Varangian to be its prince; the other
steps came later, one by one.

For fifteen years Rurik remained lord of Novgorod, and then died and
left his four-year-old son Igor as his heir, with Oleg, his kinsman, as
regent of the realm. It is the story of Oleg, as told by Nestor, the
gossipy old Russian chronicler, that we propose here to tell, but it
seemed useful to precede it by an account of how the Russian empire came
into existence.

Oleg was a man of his period, a barbarian and a soldier born; brave,
crafty, adventurous, faithful to Igor, his ward, cruel and treacherous
to others. Under his rule the Russian dominions rapidly and widely
increased.

At an earlier date two Varangians, Askhold and Dir by name, had made
their way far to the south, where they became masters of the city of
Kief. They even dared to attack Constantinople, but were driven back
from that great stronghold of the South.

It by no means pleased Oleg to find this powerful kingdom founded in the
land which he had set out to subdue. He determined that Kief should be
his, and in 882 made his way to its vicinity. But it was easier to reach
than to take. Its rulers were brave, their Varangian followers were
courageous, the city was strong. Oleg, doubting his power to win it by
force of arms, determined to try what could be done by stratagem and
treachery.

Leaving his army, and taking Igor with him, he floated down the Dnieper
with a few boats, in which a number of armed men were hidden, and at
length landed near the ancient city of Kief, which stood on high ground
near the river. Placing his warriors in ambush, he sent a messenger to
Askhold and Dir, with the statement that a party of Varangian merchants,
whom the prince of Novgorod had sent to Greece, had just landed, and
desired to see them as friends and men of their own race.

Those were simple times, in which even the rulers of cities did not put
on any show of state. On the contrary, the two princes at once left the
city and went alone to meet the false merchants. They had no sooner
arrived than Oleg threw off his mask. His followers sprang from their
ambush, arms in hand.

"You are neither princes nor of princely birth," he cried; "but I am a
prince, and this is the son of Rurik."

And at a sign from his hand Askhold and Dir were laid dead at his feet.

By this act of base treachery Oleg became the master of Kief. No one in
the city ventured to resist the strong army which he quickly brought up,
and the metropolis of the south opened its gates to the man who had
wrought murder under the guise of war. It is not likely, though, that
Oleg sought to justify his act on any grounds. In those barbarous days,
when might made right, murder was too much an every-day matter to be
deeply considered by any one.

Oleg was filled with admiration of the city he had won. "Let Kief be the
mother of all the Russian cities!" he exclaimed. And such it became, for
he made it his capital, and for three centuries it remained the capital
city of the Russian realm.

What he principally admired it for was its nearness to Constantinople,
the capital of the great empire of the East, on which, like the former
lords of Kief, he looked with greedy and envious eyes.

For long centuries past Greece and the other countries of the South had
paid little heed to the dwellers on the Russian plains, of whose
scattered tribes they had no fear. But with the coming of the
Varangians, the conquest of the tribes, and the founding of a
wide-spread empire, a different state of affairs began, and from that
day to this Constantinople has found the people of the steppes its most
dangerous and persistent foes.

Oleg was not long in making the Greek empire feel his heavy hand.
Filling the minds of his followers and subjects with his own thirst for
blood and plunder, he set out with an army of eighty thousand men, in
two thousand barks, passed the cataracts of the Borysthenes, crossed the
Black Sea, murdered the subjects of the empire in hosts, and, as the
chronicles say, sailed overland with all sails set to the port of
Constantinople itself. What he probably did was to have his vessels
taken over a neck of land on wheels or rollers.

Here he threw the imperial city into mortal terror, fixed his shield on
the very gate of Constantinople, and forced the emperor to buy him off
at the price of an enormous ransom. To the treaty made the Varangian
warriors swore by their gods Perune and Voloss, by their rings, and by
their swords,--gold and steel, the things they honored most and most
desired.

Then back in triumph they sailed to Kief, rich with booty, and ever
after hailing their leader as the Wise Man, or Magician. Eight years
afterwards Oleg made a treaty of alliance and commerce with
Constantinople, in which Greeks and Russians stood on equal footing.
Russia had made a remarkable stride forward as a nation since Rurik was
invited to Novgorod a quarter-century before.

For thirty-three years Oleg held the throne. His was too strong a hand
to yield its power to his ward. Igor must wait for Oleg's death. He had
found a province; he left an empire. In his hands Russia grew into
greatness, and from Novgorod to Kief and far and wide to the right and
left stretched the lands won by his conquering sword.

He was too great a man to die an ordinary death. According to the
tradition, miracle had to do with his passing away. Nestor, the prince
of Russian chroniclers, tells us the following story:

Oleg had a favorite horse, which he rode alike in battle and in the
hunt, until at length a prediction came from the soothsayers that death
would overtake him through his cherished charger. Warrior as he was, he
had the superstition of the pagan, and to avoid the predicted fate he
sent his horse far away, and for years avoided even speaking of it.

Then, moved by curiosity, he asked what had become of the banished
animal.

"It died years ago," was the reply; "only its bones remain."

"So much for your soothsayers," he cried, with a contempt that was not
unmixed with relief. "That, then, is all this prediction is worth! But
where are the bones of my good old horse? I should like to see what
little is left of him."

He was taken to the spot where lay the skeleton of his old favorite, and
gazed with some show of feeling on the bleaching bones of what had once
been his famous war-horse. Then, setting his foot on the skull, he
said,--

"So this is the creature that is destined to be my death."

At that moment a deadly serpent that lay coiled up within the skull
darted out and fixed its poisonous fangs in the conqueror's foot. And
thus ignobly he who had slain men by thousands and conquered an empire
came to his death.




_THE VENGEANCE OF QUEEN OLGA._


The death of Oleg brought Igor his ward, then nearly forty years of age,
to the throne of Rurik his father. And the same old story of bloodshed
and barbarity went on. In those days a king was king in name only. He
was really but the chief of a band of plunderers, who dug wealth from
the world with the sword instead of the spade, threw it away in wild
orgies, and then hounded him into leading them to new wars.

The story of the Northmen is everywhere the same. While in the West they
were harrying England, France, and the Mediterranean countries with fire
and sword, in the East their Varangian kinsmen were spreading
devastation through Russia and the empire of the Greeks.

Like his predecessor, Igor invaded this empire with a great army,
landing in Asia Minor and treating the people with such brutal ferocity
that no earthquake or volcano could have shown itself more merciless.
His prisoners were slaughtered in the most barbarous manner, fire swept
away all that havoc had left, and then the Russian prince sailed in
triumph against Constantinople, with his ten thousand barks manned by
murderers and laden with plunder.

But the Greeks were now ready for their foes. Pouring on them the
terrible Greek fire, they drove them back in dismay to Asia Minor, where
they were met and routed by the land forces of the empire. In the end
Igor hurried home with hardly a third of his great army.

Three years afterward he again led an army in boats against
Constantinople, but this time he was bought off by a tribute of gold,
silver, and precious stuffs, as Oleg had been before him.

Igor was now more than seventy years old, and naturally desired to spend
the remainder of his days in peace, but his followers would not let him
rest. The spoils and tribute of the Greeks had quickly disappeared from
their open hands, and the warlike profligates demanded new plunder.

"We are naked," they bitterly complained, "while the companions of
Sveneld have beautiful arms and fine clothing. Come with us and levy
contributions, that we and you may dwell in plenty together."

Igor obeyed--he could not well help himself--and led them against the
Drevlians, a neighboring nation already under tribute. Marching into
their country, he forced them to pay still heavier tribute, and allowed
his soldiers to plunder to their hearts' content.

Then the warriors of Kief marched back, laden with spoils. But the
wolfish instincts of Igor were aroused. More, he thought, might be
squeezed out of the Drevlians, but he wanted this extra plunder for
himself. So he sent his army on to Kief, and went back with a small
force to the country of the Drevlians, where he held out his hand--with
the sword in it--for more.

He got more than he bargained for. The Drevlians, driven to extremity,
came with arms instead of gold, attacked the king and his few followers,
and killed the whole of them upon the spot. And thus in blood ended the
career of this white-haired tribute-seeker.

The fallen prince left behind him a widow named Olga and a son named
Sviatoslaf, who was still a child, as Igor had been at the death of his
father. So Olga became regent of the kingdom, and Sveneld was made
leader of the army.

How deeply Olga loved Igor we are not prepared to say, but we are told
some strange tales of what she did to avenge him. These tales we may
believe or not, as we please. They are legends only, like those of early
Rome, but they are all the history we have, and so we repeat the story
much as old Nestor has told it.

The death of Igor filled the hearts of the Drevlians with hope. Their
great enemy was gone; the new prince was a child: might they not gain
power as well as liberty? Their prince Male should marry Olga the widow,
and all would be well with them.

So twenty of their leading men were sent to Kief, where they presented
themselves to the queenly regent. Their offer of an alliance was made in
terms suited to the manners of the times.

"We have killed your husband," they said, "because he plundered and
devoured like a wolf. But we would be at peace with you and yours. We
have good princes, under whom our country thrives. Come and marry our
prince Male and be our queen."

Olga listened like one who weighed the offer deeply.

"After all," she said, "my husband is dead, and I cannot bring him to
life again. Your proposal seems good to me. Leave me now, and come again
to-morrow, when I will entertain you before my people as you deserve.
Return to your barks, and when my people come to you to-morrow, say to
them, 'We will not go on horseback or on foot; you must carry us in our
barks.' Thus you will be honored as I desire you to be."

Back went the Drevlians, glad at heart, for the queen had seemed to them
very gracious indeed. But Olga had a deep and wide pit dug before a
house outside the city, and next day she went to that house and sent for
the ambassadors.

"We will not go on foot or on horseback," they said to the messengers;
"carry us in our barks."

"We are your slaves," answered the men of Kief. "Our ruler is slain, and
our princess is willing to marry your prince."

So they took up on their shoulders the barks, in which the Drevlians
proudly sat like kings on their thrones, and carried them to the front
of the house in which Olga awaited them with smiling lips but ruthless
heart.

There, at a sign from her hand, the ambassadors and the barks in which
they sat were flung headlong into the yawning pit.

"How do you like your entertainment?" asked the cruel queen.

"Oh!" they cried, in terror, "pity us! Forgive us the death of Igor!"

But they begged in vain, for at her command the pit was filled up and
the Drevlians were buried alive.

Then Olga sent messengers to the land of the Drevlians, with this
message to their prince:

"If you really wish for me, send me men of the highest consideration in
your country, that my people may be induced to let me go, and that I may
come to you with honor and dignity."

This message had its effect. The chief men of the country were now sent
as ambassadors. They entered Kief over the grave of their murdered
countrymen without knowing where they trod, and came to the palace
expecting to be hospitably entertained.

Olga had a bath made ready for them, and sent them word,--

"First take a bath, that you may refresh yourselves after the fatigue of
your journey, then come into my presence."

The bath was heated, and the Drevlians entered it. But, to their dismay,
smoke soon began to circle round them, and flames flashed on their
frightened eyes. They ran to the doors, but they were immovable. Olga
had ordered them to be made fast and the house to be set on fire, and
the miserable bathers were all burned alive.

But even this terrible revenge was not enough for the implacable widow.
Those were days when news crept slowly, and the Drevlians did not dream
of Olga's treachery. Once more she sent them a deceitful message: "I am
about to repair to you, and beg you to get ready a large quantity of
hydromel in the place where my husband was killed, that I may weep over
his tomb and honor him with the trizna [funeral banquet]."

The Drevlians, full of joy at this message, gathered honey in quantities
and brewed it into hydromel. Then Olga sought the tomb, followed by a
small guard who were only lightly armed. For a while she wept over the
tomb. Then she ordered a great mound of honor to be heaped over it. When
this was done she directed the trizna to be set out.

The Drevlians drank freely, while the men of Kief served them with the
intoxicating beverage.

"Where are the friends whom we sent to you?" they asked.

"They are coming with the friends of my husband," she replied.

And so the feast went on until the unsuspecting Drevlians were stupid
with drink. Then Olga bade her guards draw their weapons and slay her
foes, and a great slaughter began. When it ended, five thousand
Drevlians lay dead at her feet.

Olga's revenge was far from being complete: her thirst for blood grew as
it was fed. She returned to Kief, collected her army, took her young son
with her that he might early learn the art of war, and returned inspired
by the rage of vengeance to the land of the Drevlians.

Here she laid waste the country and destroyed the towns. In the end she
came to the capital, Korosten, and laid siege to it. Its name meant
"wall of bark," so that it was, no doubt, a town of wood, as probably
all the Russian towns at that time were.

The siege went on, but the inhabitants defended themselves obstinately,
for they knew now the spirit of the woman with whom they had to contend.
So a long time passed and Korosten still held out.

Finding that force would not serve, Olga tried stratagem, in which she
was such an adept.

"Why do you hold out so foolishly?" she said. "You know that all your
other towns are in my power, and your countrypeople are peacefully
tilling their fields while you are uselessly dying of hunger. You would
be wise to yield; you have no more to fear from me; I have taken full
revenge for my slain husband."

The Drevlians, to conciliate her, offered a tribute of honey and furs.
This she refused, with a show of generosity, and said that she would ask
no more from them than a tribute of a pigeon and three sparrows from
each house.

Gladdened by the lightness of this request, the Drevlians quickly
gathered the birds asked for, and sent them out to the invading army.
They did not dream what treachery lay in Olga's cruel heart. That
evening she let all the birds loose with lighted matches tied to their
tails. Back to their nests in the town they flew, and soon Korosten was
in flames in a thousand places.

In terror the inhabitants fled through their gates, but the soldiers of
the bloodthirsty queen awaited them outside, sword in hand, with orders
to cut them down without mercy as they appeared. The prince and all the
leading men of the state perished, and only the lowest of the populace
were left alive, while the whole land thereafter was laid under a load
of tribute so heavy that it devastated the country like an invading army
and caused the people to groan bitterly beneath the burden.

And thus it was that Olga the widow took revenge upon the murderers of
her fallen lord.




_VLADIMIR THE GREAT._


Vladimir, Grand Prince of Russia before and after the year 1000, won the
name not only of Vladimir the Great but of St. Vladimir, though he was
as great a reprobate as he was a soldier and monarch, and as
unregenerate a sinner as ever sat on a throne. But it was he who made
Russia a Christian country, and in reward the Russian Church still looks
upon him as "coequal with the Apostles." What he did to deserve this
high honor we shall see.

Sviatoslaf, the son of Olga, had proved a hardy soldier. He disdained
the palace and lived in the camp. In his marches he took no tent or
baggage, but slept in the open air, lived on horse-flesh broiled by
himself upon the coals, and showed all the endurance of a Cossack
warrior born in the snows. After years of warfare he fell on the field
of battle, and his skull, ornamented with a circle of gold, became a
drinking-cup for the prince of the Petchenegans, by whose hands he had
been slain. His empire was divided between his three sons, Yaropolk
reigning in Kief, Oleg becoming prince of the Drevlians, and Vladimir
taking Rurik's old capital of Novgorod.

These brothers did not long dwell in harmony. War broke out between
Yaropolk and Oleg, and the latter was killed. Vladimir, fearing that his
turn would come next, fled to the country of the Varangians, and
Yaropolk became lord over all Russia. It is the story of the fugitive
prince, and how he made his way from flight to empire and from empire to
sainthood, that we are now about to tell.

For two years Vladimir dwelt with his Varangian kinsmen, during which
time he lived the wild life of a Norseman, joining the bold vikings in
their raids for booty far and wide over the seas of Europe. Then,
gathering a large band of Varangian adventurers, he returned to
Novgorod, drove out the men of Yaropolk, and sent word by them to his
brother that he would soon call upon him at Kief.

Vladimir quickly proved himself a prince of barbarian instincts. In
Polotsk ruled Rogvolod, a Varangian prince, whose daughter Rogneda,
famed for her beauty, was betrothed to Yaropolk. Vladimir demanded her
hand, but received an insulting reply.

"I will never unboot the son of a slave," said the haughty princess.

It was the custom at that time for brides, on the wedding night, to pull
off the boots of their husbands; and Vladimir's mother had been one of
Queen Olga's slave women.

But insults like this, to men like Vladimir, are apt to breed bloodshed.
Hot with revengeful fury, he marched against Polotsk, killed in battle
Rogvolod and his two sons, and forced the disdainful princess to accept
his hand still red with her father's blood.

Then he marched against Kief, where Yaropolk, who seems to have had more
ambition than courage, shut himself up within the walls. These walls
were strong, the people were faithful, and Kief might long have defied
its assailant had not treachery dwelt within. Vladimir had secretly
bought over a villain named Blude, one of Yaropolk's trusted
councillors, who filled his master's mind with suspicion of the people
of Kief and persuaded him to fly for safety. His flight gave Kief into
his brother's hands.

To Rodnia fled the fugitive prince, where he was closely besieged by
Vladimir, to whose aid came a famine so fierce that it still gives point
to a common Russian proverb. Flight or surrender became necessary.
Yaropolk might have found strong friends among some of the powerful
native tribes, but the voice of the traitor was still at his ear, and at
Blude's suggestion he gave himself up to Vladimir. It was like the sheep
yielding himself to the wolf. By the victor's order Yaropolk was slain
in his father's palace.

And now the traitor sought his reward. Vladimir felt that it was to
Blude he owed his empire, and for three days he so loaded him with
honors and dignities that the false-hearted wretch deemed himself the
greatest among the Russians.

But the villain had been playing with edge tools. At the end of the
three days Vladimir called Blude before him.

"I have kept all my promises to you," he said. "I have treated you as my
friend; your honors exceed your highest wishes; I have made you lord
among my lords. But now," he continued, and his voice grew terrible,
"the judge succeeds the benefactor. Traitor and assassin of your
prince, I condemn you to death."

And at his stern command the startled and trembling traitor was struck
dead in his presence.

The tide of affairs had strikingly turned. Vladimir, late a fugitive,
was now lord of all the realm of Russia. His power assured, he showed
himself in a new aspect. Yaropolk's widow, a Greek nun of great beauty,
was forced to become his wife. Not content with two, he continued to
marry until he had no less than six wives, while he filled his palaces
with the daughters of his subjects until they numbered eight hundred in
all.

"Thereby hangs a tale," as Shakespeare says. Rogneda, Vladimir's first
wife, had forgiven him for the murder of her father and brothers, but
could not forgive him for the insult of turning her out of his palace
and putting other women in her place. She determined to be revenged.

One day when he had gone to see her in the lonely abode to which she had
been banished, he fell asleep in her presence. Here was the opportunity
her heart craved. Seizing a dagger, she was on the point of stabbing him
where he lay, when Vladimir awoke and stopped the blow. While the
frightened woman stood trembling before him, he furiously bade her
prepare for death, as she should die by his own hand.

"Put on your wedding dress," he harshly commanded; "seek your handsomest
apartment, and stretch yourself on the sumptuous bed you there possess.
Die you must, but you have been honored as the wife of Vladimir, and
shall not meet an ignoble death."

Rogneda did as she was bidden, yet hope had not left her heart, and she
taught her young son Isiaslaf a part which she wished him to play. When
the frowning prince entered the apartment where lay his condemned wife,
he was met by the boy, who presented him with a drawn sword, saying,
"You are not alone, father. Your son will be witness to your deed."

Vladimir's expression changed as he looked at the appealing face of the
child.

"Who thought of seeing you here?" he cried, and, flinging the sword to
the floor, he hastily left the room.

Calling his nobles together, he told them what had happened and asked
their advice.

"Prince," they said, "you should spare the culprit for the sake of the
child. Our advice is that you make the boy lord of Rogvolod's
principality."

Vladimir did so, sending Rogneda with her son to rule over her father's
realm, where he built a new city which he named after the boy.

Vladimir had been born a pagan, and a pagan he was still, worshipping
the Varangian deities, in particular the god Perune, of whom he had a
statue erected on a hill near his palace, adorned with a silver head. On
the same sacred hill were planted the statues of other idols, and
Vladimir proposed to restore the old human sacrifices by offering one of
his own people as a victim to the gods.

For this purpose there was selected a young Varangian who, with his
father, had adopted the Christian faith. The father refused to give up
his son, and the enraged people, who looked on the refusal as an insult
to their prince and their gods, broke into the house and murdered both
father and son. These two have since been canonized by the Russian
Church as the only martyrs to its faith.

Vladimir by this time had become great in dominion, his warlike prowess
extending the borders of Russia on all sides. The nations to the south
saw that a great kingdom had arisen on their northern border, ruled by a
warlike and conquering prince, and it was deemed wise to seek to win him
from the worship of idols to a more elevated faith. Askhold and Dir had
been baptized as Christians. Olga, after her bloody revenge, had gone to
Constantinople and been baptized by the patriarch. But the nation
continued pagan, Vladimir was an idolater in grain, and a great field
lay open for missionary zeal.

No less than four of the peoples of the south sought to make a convert
of this powerful prince. The Bulgarians endeavored to win him to the
religion of Mohammed, picturing to him in alluring language the charms
of their paradise, with its lovely houris. But he must give up wine.
This was more than he was ready to do.

"Wine is the delight of the Russians," he said: "we cannot do without
it."

The envoys of the Christian churches and the Jewish faith also sought to
win him over. The appeal of the Jews, however, failed to impress him,
and he dismissed them with the remark that they had no country, and
that he had no inclination to join hands with wanderers under the ban of
Heaven. There remained the Christians, comprising the Roman and Greek
Churches, at that time in unison. Of these the Greek Church, the claims
of which were presented to him by an advocate from Constantinople,
appealed to him most strongly, since its doctrines had been accepted by
Queen Olga.

As may be seen, religion with Vladimir was far more a matter of policy
than of piety. The gods of his fathers, to whom he had done such honor,
had no abiding place in his heart; and that belief which would be most
to his advantage was for him the best.

To settle the question he sent ten of his chief boyars, or nobles, to
the south, that they might examine and report on the religions of the
different countries. They were not long in coming to a decision.
Mohammedanism and Catholicism, they said, they had found only in poor
and barbarous provinces. Judaism had no land to call its own. But the
Greek faith dwelt in a magnificent metropolis, and its ceremonies were
full of pomp and solemnity.

"If the Greek religion were not the best," they said, in conclusion,
"Olga, your ancestress, and the wisest of mortals, would never have
thought of embracing it."

Pomp and solemnity won the day, and Vladimir determined to follow Olga's
example. As to what religion meant in itself he seems to have thought
little and cared less. His method of becoming a Christian was so
original that it is well worth the telling.

Since the days of Olga Kief had possessed Christian churches and
priests, and Vladimir might easily have been baptized without leaving
home. But this was far too simple a process for a prince of his dignity.
He must be baptized by a bishop of the parent Church, and the
missionaries who were to convert his people must come from the central
home of the faith.

Should he ask the emperor for the rite of baptism? Not he; it would be
too much like rendering homage to a prince no greater than himself. The
haughty barbarian found himself in a quandary; but soon he discovered a
promising way out of it. He would make war on Greece, conquer priests
and churches, and by force of arms obtain instruction and baptism in the
new faith. Surely never before or since was a war waged with the object
of winning a new religion.

Gathering a large army, Vladimir marched to the Crimea, where stood the
rich and powerful Greek city of Kherson. The ruins of this city may
still be seen near the modern Sevastopol. To it he laid siege, warning
the inhabitants that it would be wise in them to yield, for he was
prepared to remain three years before their walls.

The Khersonites proved obstinate, and for six months he besieged them
closely. But no progress was made, and it began to look as if Vladimir
would never become a Christian in his chosen mode. A traitor within the
walls, however, solved the difficulty. He shot from the ramparts an
arrow to which a letter was attached, in which the Russians were told
that the city obtained all its fresh water from a spring near their
camp, to which ran underground pipes. Vladimir cut the pipes, and the
city, in peril of the horrors of thirst, was forced to yield.

Baptism was now to be had from the parent source, but Vladimir was still
not content. He demanded to be united by ties of blood to the emperors
of the southern realm, asking for the hand of Anna, the emperor's
sister, and threatening to take Constantinople if his proposal were
rejected.

Never before had a convert come with such conditions. The princess Anna
had no desire for marriage with this haughty barbarian, but reasons of
state were stronger than questions of taste, and the emperors (there
were two of them at that time) yielded. Vladimir, having been baptized
under the name of Basil, married the princess Anna, and the city he had
taken as a token of his pious zeal was restored to his new kinsmen. All
that he took back to Russia with him were a Christian wife, some bishops
and priests, sacred vessels and books, images of saints, and a number of
consecrated relics.

Vladimir displayed a zeal in his new faith in accordance with the
trouble he had taken to win it. The old idols he had worshipped were now
the most despised inmates of his realm. Perune, as the greatest of them
all, was treated with the greatest indignity. The wooden image of the
god was tied to the tail of a horse and dragged to the Borysthenes,
twelve stout soldiers belaboring it with cudgels as it went. The banks
reached, it was flung with disdain into the river.

At Novgorod the god was treated with like indignity, but did not bear
it with equal patience. The story goes that, being flung from a bridge
into the Volkhof, the image of Perune rose to the surface of the water,
threw a staff upon the bridge, and cried out in a terrifying voice,
"Citizens, that is what I leave you in remembrance of me."

In consequence of this legend it was long the custom in that city, on
the day which was kept as the anniversary of the god, for the young
people to run about with sticks in their hands, striking one another
unawares.

As for the Russians in general, they discarded their old worship as
easily as the prince had thrown overboard their idols. One day a
proclamation was issued at Kief, commanding all the people to repair to
the river-bank the next day, there to be baptized. They assented without
a murmur, saying, "If it were not good to be baptized, the prince and
the boyars would never submit to it."

These were not the only signs of Vladimir's zeal. He built churches, he
gave alms freely, he set out public repasts in imitation of the
love-feasts of the early Christians. His piety went so far that he even
forbore to shed the blood of criminals or of the enemies of his country.

But horror of bloodshed did not lie long on Vladimir's conscience. In
his later life he had wars in plenty, and the blood of his enemies was
shed as freely as water. These wars were largely against the
Petchenegans, the most powerful of his foes. And in connection with them
there is a story extant which has its parallel in the history of many
another country.

It seems that in one of their campaigns the two armies came face to face
on the opposite sides of a small stream. The prince of the Petchenegans
now proposed to Vladimir to settle their quarrel by single combat and
thus spare the lives of their people. The side whose champion was
vanquished should bind itself to a peace lasting for three years.

Vladimir was loath to consent, as he felt sure that his opponents had
ready a champion of mighty power. He felt forced in honor to accept the
challenge, but asked for delay that he might select a worthy champion.

Whom to select he knew not. No soldier of superior strength and skill
presented himself. Uneasiness and agitation filled his mind. But at this
critical interval an old man, who served in the army with four of his
sons, came to him, saying that he had at home a fifth son of
extraordinary strength, whom he would offer as champion.

The young man was sent for in great haste. On his arrival, to test his
powers, a bull was sent against him which had been goaded into fury with
hot irons. The young giant stopped the raging brute, knocked him down,
and tore off great handfuls of his skin and flesh. Hope came to
Vladimir's soul on witnessing this wonderful feat.

The day arrived. The champions advanced between the camps. The
Petchenegan warrior laughed in scorn on seeing his beardless antagonist.
But when they came to blows he found himself seized and crushed as in a
vice in the arms of his boyish foe, and was flung, a lifeless body, to
the earth. On seeing this the Petchenegans fled in dismay, while the
Russians, forgetting their pledge, pursued and slaughtered them without
mercy.

Vladimir at length (1015 A.D.) came to his end. His son Yaroslaf, whom
he had made ruler of Novgorod, had refused to pay tribute, and the old
prince, forced to march against his rebel son, died of grief on the way.

With all his faults, Vladimir deserved the title of Great which his
country has given him. He put down the turbulent tribes, planted
colonies in the desert, built towns, and embellished his cities with
churches, palaces, and other buildings, for which workmen were brought
from Greece. Russia grew rapidly under his rule. He established schools
which the sons of the nobles were made to attend. And though he was but
a poor pattern for a saint, he had the merit of finding Russia pagan and
leaving it Christian.

[Illustration: CATHEDRAL AT OSTANKINO, NEAR MOSCOW.]




_THE LAWGIVER OF RUSSIA._


The Russia of the year 1000 lay deep in the age of barbarism. Vladimir
had made it Christian in name, but it was far from Christian in thought
or deed. It was a land without fixed laws, without settled government,
without schools, without civilized customs, but with abundance of
ignorance, cruelty, and superstition.

It was strangely made up. In the north lay the great commercial city of
Novgorod, which, though governed by princes of the house of Rurik, was a
republic in form and in fact. It possessed its popular assembly, of
which every citizen was a member with full right to vote, and at whose
meetings the prince was not permitted to appear. The sound of a famous
bell, the Vetchevoy, called the people together, to decide on questions
of peace and war, or to elect magistrates, and sometimes the bishop, or
even the prince. The prince had to swear to carry out the ancient laws
of the republic and not attempt to lay taxes on the citizens or to
interfere with their trade. They made him gifts, but paid him no taxes.
They decided how many hours he should give to pleasure and how many to
business; and they expelled some of their princes who thought themselves
beyond the power of the laws.

It seems strange that the absolute Russia of to-day should then have
possessed one of the freest of the cities of Europe. Novgorod was not
only a city, it was a state. The provinces far and wide around were
subject to it, and governed by its prince, who had in them an authority
much greater than he possessed over the proud civic merchants and money
lords.

In the south, on the contrary, lay the great imperial city of Kief, the
capital of the realm, and the seat of a government as arbitrary as that
of Novgorod was free. Here dwelt the grand prince as an irresponsible
autocrat, making his will the law, and forcing all the provinces, even
haughty Novgorod, to pay a tax which bore the slavish title of tribute.
Here none could vote, no assembly of citizens ever met, and the only
restraint on the prince was that of his warlike and turbulent nobles,
who often forced him to yield to their wishes. The government was a
drifting rather than a settled one. It had no anchors out, but was moved
about at the whim of the prince and his unruly lords.

Under these two forms of government lay still a third. Rural Russia was
organized on a democratic principle which still prevails throughout that
broad land. This is the principle of the Mir, or village community,
which most of the people of the earth once possessed, but which has
everywhere passed away except in Russia and India. It is the principle
of the commune, of public instead of private property. The land of a
Russian village belongs to the people as a whole, not to individuals. It
is divided up among them for tillage, but no man can claim the fields
he tills as his own, and for thousands of years what is known as
communism has prevailed on Russian soil.

The government of the village is purely democratic. All the people meet
and vote for their village magistrate, who decides, with the aid of a
council of the elders, all the questions which arise within its
confines, one of them being the division of the land. Thus at bottom
Russia is a field sown thick with little communistic republics, though
at top it is a despotism. The government of Novgorod doubtless grew out
of that of the village. The republican city has long since passed away,
but the seed of democracy remains planted deeply in the village
community.

All this is preliminary to the story of the Russian lawgiver and his
laws, which we have set out to tell. This famous person was no other
than that Yaroslaf, prince of Novgorod, and son of Vladimir the Great,
whose refusal to pay tribute had caused his father to die of grief.

Yaroslaf was the fifth able ruler of the dynasty of Rurik. The story of
his young life resembles that of his father. He found his brother strong
and threatening, and designed to fly from Novgorod and join the
Varangians as a viking lord, as his father had done before him. But the
Novgorodians proved his friends, destroyed the ships that were to carry
him away, and provided him with money to raise a new army. With this he
defeated his base brother, who had already killed or driven into exile
all their other brothers. The result was that Yaroslof, like his father,
became sovereign of all Russia.

But though this new grand prince extended his dominions by the sword,
it was not as a soldier, but as a legislator, that he won fame. His
genius was not shown on the field of battle, but in the legislative
council, and Russia reveres Yaroslaf the Wise as its first maker of
laws.

The free institutions of Novgorod, of which we have spoken, were by him
sustained and strengthened. Many new cities were founded under his
beneficent rule. Schools were widely established, in one of which three
hundred of the youth of Novgorod were educated. A throng of Greek
priests were invited into the land, since there were none of Russian
birth to whom he could confide the duty of teaching the young. He gave
toleration to the idolaters who still existed, and when the people of
Suzdal were about to massacre some hapless women whom they accused of
having brought on a famine by sorcery, he stayed their hands and saved
the poor victims from death. The Russian Church owed its first national
foundation to him, for he declared that the bishops of the land should
no longer depend for appointment on the Patriarch of Constantinople.

There are no startling or dramatic stories to be told about Yaroslaf.
The heroes of peace are not the men who make the world's dramas. But it
is pleasant, after a season spent with princes who lived for war and
revenge, and who even made war to obtain baptism, to rest awhile under
the green boughs and beside the pleasant waters of a reign that became
famous for the triumphs of peace.

Under Yaroslaf Russia united itself by ties of blood to Western Europe.
His sons married Greek, German, and English princesses; his sister
became queen of Poland; his three daughters were queens of Norway,
Hungary, and France. Scandinavian in origin, the dynasty of Rurik was
reaching out hands of brotherhood towards its kinsmen in the West.

But it is as a law-maker that Yaroslaf is chiefly known. Before his time
the empire had no fixed code of laws. To say that it was without law
would not be correct. Every people, however ignorant, has its laws of
custom, unwritten edicts, the birth of the ages, which have grown up
stage by stage, and which are only slowly outgrown as the tribe develops
into the nation.

Russia had, besides Novgorod, other commercial cities, with republican
institutions. Kief was certainly not without law. And the many tribes of
hunters, shepherds, and farmers must have had their legal customs. But
with all this there was no code for the empire, no body of written laws.
The first of these was prepared about 1018 by Yaroslaf, for Novgorod
alone, but in time became the law of all the land. This early code of
Russian law is a remarkable one, and goes farther than history at large
in teaching us the degree of civilization of Russia at that date.

In connection with it the chronicles tell a curious story. In 1018, we
are told, Novgorod, having grown weary of the insults and oppression of
its Varangian lords and warriors, killed them all. Angry at this,
Yaroslaf enticed the leading Novgorodians into his palace and
slaughtered them in reprisal. But at this critical interval, when his
guards were slain and his subjects in rebellion, he found himself
threatened by his ambitious brother. In despair he turned to the
Novgorodians and begged with tears for pardon and assistance. They
forgave and aided him, and by their help made him sovereign of the
empire.

How far this is true it is impossible to say, but the code of Yaroslaf
was promulgated at that date, and the rights given to Novgorod showed
that its people held the reins of power. It confirmed the city in the
ancient liberties of which we have already spoken, giving it a freedom
which no other city of its time surpassed. And it laid down a series of
laws for the people at large which seem very curious in this enlightened
age. It must suffice to give the leading features of this ancient code.

It began by sustaining the right of private vengeance. The law was for
the weak alone, the strong being left to avenge their own wrongs. The
punishment of crime was provided for by judicial combats, which the law
did not even regulate. Every strong man was a law unto himself.

Where no avengers of crime appeared, murder was to be settled by fines.
For the murder of a boyar eighty grivnas were to be paid, and forty for
the murder of a free Russian, but only half as much if the victim was a
woman. Here we have a standard of value for the women of that age.

Nothing was paid into the treasury for the murder of a slave, but his
master had to be paid his value, unless he had been slain for insulting
a freeman. His value was reckoned according to his occupation, and
ranged from twelve to five grivnas.

If it be asked what was the value of a grivna, it may be said that at
that time there was little coined money, perhaps none at all, in Russia.
Gold and silver were circulated by weight, and the common currency was
composed of pieces of skin, called _kuni_. A grivna was a certain number
of kunis equal in value to half a pound of silver, but the kuni often
varied in value.

All prisoners of war and all persons bought from foreigners were
condemned to perpetual slavery. Others became slaves for limited
periods,--freemen who married slaves, insolvent debtors, servants out of
employment, and various other classes. As the legal interest of money
was forty per cent., the enslavement of debtors must have been very
common, and Russia was even then largely a land of slaves.

The loss of a limb was fined almost as severely as that of a life. To
pluck out part of the beard cost four times as much as to cut off a
finger, and insults in general were fined four times as heavily as
wounds. Horse-stealing was punished by slavery. In discovering the
guilty the ordeals of red-hot iron and boiling water were in use, as in
the countries of the West.

There were three classes in the nation,--slaves, freemen, and boyars, or
nobles, the last being probably the descendants of Rurik's warriors. The
prince was the heir of all citizens who died without male children,
except of boyars and the officers of his guard.

These laws, which were little more primitive than those of Western
Europe at the same period, seem never to have imposed corporal
punishment for crime. Injury was made good by cash, except in the case
of the combat. The fines went to the lord or prince, and were one of his
means of support, the other being tribute from his estates. No provision
for taxation was made. The mark of dependence on the prince was military
service, the lord, as in the feudal West, being obliged to provide his
own arms, provisions, and mounted followers.

Judges there were, who travelled on circuits, and who impanelled twelve
respectable jurors, sworn to give just verdicts. There are several laws
extending protection to property, fixed and movable, which seem
specially framed for the merchants of Novgorod.

Such are the leading features of the code of Yaroslaf. The franchises
granted the Novgorodians, which for four centuries gave them the right
to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," form part of it. Crude
as are many of its provisions, it forms a vital starting-point, that in
which Russia first came under definite in place of indefinite law. And
the bringing about of this important change is the glory of Yaroslaf the
Wise.




_THE YOKE OF THE TARTARS._


In Asia, the greatest continent of the earth, lies its most extensive
plain, the vast plateau of Mongolia, whose true boundaries are the
mountains of Siberia and the Himalayan highlands, the Pacific Ocean and
the hills of Eastern Europe, and of which the great plain of Russia is
but an outlying section. This mighty plateau, largely a desert, is the
home of the nomad shepherd and warrior, the nesting-place of the
emigrant invader. From these broad levels in the past horde after horde
of savage horsemen rode over Europe and Asia,--the frightful Huns, the
devastating Turks, the desolating Mongols. It is with the last that we
are here concerned, for Russia fell beneath their arms, and was held for
two centuries as a captive realm.

The nomads are born warriors. They live on horseback; the care of their
great herds teaches them military discipline; they are always in motion,
have no cities to defend, no homes to abandon, no crops to harvest.
Their home is a camp; when they move it moves with them; their food is
on the hoof and accompanies them on the march; they can go hungry for a
week and then eat like cormorants; their tools are weapons, always in
hand, always ready to use; a dozen times they have burst like a
devouring torrent from their desert and overwhelmed the South and West.

While the Turks were still engaged in their work of conquest, the
Mongols arose, and under the formidable Genghis Khan swept over Southern
Asia like a tornado, leaving death and desolation in their track. The
conqueror died in 1227,--for death is a foe that vanquishes even the
greatest of warriors,--and was succeeded by his son Octoi, as Great Khan
of the Mongols and Tartars. In 1235, Batou, nephew of the khan, was sent
with an army of half a million men to the conquest of Europe.

This flood of barbarians fell upon Russia at an unfortunate time, one of
anarchy and civil war, when the whole nation was rent and torn and there
were almost as many sovereigns as there were cities. The system of
giving a separate dominion to every son of a grand prince had ruined
Russia. These small potentates were constantly at war, confusion reigned
supreme, Kief was taken and degraded and a new capital, Vladimir,
established, and Moscow, which was to become the fourth capital of
Russia, was founded. Such was the state of affairs when Batou, with his
vast horde of savage horsemen, fell on the distracted realm.

Defence was almost hopeless. Russia had no government, no army, no
imperial organization. Each city stood for itself, with great widths of
open country around. Over these broad spaces the invaders swept like an
avalanche, finding cultivated fields before them, leaving a desert
behind. They swam the Don, the Volga, and the other great rivers on
their horses, or crossed them on the ice. Leathern boats brought over
their wagons and artillery. They spread from Livonia to the Black Sea,
poured into the kingdoms of the West, and would have overrun all Europe
but for the vigorous resistance of the knighthood of Germany.

The cities of Russia made an obstinate defence, but one after another
they fell. Some saved themselves by surrender. Most of them were taken
by assault and destroyed. City after city was reduced to ashes, none of
the inhabitants being left to deplore their fall. The nomads had no use
for cities. Walls were their enemies: pasturage was all they cared for.
The conversion of a country into a desert was to them a gain rather than
a loss, for grass will grow in the desert, and grass to feed their
horses and herds was what they most desired.

So far as the warriors of Mongolia were concerned, their conquests left
them no better off. They still had to tend and feed their herds, and
they could have done that as well in their native land. But the leaders
had the lust of dominion, their followers the blood-fury, and inspired
by these feelings they ravaged the world.

One thing alone saved Russia from being peopled by Tartars,--its
climate. This was not to their liking, and they preferred to dwell in
lands better suited to their tastes and habits. The great Tartar empire
of Kaptchak, or the Golden Horde, was founded on the eastern frontier;
other khanates were founded in the south; but the Russian princes were
left to rule in the remainder of the land, under tribute to the khans,
to whom they were forced to do homage. In truth, these Tartar chiefs
made themselves lords paramount of the Russian realm, and no prince,
great or small, could assume the government of his state until he had
journeyed to Central Mongolia to beg permission to rule from the khan of
the Great Horde.

The subjection of the princes was that of slaves. A century afterward
they were obliged to spread a carpet of sable fur under the hoofs of the
steed of the khan's envoy, to prostrate themselves at his feet and learn
his mission on their knees, and not only to present a cup of koumiss to
the barbarian, but even to lick from the neck of his horse the drops of
the beverage which he might let fall in drinking. More shameful
subjection it would be difficult to describe.

Several princes who proved insubordinate were summoned to the camp of
the Horde and there tried and executed. Rivals sought the khan, to buy
power by presents. During their journeys, which occupied a year or more,
the Tartar bashaks ruled their dominions. Tartar armies aided the
princes in their civil wars, and helped these ambitious lords to keep
their country in a state of subjection.

Fortunately for Russia, the great empire of the Mongols gradually fell
to pieces of its own weight. The Kaptchak, or Golden Horde, broke loose
from the Great Horde, and Russia had a smaller power to deal with. The
Golden Horde itself broke into two parts. And among the many princes of
Russia a grand prince was still acknowledged, with right by title to
dominion over the entire realm.

One of these grand princes, Alexander by name, son of the grand prince
of Vladimir, proved a great warrior and statesman and gained the power
as well as the title. Prince of Novgorod by inheritance, he defeated all
his enemies, drove the Germans from Russia, and recovered the Neva from
the Swedes, which feat of arms gained him the title of Alexander Nevsky.
The Tartars were too powerful to be attacked, so he managed to gain
their good will. The khan became his friend, and when trouble arose with
Kief and Vladimir their princes were dethroned and these principalities
given to the shrewd grand prince.

Russia seemed to be rehabilitated. Alexander was lord of its three
capitals, Novgorod, Kief, and Vladimir, and grand prince of the realm.
But the Russians were not content to submit either to his authority or
to the yoke of the Tartars. His whole life was spent in battle with
them, or in journeys to the tent of the khan to beg forgiveness for
their insults.

The climax came when the Tartar collectors of tribute were massacred in
some cities and ignominiously driven out of others. When these acts
became known at the Horde the angry khan sent orders for the grand
prince and all other Russian princes to appear before him and to bring
all their troops. He said that he was about to make a campaign, and
needed the aid of the Russians.

This story Alexander did not believe. He plainly perceived that the wily
Tartar wished to deprive Russia of all its armed men, that he might the
more easily reduce it again to subjection. Rather than see his country
ruined, the patriotic prince determined to disobey, and to offer himself
as a victim by seeking alone the camp of Usbek, the great khan, a
mission of infinite danger.

He hoped that his submission might save Russia from ruin, though he knew
that death lay on his path. He found Usbek bitterly bent on war, and for
a whole year was kept in the camp of the Horde, seeking to appease the
wrath of the barbarian. In the end he succeeded, the khan promising to
forgive the Russians and desist from the intended war, and in the year
1262 Alexander started for home again.

He had seemingly escaped, but not in reality. He had not journeyed far
before he suddenly died. To all appearance, poison had been mingled with
his food before he left the camp of the khan. Alexander had become too
great and powerful at home for the designs of the conquerors. He died
the victim of his love of country. His people have recognized his virtue
by making him a saint. He had not labored in vain. In his hands the
grand princeship had been restored, Vladimir had become supreme, and a
centre had been established around which the Russians might rally. But
for a century and more still they were to remain subject to the Tartar
yoke.




_THE VICTORY OF THE DON._


The history of Russia during the century after the Mongol conquest is
one of shame and anarchy. The shame was that of slavish submission to
the Tartar khan. Each prince, in succession, fell on his knees before
this high dignitary of the barbarians and begged or bought his throne.
The anarchy was that of the Russian princes, on which the khan looked
with winking eyes, thinking that the more they weakened themselves the
more they would strengthen him. The rulers of Moscow, Tver, Vladimir,
and Novgorod fought almost incessantly for supremacy, crushing their
people beneath the feet of their ambition, now one, now another, gaining
the upper hand.

[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF MOSCOW.]

In the end the princes of Moscow became supreme. They grew rich, and
were able to keep up a regular army, that chief tool of despotism. The
crown lands alone gave them dominion over three hundred thousand
subjects. The time was coming in which they would be the absolute rulers
of all Russia. But before this could be accomplished the power of the
khans must be broken, and the first step towards this was taken by the
great Dmitri Donskoi, who became grand prince of Moscow in 1362.

Dmitri came to the throne at a fortunate epoch. The Golden Horde was
breaking to pieces. There were several khans, at war with one another,
and discord ruled among the overlords of Russia. Still greater discord
reigned in Russia itself. For eighteen years Dmitri was kept busy in
wars with the princes of Tver, Kief, and Lithuania. Terrible was the war
with Tver. Four times he overcame Michael, its prince. Four times did
Michael, aided by the prince of Lithuania, gain the victory. During this
obstinate conflict Moscow was twice besieged. Only its stone walls,
lately built, saved it from capture and ruin. At length Olguerd, the
fiery prince of Lithuania, died, and Tver yielded. Moscow became
paramount among the Russian principalities.

And now Dmitri, with all Russia as his realm, dared to defy the terrible
Tartars. For more than a century no Russian prince had ventured to
appear before the khan of the Golden Horde except on his knees. Dmitri
had thus humbled himself only three years before. Now, inflated with his
new power, he refused to pay tribute to the khan, and went so far as to
put to death the Tartar envoy, who insolently demanded the accustomed
payment.

Dmitri had burned his bridges behind him. He had flung down the gage of
war to the Tartars, and would soon feel their hand in all its dreaded
strength. The khan, on hearing of the murder of his ambassador, burst
into a terrible rage. The civil wars which divided the Golden Horde had
for the time ceased, and Mamai, the khan, gathered all the power of the
Horde and marched on defiant Moscow, vowing to sweep that rebel city
from the face of the earth.

The Russians did not wait his coming. All dissensions ceased in the
face of the impending peril, all the princes sent aid, and Dmitri
marched to the Don at the head of an army of two hundred thousand men.
Here he found the redoubtable Mamai with three times that number of the
fierce Tartar horsemen in his train.

"Yonder lies the foe," said Dmitri to his princely associates. "Here
runs the Don. Shall we await him here, or cross and meet him with the
river at our backs?"

"Let us cross," was the unanimous verdict. "Let us be first in the
assault."

At once the order was given, and the battalions marched on board the
boats and were ferried across the stream, at a short distance from the
opposite bank of which the enemy lay. No sooner had they landed than
Dmitri ordered all the boats to be cast adrift. It was to be victory or
death; no hope of escape by flight was left; but well he knew that the
men would fight with double valor under such desperate straits.

The battle began. On the serried Russian ranks the Tartars poured in
that impetuous assault which had so often carried their hosts to
victory. The Russians defended themselves with fiery valor, assault
after assault was repulsed, and so fiercely was the field contested that
multitudes of the fallen were trampled to death beneath the horses'
feet. At length, however, numbers began to tell. The Russians grew weary
from the closeness of the conflict. The vast host of the Tartars enabled
them to replace with fresh troops all that were worn in the fight.
Victory seemed about to perch upon their banners.

Dismay crept into the Russian ranks. They would have broken in flight,
but no avenue of escape was left. The river ran behind them, unruffled
by a boat. Flight meant death by drowning; fight meant death by the
sword. Of the two the latter seemed best, for the Russians firmly
believed that death at the hands of the infidels meant an immediate
transport to the heavenly mansions of bliss.

At this critical moment, when the host of Dmitri was wavering between
panic and courage, the men ready to drop their swords through sheer
fatigue, an unlooked-for diversion inspired their shrinking souls. The
grand prince had stationed a detachment of his army as a reserve, and
these, as yet, had taken no part in the battle. Now, fresh and furious,
they were brought up, and fell vigorously upon the rear of the Tartars,
who, filled with sudden terror, thought that a new army had come to the
aid of the old. A moment later they broke and fled, pursued by their
triumphant foes, and falling fast as they hurried in panic fear from the
encrimsoned field.

Something like amazement filled the souls of the Russians as they saw
their dreaded enemies in flight. Such a consummation they had scarcely
dared hope for, accustomed as they had been for a century to crouch
before this dreadful foe. They had bought their victory dearly. Their
dead strewed the ground by thousands. Yet to be victorious over the
Tartar host seemed to them an ample recompense for an even greater loss
than that sustained. Eight days were occupied by the survivors in
burying the slain. As for the Tartar dead, they were left to fester on
the field. Such was the great victory of the Don, from which Dmitri
gained his honorable surname of Donskoi. He died nine years afterwards
(1389), having won the high honor of being the first to vanquish the
terrible horsemen of the Steppes, firmly founded the authority of the
grand princes, and made Moscow the paramount power in Russia.




_IVAN, THE FIRST OF THE CZARS._


The victory of the Don did not free Russia from the Tartar yoke. Two
years afterwards the principality of Moscow was overrun and ravaged by a
lieutenant of the mighty Tamerlane, the all-conquering successor of
Genghis Khan. Several times Moscow was taken and burned. Full seventy
years later, at the court of the Golden Horde, two Russian princes might
have been seen disputing before the great khan the possession of the
grand principality and tremblingly awaiting his decision. Nevertheless,
the battle of the Don had sounded the knell of the Tartar power. Anarchy
continued to prevail in the Golden Horde. The power of the grand princes
of Moscow steadily grew. The khans themselves played into the hands of
their foes. Russia was slowly but surely casting off her fetters, and
deliverance was at hand.

Ivan III., great-grandson of Dmitri Donskoi, ascended the throne in
1462, nearly two centuries and a half after the Tartar invasion. During
all that period Russia had been the vassal of the khans. Only now was
its freedom to come. It was by craft, more than by war, that Ivan won.
In the field he was a dastard, but in subtlety and perfidy he surpassed
all other men of his time, and his insidious but persistent policy
ended by making him the autocrat of all the Russias.

He found powerful enemies outside his dominions,--the Tartars, the
Lithuanians, and the Poles. He succeeded in defeating them all. He had
powerful rivals within the domain of Russia. These also he overcame. He
made Moscow all-powerful, imitated the tyranny of the Tartars, and
founded the autocratic rule of the czars which has ever since prevailed.

The story of the fall of the Golden Horde may be briefly told. It was
the work of the Russian army, but not of the Russian prince. In 1469,
after collecting a large army, Ivan halted and began negotiating. But
the army was not to be restrained. Disregarding the orders of their
general, they chose another leader, and assailed and captured Kasan, the
chief Tartar city. As for the army of the Golden Horde, it was twice
defeated by the Russian force. In 1480 a third invasion of the Tartars
took place, which resulted in the annihilation of their force.

The tale, as handed down to us, is a curious one. The army, full of
martial ardor, had advanced as far as the Oka to meet the Tartars; but
on the approach of the enemy Ivan, stricken with terror, deserted his
troops and took refuge in far-off Moscow. He even recalled his son, but
the brave boy refused to obey, saying that "he would rather die at his
post than follow the example of his father."

The murmurs of the people, the supplication of the priests, the
indignation of the boyars, forced him to return to the army, but he
returned only to cover it with shame and himself with disgrace. For
when the chill of the coming winter suddenly froze the river between the
two forces, offering the foe a firm pathway to battle, Ivan, in
consternation, ordered a retreat, which his haste converted into a
disorderly flight. Yet the army was two hundred thousand strong and had
not struck a blow.

Fortune and his allies saved the dastard monarch. For at this perilous
interval the khan of the Crimea, an ally of Russia, attacked the capital
of the Golden Horde and forced a hasty recall of its army; and during
its disorderly homeward march a host of Cossacks fell upon it with such
fury that it was totally destroyed. Russia, threatened with a new
subjection to the Tartars by the cowardice of its monarch, was finally
freed from these dreaded foes through the aid of her allies.

But the fruits of this harvest, sown by others, were reaped by the czar.
His people, who had been disgusted with his cowardice, now gave him
credit for the deepest craft and wisdom. All this had been prepared by
him, they said. His flight was a ruse, his pusillanimity was prudence;
he had made the Tartars their own destroyers, without risking the fate
of Russia in a battle; and what had just been condemned as dastard
baseness was now praised as undiluted wisdom.

Ivan would never have gained the title of Great from his deeds in war.
He won it, and with some justice, from his deeds in peace. He was great
in diplomacy, great in duplicity, great in that persistent pursuit of a
single object through which men rise to power and fame. This object, in
his case, was autocracy. It was his purpose to crush out the last shreds
of freedom from Russia, establish an empire on the pernicious pattern of
a Tartar khanate, which had so long been held up as an example before
Russian eyes, and make the Prince of Moscow as absolute as the Emperor
of China. He succeeded. During his reign freedom fled from Russia. It
has never since returned.

The story of how this great aim was accomplished is too long to be told
here, and the most important part of it must be left for our next tale.
It will suffice, at this point, to say that by astute policy and good
fortune Ivan added to his dominions nineteen thousand square miles of
territory and four millions of subjects, made himself supreme autocrat
and his voice the sole arbiter of fate, reduced the boyars and
subordinate princes to dependence on his throne, established a new and
improved system of administration in all the details of government, and
by his marriage with Sophia, the last princess of the Greek imperial
family,--driven by the Turks from Constantinople to Rome,--gained for
his standard the two-headed eagle, the symbol of autocracy, and for
himself the supreme title of czar.




_THE FALL OF NOVGOROD THE GREAT._


The Czar of Russia is the one political deity in Europe, the sole
absolute autocrat. More than a hundred millions of people have delivered
themselves over, fettered hand and foot, almost body and soul, to the
ownership of one man, without a voice in their own government, without
daring to speak, hardly daring to think, otherwise than he approves.
Thousands of them, millions of them, perhaps, are saying to-day, in the
words of Hamlet, "It is not and it cannot come to good; but break my
heart, for I must hold my tongue."

Who is this man, this god of a nation, that he should loom so high? Is
he a marvel of wisdom, virtue, and nobility, made by nature to wear the
purple, fashioned of porcelain clay, greater and better than all the
host to whom his word is the voice of fate? By no means; thousands of
his subjects tower far above him in virtue and ability, but,
puppet-like, the noblest and best of them must dance as he pulls the
strings, and hardly a man in Russia dares to say that his soul is his
own if the czar says otherwise.

Such a state of affairs is an anachronism in the nineteenth century, a
hideous relic of the barbarism and anarchy of mediaeval times. In
America, where every man is a czar, so far as the disposal of himself
is concerned, the enslavement of the Russians seems a frightful
disregard of the rights of man, the nation a giant Gulliver bound down
to the earth by chains of creed and custom, of bureaucracy and perverted
public opinion. Like Gulliver, it was bound when asleep, and it must
continue fettered while its intellect remains torpid. Some day it will
awake, stretch its mighty limbs, burst its feeble bonds, and hurl in
disarray to the earth the whole host of liliputian officials and
dignitaries who are strutting in the pride of ownership on its great
body, the czar tumbling first from his great estate.

This does not seem a proper beginning to a story from Russian history,
but, to quote from Shakespeare again, "Thereby hangs a tale." The
history of Russia has, in fact, been a strange one; it began as a
republic, it has ended as a despotism; and we cannot go on with our work
without attempting to show how this came about.

It was the Mongol invasion that enslaved Russia. Helped by the khans,
Moscow gradually rose to supremacy over all the other principalities,
trod them one by one under her feet, gained power by the aid of Tartar
swords and spears or through sheer dread of the Tartar name, and when
the Golden Horde was at length overthrown the Grand Prince took the
place of the Great Khan and ruled with the same absolute sway. It was
the absolutism of Asia imported into Europe. Step by step the princes of
Moscow had copied the system of the khan. This work was finished by Ivan
the Great, at once the deliverer and the enslaver of Russia, who freed
that country from the yoke of the khan, but laid upon it a heavier
burden of servility and shame.

Under the khan there had been insurrection. Under the czar there was
subjection. The latter state was worse than the former. The subjection
continues still, but the spirit of insurrection is again rising. The
time is coming in which the rule of that successor of the Tartar khan,
miscalled the czar, will end, and the people take into their own hands
the control of their bodies and souls.

There were republics in Russia even in Ivan's day, free cities which,
though governed by princes, maintained the republican institutions of
the past. Chief among these was Novgorod, that Novgorod the Great which
invited Rurik into Russia and under him became the germ of the vast
Russian empire. A free city then, a free city it continued. Rurik and
his descendants ruled by sufferance. Yaroslaf confirmed the free
institutions which Rurik had respected. For centuries this great
commercial city continued prosperous and free, becoming in time a member
of the powerful Hanseatic League. Only for the invasion of the Mongols,
Novgorod instead of Moscow might have become the prototype of modern
Russia, and a republic instead of a despotism have been established in
that mighty land. The sword of the Tartar cast into the scales
overweighted the balance. It gave Moscow the supremacy, and liberty
fell.

Ivan the Great, in his determined effort to subject all Russia to his
autocratic sway, saw before him three republican communities, the free
cities of Novgorod, Viatka, and Pskof, and took steps to sweep these
last remnants of ancient freedom from his path. Novgorod, as much the
most important of these, especially demands our attention. With its fall
Russian liberty fell to the earth.

At that time Novgorod was one of the richest and most powerful cities of
the earth. It was an ally rather than a subject of Moscow, and all the
north of Russia was under its sway and contributed to its wealth. But
luxury had sapped its strength, and it held its liberties more by
purchase than by courage. Some of these liberties had already been lost,
seized by the grand prince. The proud burghers chafed under this
invasion of their time-honored privileges, and in 1471, inspired by the
seeming timidity of Ivan, they determined to regain them.

It was a woman that brought about the revolt. Marfa, a rich and
influential widow of the city, had fallen in love with a Lithuanian,
and, inspired at once by the passions of love and ambition, sought to
attach her country to that of her lover. She opened her palace to the
citizens and lavished on them her treasures, seeking to inspire them
with her own views. Her efforts were successful: the officers of the
grand prince were driven out, and his domains seized; and when he
threatened reprisal they broke into open revolt, and bound themselves by
treaty to Casimir, prince of Lithuania.

But events were to prove that the turbulent citizens were no match for
the crafty Ivan, who moved slowly but ever steadily to his goal, and
made secure each footstep before taking a step in advance. His
insidious policy roused three separate hostilities against Novgorod. The
pride of the nobles was stirred up against its democracy; the greed of
the princes made them eager to seize its wealth; the fanatical people
were taught that this great city was an apostate to the faith.

These hostile forces proved too much for the city against which they
were directed. Novgorod was taken and plundered, though Ivan did not yet
deprive it of its liberties. He had powerful princes to deal with, and
did not dare to seize so rich a prey without letting them share the
spoil. But he ruined the city by devastation and plunder, deprived it of
its tributaries, the city and territory of Perm, and turned from
Novgorod to Moscow the rich commerce of this section. Taking advantage
of some doubtful words in the treaty of submission, he held himself to
be legislator and supreme judge of the captive city. Such was the first
result of the advice of an ambitious woman.

The next step of the autocrat added to his influence. Novgorod being
threatened with an attack from Livonia, he sent thither troops and
envoys to fight and negotiate in his name, thus taking from the city,
whose resources he had already drained, its old right of making peace
and war.

The ill feeling between the rich and the poor of Novgorod was fomented
by his agents; all complaints were required to be made to him; he still
further impoverished the rich by the presents and magnificent receptions
which his presence among them demanded, and dazzled the eyes of the
people by the Oriental state and splendor which had been adopted by the
court of Moscow, and which he displayed in their midst.

The nobles who had formerly been his enemies now became his victims. He
had induced the people to denounce them, and at once seized them and
sent them in chains to Moscow. The people, blinded by this seeming
attention to their complaints, remained heedless of the violation of the
ancient law of their republic, "that none of its citizens should ever be
tried or punished out of the limits of its own territory."

Thus tyranny made its slow way. The citizens, once governed and judged
by their own peers, now made their appeals to the grand prince and were
summoned to appear before his tribunal. "Never since Rurik," say the
annals, "had such an event happened; never had the grand princes of Kief
and Vladimir seen the Novgorodians come and submit to them as their
judges. Ivan alone could reduce Novgorod to that degree of humiliation."

This work was done with the deliberation of a settled policy. Ivan did
not molest Marfa, who had instigated the revolt; his sentences were just
and equitable; men were blinded by his seeming moderation; and for full
seven years he pursued his insidious way, gradually weaning the people
from their ancient customs, and taking advantage of every imprudence and
thoughtless concession on their part to ground on it a claim to
increased authority.

It was the glove of silk he had thus far extended to them. Within it lay
concealed the hand of iron. The grasp of the iron hand was made when,
during an audience, the envoy of the republic, through treason or
thoughtlessness, addressed him by the name of sovereign (_Gosudar_,
"liege lord," instead of _Gospodin_, "master," the usual title).

Ivan, taking advantage of this, at once claimed all the absolute rights
which custom had attached to that title. He demanded that the republic
should take an oath to him as its judge and legislator, receive his
boyars as their rulers, and yield to them the ancient palace of
Yaroslaf, the sacred temple of their liberties, in which for more than
five centuries their assemblies had been held.

This demand roused the Novgorodians to their danger. They saw how
blindly they had yielded to tyranny. A transport of indignation inspired
them. For the last time the great bell of liberty sent forth its peal of
alarm. Gathering tumultuously at the palace from which they were
threatened with expulsion, they vigorously resolved,--

"Ivan is in fact our lord, but he shall never be our sovereign; the
tribunal of his deputies may sit at Goroditch, but never at Novgorod:
Novgorod is, and always shall be, its own judge."

In their rage they murdered several of the nobles whom they suspected of
being friends of the tyrant. The envoy who had uttered the imprudent
word was torn to pieces by their furious hands. They ended by again
invoking the aid of Lithuania.

On hearing of this outbreak the despot feigned surprise. Groans broke
from his lips, as if he felt that he had been basely used. His
complaints were loud, and the calling in of a foreign power was brought
against Novgorod as a frightful aggravation of its crime. Under cover of
these groans and complaints an army was gathered to which all the
provinces of the empire were forced to send contingents.

These warlike preparations alarmed the citizens. All Russia seemed
arrayed against them, and they tremblingly asked for conditions of peace
in accordance with their ancient honor. "I will reign at Novgorod as I
do at Moscow," replied the imperious despot. "I must have domains on
your territory. You must give up your Posadnick, and the bell which
summons you to the national council." Yet this threat of enslavement was
craftily coupled with a promise to respect their liberty.

This declaration, the most terrible that free citizens could have heard,
threw them into a state of violent agitation. Now in defiant fury they
seized their arms, now in helpless despondency let them fall. For a
whole month their crafty adversary permitted them to exhibit their rage,
not caring to use the great army with which he had encircled the city
when assured that the terror of his presence would soon bring him
victory.

They yielded: they could do nothing but yield. No blood was shed. Ivan
had gained his end, and was not given to useless cruelty. Marfa and
seven of the principal citizens were sent prisoners to Moscow and their
property was confiscated. No others were molested. But on the 15th of
January, 1478, the national assemblies ceased, and the citizens took the
oath of subjection. The great republic, which had existed from
prehistoric times, was at an end, and despotism ruled supreme.

On the 18th the boyars of Novgorod entered the service of Ivan, and the
possessions of the clergy were added to the domain of the prince, giving
him as vassals three hundred thousand boyar-followers, on whom he
depended to hold Novgorod in a state of submission. A great part of the
territories belonging to the city became the victor's prize, and it is
said that, as a share of his spoil, he sent to Moscow three hundred
cart-loads of gold, silver, and precious stones, besides vast quantities
of furs, cloths, and other goods of value.

Pskov, another of the Russian republics, had been already subdued. In
1479, Viatka, a colony of Novgorod, was reduced to like slavery. The end
had come. Republicanism in Russia was extinguished, and gradually the
republican population was removed to the soil of Moscow and replaced by
Muscovites, born to the yoke.

The liberties of Novgorod were gone. It had been robbed of its wealth.
Its commerce remained, which in time would have restored its prosperity.
But this too Ivan destroyed, not intentionally, but effectually. A burst
of despotic anger completed the work of ruin. The tyrant, having been
insulted by a Hanseatic city, ordered all the merchants of the Hansa
then in Novgorod to be put in chains and their property confiscated. As
a result, that confidence under which alone commerce can flourish
vanished, the North sought new channels for its trade, and Novgorod the
Great, once peopled by four hundred thousand souls, declined until only
an insignificant borough marks the spot where once it stood.

It is an interesting fact that this final blow to Russian republicanism
was dealt in 1492, the very year in which Columbus discovered a new
world beyond the seas, within which the greatest republic the world has
ever known was destined to arise.




_IVAN THE TERRIBLE._


In seeking examples of the excesses to which absolute power may lead, we
usually name the wicked emperors of Rome, among whom Nero stands most
notorious as a monster of cruelty. Modern history has but one Nero in
its long lines of kings and emperors, and him we find in Ivan IV. of
Russia, surnamed the Terrible.

This cruel czar succeeded to the throne when but three years of age. In
his early years he lived in a state of terror, being insulted and
despised by the powerful nobles who controlled the power of the throne.
At fourteen years of age his enemies were driven out and his kinsmen
came into power. They, caring only for blood and plunder, prompted the
boy to cruelty, teaching him to rob, to torture, to massacre. They
applauded him when he amused himself by tormenting animals; and when,
riding furiously through the streets of Moscow, he dashed all before him
to the ground and trampled women and children under his horses' feet,
they praised him for spirit and energy.

This was an education fitted to make a Nero. But, happily for Russia,
for thirteen years the tiger was chained. Ivan was seventeen years of
age when a frightful conflagration which broke out in Moscow gave rise
to a revolt against the Glinski, his wicked kinsmen. They were torn to
pieces by the furious multitude, while terror rent his youthful soul.
Amid the horror of flames, cries of vengeance, and groans of the dying,
a monk appeared before the trembling boy, and with menacing looks and
upraised hand bade him shrink from the wrath of Heaven, which his
cruelty had aroused.

Certain appearances which appeared supernatural aided the effect of
these words, the nature of Ivan seemed changed as by a miracle, dread of
Heaven's vengeance controlled his nature, and he yielded himself to the
influence of the wise and good. Pious priests and prudent boyars became
his advisers, Anastasia, his young and virtuous bride, gained an
influence over him, and Russia enjoyed justice and felicity.

During the succeeding thirteen years the country was ably and wisely
governed, order was everywhere established, the army was strengthened,
fortresses were built, enemies were defeated, the morals of the clergy
were improved, a new code of laws was formed, arts were introduced from
Europe, a printing-office was opened, the city of Archangel was built,
and the north of the empire was thrown open to commerce.

All this was the work of Adashef, Ivan's wise prime minister, aided by
the influence of the noble-hearted Anastasia. In 1560, at the end of
this period of mild and able administration, a sudden change took place
and the tiger was set free. Anastasia died. A disease seized Ivan which
seemed to affect his brain. The remainder of his life was marked by
paroxysms of frightful barbarity.

A new terror seized him, that of a vast conspiracy of the nobles
against his power, and for safety he retired to Alexandrovsky, a
fortress in the midst of a gloomy forest. Here he assumed the monkish
dress with three hundred of his minions, abandoning to the boyars the
government of the empire, but keeping the military power in his own
hands.

On all sides Russia now suffered from its enemies. Moscow, with several
hundred thousand Muscovites, was burned by the Tartars in 1571. Disaster
followed disaster, which Ivan was too cowardly and weak to avert.
Trusting to incompetent generals abroad, he surrounded himself at home
with a guard of six thousand chosen men, who were hired to play the part
of spies and assassins. They carried as emblems of office a dog's head
and a broom, the first to indicate that they worried the enemies of the
czar, the second that they swept them from the face of the earth. They
were chosen from the lowest class of the people, and to them was given
the property of their victims, that they might murder without mercy.

The excesses of Ivan are almost too horrible to tell. He began by
putting to death several great boyars of the family of Rurik, while
their wives and children were driven naked into the forests, where they
died under the scourge. Novgorod had been ruined by his grandfather. He
marched against it, in a freak of madness, gathered a throng of the
helpless people within a great enclosure, and butchered them with his
own hand. When worn out with these labors of death, he turned on them
his guard, his slaves, and his dogs, while for a month afterwards
hundreds of them were flung daily into the waters of the river, through
the broken ice. What little vitality Ivan III. had left in the
republican city was stamped out under the feet of this insensate brute.

Tver and Pskov, two others of the free cities of the empire, suffered
from his frightful presence. Then returning to Moscow, he filled the
public square with red-hot brasiers, great brass caldrons, and eighty
gibbets, and here five hundred of the leading nobles were slain by his
orders, after being subjected to terrible tortures.

Women were treated as barbarously as men. Ivan, with a cruelty never
before matched, ordered many of them to be hanged at their own doors,
and forced the husbands to go in and out under the swinging and
festering corpses of those they had loved and cherished. In other cases
husbands or children were fastened, dead, in their seats at table, and
the family forced to sit at meals, for days, opposite these terrifying
objects.

Seeking daily for new conceits of cruelty, he forced one lord to kill
his father and another his brother, while it was his delight to let
loose his dogs and bears upon the people in the public square, the
animals being left to devour the mutilated bodies of those they killed.
Eight hundred women were drowned in one frightful mass, and their
relatives were forced under torture to point out where their wealth lay
hidden.

It is said that sixty thousand people were slain by Ivan's orders in
Novgorod alone; how many perished in the whole realm history does not
relate. His only warlike campaign was against the Livonians. These he
failed to conquer, but held their resistance as a rebellion, and ordered
his prisoners to be thrown into boiling caldrons, spitted on lances, or
roasted at fires which he stirred up with his own hands.

This monster of iniquity married in all seven wives. He sought for an
eighth from the court of Queen Elizabeth of England, and the daughter of
the Earl of Huntington was offered him as a victim,--a willing one, it
seems, influenced by the glamour which power exerts over the mind; but
before the match was concluded the intended bride took fright, and
begged to be spared the terrible honor of wedding the Russian czar.

Yet all the excesses of Ivan did not turn the people against him. He
assumed the manner of one inspired, claiming divine powers, and all the
injuries and degradation which he inflicted upon the people were
accepted not only with resignation but with adoration. The Russians of
that age of ignorance seem to have looked upon God and the czar as one,
and submitted to blows, wounds, and insults with a blind servility to
which only abject superstition could have led.

[Illustration: CHURCH AND TOWER OF IVAN THE GREAT.]

The end came at last, in a final freak of madness. An humble
supplication, coming from the most faithful of his subjects, was made to
him; but in his distorted brain it indicated a new conspiracy of the
boyars, of which his eldest and ablest son was to be the leader. In a
transport of insane rage the frenzied emperor raised his iron-bound
staff and struck to the earth with a mortal blow this hope of his race.

This was his last excess. Regret for his hasty act, though not remorse
for his murders, assailed him, and he soon after died, after twenty-six
years of insane cruelties, ordering new executions almost with his
latest breath.




_THE CONQUEST OF SIBERIA._


In the year 1558 a family of wealthy merchants, Stroganof by name, began
to barter with the Tartar tribes dwelling east of the Ural Mountains.
Ivan IV. had granted to this family the desert districts of the Kama,
with great privileges in trade, and the power to levy troops and build
forts--at their own expense--as a security against the robbers who
crossed the Urals to prey upon their settled neighbors to the west. In
return the Stroganofs were privileged to follow their example in a more
legal manner, by the brigandage of trade between civilization and
barbarism.

These robbers came from the region now known as Siberia, which extends
to-day through thousands of miles of width, from the Urals to the
Pacific. Before this time we know little about this great expanse of
land. It seems to have been peopled by a succession of races, immigrants
from the south, each new wave of people driving the older tribes deeper
into the frozen regions of the north. Early in the Christian era there
came hither a people destitute of iron, but expert in the working of
bronze, silver, and gold. They had wide regions of irrigated fields, and
a higher civilization than that of those who in time took their place.

People of Turkish origin succeeded these tribes about the eleventh
century. They brought with them weapons of iron and made fine pottery.
In the thirteenth century, when the great Mongol outbreak took place
under Genghis Khan, the Turkish kingdom in Siberia was destroyed and
Tartars took their place. Civilization went decidedly down hill. Such
was the state of affairs when Russia began to turn eyes of longing
towards Siberia.

The busy traders of Novgorod had made their way into Siberia as early as
the eleventh century. But this republic fell, and the trade came to an
end. In 1555, Khan Ediger, who had made himself a kingdom in Siberia,
and whose people had crossed swords with the Russians beyond the Urals,
sent envoys to Moscow, who consented to pay to Russia a yearly tribute
of a thousand sables, thus acknowledging Russian supremacy.

This tribute showed that there were riches beyond the mountains. The
Stroganofs made their way to the barrier of the hills, and it was not
long before the trader was followed by the soldier. The invasion of
Siberia was due to an event which for the time threatened the total
overthrow of the Russian government. A Cossack brigand, Stepan Rozni by
name, had long defied the forces of the czar, and gradually gained in
strength until he had an army of three hundred thousand men under his
command. If he had been a soldier of ability he might have made himself
lord of the empire. Being a brigand in grain, he was soon overturned and
his forces dispersed.

Among his followers was one Yermak, a chief of the Cossacks of the Don,
whom the czar sentenced to death for his love of plunder, but afterwards
pardoned. Yermak and his followers soon found the rule of Moscow too
stringent for their ideas of personal liberty, and he led a Cossack band
to the Stroganof settlements in Perm.

Tradition tells us that the Stroganof of that date did not relish the
presence of his unruly guests, with their free ideas of property rights,
and suggested to Yermak that Siberia offered a promising field for a
ready sword. He would supply him with food and arms if he saw fit to
lead an expedition thither.

The suggestion accorded well with Yermak's humor. He at once began to
enlist volunteers for the enterprise, adding to his own Cossack band a
reinforcement of Russians and Tartars and of German and Polish prisoners
of war, until he had sixteen hundred and thirty-six men under his
command. With these he crossed the mountains in 1580, and terrified the
natives to submission with his fire-arms, a form of weapon new to them.
Making their way down the Tura and Taghil Rivers, the adventurers
crossed the immense untrodden forests of Tobol, and Kutchum, the Tartar
khan, was assailed in his capital town of Ister, near where Tobolsk now
stands.

Many battles with the Tartars were fought, Ister was taken, the khan
fled to the steppes, and his cousin was made prisoner by the
adventurers. Yermak now, having added by his valor a great domain to the
Russian empire, purchased the favor of Ivan IV. by the present of this
new kingdom. He made his way to the Irtish and Obi, opened trade with
the rich khanate of Bokhara, south of the desert, and in various ways
sought to consolidate the conquest he had made. But misfortune came to
the conqueror. One day, being surprised by the Tartars when unprepared,
he leaped into the Irtish in full armor and tried to swim its rapid
current. The armor he wore had been sent him by the czar, and had served
him well in war. It proved too heavy for his powers of swimming, bore
him beneath the hungry waters, and brought the career of the victorious
brigand to an end. After his death his dismayed followers fled from
Siberia, yielding it to Tartar hands again.

Yermak--in his way a rival of Cortez and Pizarro--gained by his conquest
the highest fame among the Russian people. They exalted him to the level
of a hero, and their church has raised him to the rank of a saint, at
whose tomb miracles are performed. As regards the Russian saints, it may
here be remarked that they have been constructed, as a rule, from very
unsanctified timber, as may be seen from the examples we have heretofore
given. Not only the people and the priests but the poets have paid their
tribute to Yermak's fame, epic poems having been written about his
exploits and his deeds made familiar in popular song.

Though the Cossacks withdrew after Yermak's death, others soon succeeded
them. The furs of Siberia formed a rich prize whose allurement could not
be ignored, and new bands of hunters and adventurers poured into the
country, sustained by regular troops from Moscow. The advance was made
through the northern districts to avoid the denser populations of the
south. New detachments of troops were sent, who built forts and settled
laborers around them, with the duty of supplying the garrisons with
food, powder, and arms. By 1650 the Amur was reached and followed to the
Pacific Ocean.

It was a brief period in which to conquer a country of such vast extent.
But no organized resistance was met, and the land lay almost at the
mercy of the invaders. There was vigorous opposition by the tribes, but
they were soon subdued. The only effective resistance they met was that
of the Chinese, who obliged the Cossacks to quit the Amur, which river
they claimed. In 1855 the advance here began again, and the whole course
of the river was occupied, with much territory to its south. Siberia,
thus conquered by arms, is being made secure for Russia by a
trans-continental railroad and hosts of new settlers, and promises in
the future to become a land of the greatest prosperity and wealth.

[Illustration: KIAKHTA, SIBERIA.]




_THE MACBETH OF RUSSIA._


On the 15th of May, 1591, five boys were playing in the court-yard of
the Russian palace at Uglitch. With them were the governess and nurse of
the principal child--a boy ten years of age--and a servant-woman. The
child had a knife in his hand, with which he was amusing himself by
thrusting it into the ground or cutting a piece of wood.

Unluckily, the attention of the women for a brief interval was drawn
aside. When the nurse looked at her charge again, to her horror she
found him writhing on the ground, bathed in blood which poured from a
large wound in his throat.

The shrieks of the nurse quickly drew others to the spot, and in a
moment there was a terrible uproar, for the dying boy was no less a
person than Dmitri, son of Ivan the Terrible, brother of Feodor, the
reigning czar, and heir to the crown of Russia. The tocsin was sounded,
and the populace thronged into the court-yard, thinking that the palace
was on fire. On learning what had actually happened they burst into
uncontrollable fury. The child had not killed himself, but had been
murdered, they said, and a victim for their rage was sought.

In a moment the governess was hurled bleeding and half alive to the
ground, and one of her slaves, who came to her aid, was killed. The
keeper of the palace was accused of the crime, and, though he fled and
barred himself within a house, the infuriated mob broke through the
doors and killed him and his son. The body of the child was carried into
a neighboring church, and here the son of the governess, against whom
suspicion had been directed, was murdered before it under his mother's
eyes. Fresh victims to the wrath of the populace were sought, and the
lives of the governess and some others were with difficulty saved.

As for the child who had killed himself or had been killed, alarming
stories had recently been set afloat. He was said to be the image of his
terrible father, and to manifest an unnatural delight in blood and the
sight of pain, his favorite amusement being to torture and kill animals.
But it is doubtful if any of this was true, for there was then one in
power who had a reason for arousing popular prejudice against the boy.

That this may be better understood we must go back. Ivan had killed his
ablest son, as told in a previous story, and Feodor, the present czar,
was a feeble, timid, sickly incapable, who was a mere tool in the hands
of his ambitious minister, Boris Godunof. Boris craved the throne.
Between him and this lofty goal lay only the feeble Feodor and the child
Dmitri, the sole direct survivors of the dynasty of Rurik. With their
death without children that great line would be extinguished.

The story of Boris reminds us in several particulars of that of the
Scotch usurper Macbeth. His future career had been predicted, in the
dead of night, by astrologers, who said, "You shall yet wear the
crown." Then they became silent, as if seeing horrors which they dared
not reveal. Boris insisted on knowing more, and was told that he should
reign, but only for seven years. In joy he exclaimed, "No matter, though
it be for only seven days, so that I reign!"

This ambitious lord, who ruled already if he did not reign, had
therefore a purpose in exciting prejudice against and distrust of
Dmitri, the only heir to the crown, and in taking steps for his removal.
Feodor dead, the throne would fall like ripe fruit into his own hands.

Yet, whether guilty of the murder or not, he took active steps to clear
himself of the dark suspicion of guilt. An inquest was held, and the
verdict rendered that the boy had killed himself by accident. At once
the regent proceeded to punish those who had taken part in the outbreak
at Uglitch. The czaritza, mother of Dmitri, who had first incited the
mob, was forced to take the veil. Her brothers, who had declared the act
one of murder, were sent to remote prisons. Uglitch was treated with
frightful severity. More than two hundred of its inhabitants were put to
death. Others were maimed and thrown into dungeons. All the rest, except
those who had fled, were exiled to Siberia, and with them was banished
the very church-bell which had called them out by its tocsin peal. A
town of thirty thousand inhabitants was depopulated that, as people
said, every evidence of the guilt of Boris Godunof might be destroyed.

This dreadful violence did Boris more harm than good. Macbeth stabbed
the sleeping grooms to hide his guilt. Boris destroyed a city. But he
only caused the people to look on him as an assassin and to doubt the
motives of even his noblest acts.

A fierce fire broke out that left much of Moscow in ruin. Boris rebuilt
whole streets and distributed money freely among the people. But even
those who received this aid said that he had set fire to the city
himself that he might win applause with his money. A Tartar army invaded
the empire and appeared at the gates of Moscow. All were in terror but
Boris, who hastily built redoubts, recruited soldiers, and inspired all
with his own courage. The Tartars were defeated, and hardly a third of
them reached home again. Yet all the return the able regent received was
the popular saying that he had called in the Tartars in order to make
the people forget the death of Dmitri.

A child was born to Feodor,--a girl. The enemies of the regent instantly
declared that a boy had been born and that he had substituted for it a
girl. It died in a few days, and then it was said that he had poisoned
it.

Yet Boris went on, disdaining his enemies, winning power as he went. He
gained the favor of the clergy by giving Russia a patriarch of its own.
The nobles who opposed him were banished or crushed. He made the
peasants slaves of the land, and thus won over the petty lords. Cities
were built, fortresses erected, the enemies of Russia defeated; Siberia
was brought under firm control, and the whole nation made to see that
it had never been ruled by abler hands.

Boris in all this was strongly paving his way to the throne. In 1598 the
weak Feodor died. He left no sons, and with him, its fifty-second
sovereign, the dynasty of Rurik the Varangian came to an end. It had
existed for more than seven centuries. Branches of the house of Rurik
remained, yet no member of it dared aspire to that throne which the
tyrant Ivan had made odious.

A new ruler had to be chosen by the voice of those in power, and Boris
stood supreme among the aspirants. The chronicles tell us, with striking
brevity, "The election begins; the people look up to the nobles, the
nobles to the grandees, the grandees to the patriarch; he speaks, he
names Boris; and instantaneously, and as one man, all re-echo that
formidable name."

And now Godunof played an amusing game. He held the reins of power so
firmly that he could safely enact a transparent farce. He refused the
sceptre. The grandees and the people begged him to accept it, and he
took refuge from their solicitations in a monastery. This comedy, which
even Caesar had not long played, Boris kept up for over a month. Yet from
his cell he moved Russia at his will.

In truth, the more he seemed to withdraw the more eager became all to
make him accept. Priests, nobles, people, besieged him with their
supplications. He refused, and again refused, and for six weeks kept all
Russia in suspense. Not until he saw before him the highest grandees and
clergy of the realm on their knees, tears in their eyes, in their hands
the relics of the saints and the image of the Redeemer, did he yield
what seemed a reluctant assent, and come forth from his cell to accept
that throne which was the chief object of his desires.

But Boris on the throne still resembled Macbeth. The memory of his
crimes pursued him, and he sought to rule by fear instead of love. He
endeavored, indeed, to win the people by shows and prodigality, but the
powerful he ruled with a heavy hand, destroying all whom he had reason
to fear, threatening the extinction of many great families by forbidding
their members to marry, seizing the wealth of those he had ruined. The
family of the Romanofs, allied to the line of Rurik, and soon to become
pre-eminent in Russia, he pursued with rancor, its chief being obliged
to turn monk to escape the axe. As monk he in time rose to the headship
of the church.

The peasantry, who had before possessed liberty of movement, were by him
bound as serfs to the soil. Thousands of them fled, and an insupportable
inquisition was established, as hateful to the landowners as to the
serfs. All this was made worse by famine and pestilence, which ravaged
Russia for three years. And in the midst of this disaster the ghost of
the slain Dmitri rose to plague his murderer. In other words, one who
claimed to be the slain prince appeared, and avenged the murdered child,
his story forming one of the most interesting tales in the history of
Russia. It is this which we have now to tell.

About midsummer of the year 1603 Adam Wiszniowiecki, a Polish prince,
angry at some act of negligence in a young man whom he had lately
employed, gave him a box on the ear and called him by an insulting name.

"If you knew who I am, prince," said the indignant youth, "you would not
strike me nor call me by such a name."

"Knew who you are! Why, who are you?"

"I am Dmitri, son of Ivan IV., and the rightful czar of Russia."

Surprised by this extraordinary statement, the prince questioned him,
and was told a plausible story by the young man. He had escaped the
murderer, he said, the boy who died being the son of a serf, who
resembled and had been substituted for him by his physician Simon, who
knew what Boris designed. The physician had fled with him from Uglitch
and put him in the hands of a loyal gentleman, who for safety had
consigned him to a monastery.

The physician and gentleman were both dead, but the young man showed the
prince a Russian seal which bore Dmitri's arms and name, and a gold
cross adorned with jewels of great value, given him, he said, by his
princely godfather. He was about the age which Dmitri would have
reached, and, as a Russian servant who had seen the child said, had
warts and other marks like those of the true Dmitri. He possessed also a
persuasiveness of manner which soon won over the Polish prince.

The pretender was accepted as an illustrious guest by Prince
Wiszniowiecki, given clothes, horses, carriages, and suitable retinue,
and presented to other Polish dignitaries. Dmitri, as he was thenceforth
known, bore well the honors now showered upon him. He was at ease among
the noblest; gracious, affable, but always dignified; and all said that
he had the deportment of a prince.

He spoke Polish as well as Russian, was thoroughly versed in Russian
history and genealogy, and was, moreover, an accomplished horseman,
versed in field sports, and of striking vigor and agility, qualities
highly esteemed by the Polish nobles.

The story of this event quickly reached Russia, and made its way with
surprising rapidity through all the provinces. The czarevitch Dmitri had
not been murdered, after all! He was alive in Poland, and was about to
call the usurper to a terrible reckoning. The whole nation was astir
with the story, and various accounts of his having been seen in Russia
and of having played a brave part in the military expeditions of the
Cossacks were set afloat.

Boris soon heard of this claimant of the throne. He also received the
disturbing news that a monk was among the Cossacks of the Don urging
them to take up arms for the czarevitch who would soon be among them.
His first movement was the injudicious one of trying to bribe
Wiszniowiecki to give up the impostor to him,--the result being to
confirm the belief that he was in truth the prince he claimed to be.

The events that followed are too numerous to be given in detail, and it
must suffice here to say that on October 31, 1604, Dmitri entered
Russian territory at the head of a small Polish army, of less than five
thousand in all. This was a trifling force with which to invade an
empire, but it grew rapidly as he advanced. Town after town submitted on
his appearance, bringing to him, bound and gagged, the governors set
over them by Boris. Dmitri at once set them free and treated them with
politic humanity.

The first town to offer resistance was Novgorod-Swerski, which Peter
Basmanof, a general of Boris, had garrisoned with five hundred men.
Basmanof was brave and obstinate, and for several weeks he held the
force of Dmitri before this petty place, while Boris was making vigorous
efforts to collect an army among his discontented people. On the last
day of 1604 the two armies met, fifteen thousand against fifty thousand,
and on a broad open plain that gave the weaker force no advantage of
position.

But Dmitri made up for weakness by soldierly spirit. At the head of some
six hundred mail-clad Polish knights he vigorously charged the Russian
right wing, hurled it back upon the centre, and soon had the whole army
in disorder. The soldiers flung down their arms and fled, shouting, "The
czarevitch! the czarevitch!"

Yet in less than a month this important victory was followed by a
defeat. Dmitri had been weakened by his Poles being called home. Boris
gathered new forces, and on January 20, 1605, the armies met again, now
seventy thousand Muscovites against less than quarter their number. Yet
victory would have come to Dmitri again but for treachery in his army.
He charged the enemy with the same fierceness as before, bore down all
before him, routed the cavalry, tore a great gap in the line of the
infantry, and would have swept the field had the main body of his army,
consisting of eight thousand Zaporogues, come to his aid.

At this vital moment this great body of cavalry, half the entire army,
wheeled and quit the field,--bribed, it is said, by Boris. Such a
defection, at such a moment, was fatal. The Russians rallied; the day
was lost; nothing but flight remained. Dmitri fled, hotly pursued, and
his horse suffering from a wound. He was saved by his devoted Cossack
infantry, four thousand in number, who stood to their guns and faced the
whole Muscovite army. They were killed to a man, but Dmitri
escaped,--favored, as we are told, by some of the opposing leaders, who
did not want to make Boris too powerful.

All was not lost while Dmitri remained at liberty. Lost armies could be
restored. He took refuge in Putivle, one of the towns which had
pronounced in his favor, and while his enemies, who proved half-hearted
in the cause of Boris, wasted their time in besieging a small fortress,
new adherents flocked to his banner. Boris was furious against his
generals, but his fury caused them to hate instead of to serve him. He
tried to get rid of Dmitri by poison, but his agents were discovered and
punished, and the attempt helped his rival more than a victory would
have done.

Dmitri wrote to Boris, declaring that Heaven had protected him against
this base attempt, and ironically promising to extend mercy towards him.
"Descend from the throne you have usurped, and seek in the solitude of
the cloister to reconcile yourself with Heaven. In that case I will
forget your crimes, and even assure you of my sovereign protection."

All this was bitter to the Russian Macbeth. The princely blood which he
had shed to gain the throne seemed to redden the air about him. The
ghost of his slain victim haunted him. His power, indeed, seemed as
great as ever. He was an autocrat still, the master of a splendid court,
the ruler over a vast empire. Yet he knew that they who came with
reverence and adulation into his presence hated him in their hearts, and
anguish must have smitten the usurper to the soul.

His sudden death seemed to indicate this. On the 13th of April, 1605,
after dining in state with some distinguished foreigners, illness
suddenly seized him, blood burst from his mouth, nose, and ears, and
within two hours he was dead. He had reigned six years,--nearly the full
term predicted by the soothsayers.

The story of Dmitri is a long one still, but must be dealt with here
with the greatest brevity. Feodor, the son of Boris, was proclaimed czar
by the boyars of the court. The oath of allegiance was taken by the
whole city; all seemed to favor him; yet within six weeks this boyish
czar was deposed and executed without a sword being drawn in his
defence.

Basmanof, the leading general of Boris, had turned to the cause of
Dmitri, and the army seconded him. The people of Moscow declared in
favor of the pretender, there were a few executions and banishments, and
on the 20th of June the new czar entered Moscow in great pomp, amid the
acclamations of an immense multitude, who thronged the streets, the
windows, and the house-tops; and the young man who, less than two years
before, had had his ears boxed by a Polish prince, was now proclaimed
emperor and autocrat of the mighty Russian realm.

It was a short reign to which the false Dmitri--for there seems to be no
doubt of the death of the true Dmitri--had come. Within less than a year
Moscow was in rebellion, he was slain, and the throne was vacant. And
this result was largely due to his generous and kindly spirit, largely
to his trusting nature and disregard of Russian opinion.

No man could have been more unlike the tyrant Ivan, his reputed father.
Dmitri proved kind and generous to all, even bestowing honors upon
members of the family of Godunof. He remitted heavy taxes, punished
unjust judges, paid the debts contracted by Ivan, passed laws in the
interest of the serfs, and held himself ready to receive the petitions
and redress the grievances of the humblest of his subjects. His
knowledge of state affairs was remarkable for one of his age, and Russia
had never had an abler, nobler-minded, and more kindly-hearted czar.

But Dmitri in discretion was still a boy, and made trouble where an
older head would have mended it. He offended the boyars of his council
by laughing at their ignorance.

"Go and travel," he said; "observe the ways of civilized nations, for
you are no better than savages."

The advice was good, but not wise. He offended the Russian demand for
decorum in a czar by riding through the streets on a furious stallion,
like a Cossack of the Don. In religion he was lax, favoring secretly the
Latin Church. He chose Poles instead of Russians for his secretaries.
And he excited general disgust by the announcement that he was about to
marry a Polish woman, heretical to the Russian faith. The people were
still more incensed by the conduct of Marina, this foreign bride, both
before and after the wedding, she giving continual offence by her
insistence on Polish customs.

While thus offending the prejudices and superstitions of his people,
Dmitri prepared for his downfall by his trustfulness and clemency. He
dismissed the spies with whom former czars had surrounded themselves,
and laid himself freely open to treachery. The result of his acts and
his openness was a conspiracy, which was fortunately discovered.
Shuiski, its leader, was condemned to be executed. Yet as he knelt with
the axe lifted above him, he was respited and banished to Siberia; and
on his way thither a courier overtook him, bearing a pardon for him and
his banished brothers. His rank was restored, and he was again made a
councillor of the empire.

Clemency like this was praiseworthy, but it proved fatal. Like Caesar
before him, Dmitri was over-clement and over-confident, and with the
same result. Yet his answer to those who urged him to punish the
conspirator was a noble one, and his trustfulness worth far more than a
security due to cruelty and suspicion.

"No," he said, "I have sworn not to shed Christian blood, and I will
keep my oath. There are two ways of governing an empire,--tyranny and
generosity. I choose the latter. I will not be a tyrant. I will not
spare money; I will scatter it on all hands."

Only for the offence which he gave his people by disregarding their
prejudices, Dmitri might have long and ably reigned. His confidence
opened the way to a new conspiracy, of which Shuiski was again at the
head. Reports were spread through the city that Dmitri was a heretic and
an impostor, and that he had formed a plot to massacre the Muscovites by
the aid of the Poles whom he had introduced into the city.

As a result of the insidious methods of the conspirators, the whole city
broke out in rebellion, and at daybreak on the 29th of May, 1606, a body
of boyars gathered in the great square in full armor, and, followed by a
multitude of townsmen, advanced on the Kremlin, whose gates were thrown
open by traitors within.

Dmitri, who had only fifty guards in the palace, was aroused by the din
of bells and the uproar in the streets. An armed multitude filled the
outer court, shouting, "Death to the impostor!"

Soon conspirators appeared in the palace, where the czar, snatching a
sword from one of the guards, and attended by Basmanof, attacked them,
crying out, "I am not a Boris for you!"

He killed several with his own hands, but Basmanof was slain before
him, and he and the guards were driven back from chamber to chamber,
until the guards, finding that the czar had disappeared, laid down their
arms.

Dmitri, seeing that resistance was hopeless, had sought a distant room,
and here had leaped or been thrown from a window to the ground. The
height was thirty feet, his leg was broken by the fall, and he fainted
with the pain.

His last hope of life was gone. Some faithful soldiers who found him
sought to defend him against the mob who soon appeared, but their
resistance was of no avail. Dmitri was seized, his royal garments were
torn off, and the caftan of a pastry-cook was placed upon him. Thus
dressed, he was carried into a room of the palace for the mockery of a
trial.

"Bastard dog," cried one of the Russians, "tell us who you are and
whence you came."

"You all know I am your czar," replied Dmitri, bravely, "the legitimate
son of Ivan Vassilievitch. If you desire my death, give me time at least
to collect my senses."

At this a Russian gentleman named Valnief shouted out,--

"What is the use of so much talk with the heretic dog? This is the way I
confess this Polish fifer." And he put an end to the agony of Dmitri by
shooting him through the breast.

In an instant the mob rushed on the lifeless body, slashing it with axes
and swords. It was carried out, placed on a table, and a set of
bagpipes set on the breast with the pipe in the mouth.

"You played on us long enough; now play for us," cried the ribald
insulter.

Others lashed the corpse with their whips, crying, "Look at the czar,
the hero of the Germans."

For three days Dmitri's body lay exposed to the view of the populace,
but it was so hacked and mangled that none could recognize in it the
gallant young man who a few days before had worn the imperial robes and
crown.

On the third night a blue flame was seen playing over the table, and the
guards, frightened by this natural result of putrefaction, hastened to
bury the body outside the walls. But superstitious terrors followed the
prodigy: it was whispered that Dmitri was a wizard who, by magic arts,
had the power to come to life from the grave. To prevent this the body
was dug up again and burned, and the ashes were collected, mixed with
gunpowder, and rammed into a cannon, which was then dragged to the gate
by which Dmitri had entered Moscow. Here the match was applied, and the
ashes of the late czar were hurled down the road leading to Poland,
whence he had come.

Thus died a man who, impostor though he seems to have been, was perhaps
the noblest and best of all the Russian czars, while the story of his
rise and fall forms the most dramatic tale in all the annals of the
empire over which for one short year he ruled.




_THE ERA OF THE IMPOSTORS._


We have told how the ashes of Dmitri were loaded into a cannon and fired
from the gate of Moscow. They fell like seeds of war on the soil of
Russia, and for years that unhappy land was torn by faction and harried
by invasion. From those ashes new Dmitris seemed to spring, other
impostors rose to claim the crown, and until all these shades were laid
peace fled from the land.

Vassili Shuiski, the leader in the insurrection against Dmitri, had
himself proclaimed czar. He was destined to learn the truth of the
saying, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." For hardly had the
mob that murdered Dmitri dispersed before rumors arose that their victim
was not dead. His body had been so mangled that none could recognize it,
and the story was set afloat that it was one of his officers who had
been killed, and that he had escaped. Four swift horses were missing
from the stables of the palace, and these were at once connected with
the assumed flight of the czar. Rumor was in the air, and even in Moscow
doubts of Dmitri's death grew rife.

Fuel soon fell on the flame. Three strangers in Russian dress, but
speaking the language of Poland, crossed the Oka River, and gave the
ferryman the high fee of six ducats, saying, "You have ferried the
czar; when he comes back to Moscow with a Polish army he will not forget
your service."

At a German inn, a little farther on, the same party used similar
language. This story spread like wildfire through Russia, and deeply
alarmed the new czar. To put it down he sought to play on the religious
feelings of the Russians, by making a saint of the original Dmitri. A
body was produced, said to have been taken from the grave of the slain
boy at Uglitch, but in a remarkable state of preservation, since it
still displayed the fresh hue of life and held in its hand some
strangely preserved nuts. Tales of miracles performed by the relics of
the new saint were also spread, but with little avail, for the people
were not very ready to believe the man who had stolen the throne.

War broke out despite these manufactured miracles. Prince
Shakhofskoi--the supposed leader of the party who had told the story at
the Oka--was soon in the field with an army of Cossacks and peasants,
and defeated the royal army. But the new Dmitri, in whose name he
fought, did not appear. It seemed as if Shakhofskoi had not yet been
able to find a suitable person to play the part.

Russia, however, was not long without a pretender. During Dmitri's reign
a young man had appeared among the Cossacks of the Volga, calling
himself Peter Feodorovitch, and claiming to be the son of the former
czar Feodor. This man now reappeared and presented himself to the rebel
army as the representative of his uncle Dmitri. He was eagerly welcomed
by Shakhofskoi, who badly needed some one whom he might offer to his
men as a prince.

And now we have to describe one of the strangest sieges in the annals of
history. Shakhofskoi, finding himself threatened by a powerful army,
took refuge in the fortified town of Toula. Here he was soon joined by
Bolotnikof, a Polish general who had come to Russia with a commission
bearing the imperial seal of Dmitri. In this stronghold they were
besieged by an army of one hundred thousand men, led by the czar
himself.

Toula was strong. It was vigorously defended, the garrison fighting
bravely for their lives. No progress was made with the siege, and
Shuiski grew disconsolate, for he knew that to fail now would be ruin.

From this state of anxiety he was relieved by a remarkable proposal,
that of an obscure individual who promised to drown all the people of
Toula and deliver the town into his hands. This extraordinary offer,
made by a monk named Kravkof, was at first received with incredulous
laughter, and it was some time before the czar and his council could be
brought to listen to the words of an idle braggart, as they deemed the
stranger. In the end the czar asked him to explain his plan.

It proved to be the following. Toula lay in a narrow valley, down whose
centre flowed the little river Oupa, passing through the town. Kravkof
suggested that they should dam this stream below the town. "Do as I
say," he remarked, "and if the whole town is not under water in a few
hours, I will answer for the failure with my head."

The project thus presented seemed feasible. Immediately all the millers
in the army, men used to the kind of work required, were put under his
orders, and the other soldiers were set to carrying sacks of earth to
the place chosen for the dam. As this rose in height, the water backed
up in the town. Soon many of the streets became canals, hundreds of
houses, undermined by the water, were destroyed, and the promise of
Kravkof seemed likely to be fulfilled.

Yet the garrison, confined in what had become a walled-in lake, fought
with desperate obstinacy. Water surrounded them, yet they waded to the
walls and fought. Famine decimated them, yet they starved and fought. A
terrible epidemic broke out in the water-soaked city, but the garrison
fought on. Dreadful as were their surroundings, they held out with
unflinching courage and intrepidity.

The dam was the centre of the struggle. The besiegers sought to raise it
still higher and deepen the water in the streets; the besieged did their
best to break it down and relieve the city. It had grown to a great
height with such rapidity that the superstitious people of Toula felt
sure that magic had aided in its building and fancied that it might be
destroyed by magic means. A monk declared that Shuiski had brought
devils to his aid, but professed to be a proficient in the black art,
and offered, for a hundred roubles, to fight the demons in their own
element.

Bolotnikof accepted his terms, and he stripped, plunged into the river,
and disappeared. For a full hour nothing was seen of him, and every one
gave him up for lost. But at the end of that time he rose to the surface
of the water, his body covered with scratches. The story he had to tell
was, to say the least, remarkable.

"I have had a frightful conflict," he said, "with the twelve thousand
devils Shuiski has at work upon his dam. I have settled six thousand of
them, but the other six thousand are the worst of all, and will not give
in."

Thus against men and devils alike, against water, famine, and
pestilence, fought the brave men of Toula, holding out with
extraordinary courage. Letters came to them in Dmitri's name, promising
help, but it never came. At length, after months of this brave defence
had elapsed, Shakhofskoi proposed that they should capitulate. The
Cossacks of the garrison, furious at the suggestion, seized and thrust
him into a dungeon. Not until every scrap of food had been eaten, horses
and dogs devoured, even leather gnawed as food, did Bolotnikof and Peter
the pretender offer to yield, and then only on condition that the
soldiers should receive honorable treatment. If not, they would die with
arms in their hands, and devour one another as food, rather than
surrender. As for themselves, they asked for no pledges of safety.

Shuiski accepted the terms, and the gates were opened. Bolotnikof
advanced boldly to the czar and offered himself as a victim, presenting
his sword with the edge laid against his neck.

"I have kept the oath I swore to him who, rightly or wrongly, calls
himself Dmitri," he said. "Deserted by him, I am in your power. Cut off
my head if you will; or, if you will spare my life, I will serve you as
I have served him."

This appeal was wasted on Shuiski. He forgot the clemency which the czar
Dmitri had formerly shown to him, sent Bolotnikof to Kargopol, and soon
after ordered him to be drowned. Peter the pretender was hanged on the
spot. Shakhofskoi alone was spared. They found him in chains, which he
said had been placed on him because he counselled the obstinate rebels
to submit. Shuiski set him free, and the first use he made of his
liberty was to kindle the rebellion again.

Thus ended this remarkable siege, one in some respects without parallel
in the history of war. What followed must be briefly told. Though the
siege of Toula ended with the hanging of one pretender to the throne,
another was already in the field. The new Dmitri, in whose name the war
was waged, had made his appearance during the siege. Some of the
officers of the first Dmitri pretended to recognize him, but in reality
he was a coarse, vulgar, ignorant knave, who had badly learned his
lesson, and lacked all the native princeliness of his predecessor.

Yet he had soon a large army at his back, and with it, on April 24,
1608, he defeated the army of the czar with great slaughter. He might
easily have taken Moscow, but instead of advancing on it he halted at
the village of Tushino, twelve versts away, where he held his court for
seventeen months.

Meanwhile still another pretender appeared, who called himself Feodor,
son of the czar Feodor. He presented himself to the Don Cossacks, who
brought him in chains to Dmitri, by whom he was promptly put to death.
Soon afterwards Marina, wife of the first Dmitri, who had been released,
with her father, by Shuiski, was brought into the camp of the pretender.
And here an interesting bit of comedy was played. Marina, rather than go
back to meet ridicule in Poland, was ready to become the wife of this
vulgar impostor, though she saw at once that he was not the man he
claimed to be.

She met him coldly at first, but at a second meeting she greeted him
with a great show of tenderness before the whole army, being glad, it
would appear, to regain her old position on any terms. The news that
Marina had recognized the pretender brought over numbers to his side,
and soon nearly all Russia had declared for him, the only cities holding
out being Moscow, Novgorod, and Smolensk.

The false Dmitri had now reached the summit of his fortunes. A rapid
decline followed. One of his generals, who laid siege to the monastery
of the Trinity, near Moscow, was repulsed. His partisans were defeated
in other quarters. Soon the whole aspect of the war changed. A new enemy
to Russia came into the field, Sigismund, King of Poland, who laid siege
to the strong city of Smolensk, while the army of the czar, which
marched to its relief, suffered an annihilating defeat.

This result closed the reign of Shuiski. An insurrection broke out in
Moscow, he was forced to become a monk, and in the end was delivered to
Sigismund and died in prison. Thus was Dmitri avenged. The new
condition of affairs proved as disastrous to the false Dmitri. His Poles
deserted him, his power vanished, and he descended to the level of a
mere Cossack robber. In December, 1610, murder ended his career.

Smolensk fell after a siege of eighteen months, but at the last moment a
powder magazine exploded and set fire to the city, and Sigismund became
master only of a heap of ruins. The Poles in Moscow, attacked by the
Russians, took possession of the Kremlin, burned down most of the city,
and massacred a hundred thousand of the people. Anarchy was rampant
everywhere. New chiefs appeared in all quarters. Each town declared for
itself. The Swedes took possession of Novgorod. A third Dmitri appeared,
and dwelt in state for a while, but was soon taken and hanged. The whole
great empire was in a state of frightful confusion, and seemed as if it
was about to fall to pieces.

From this fate it was saved by one of the common people, a butcher of
Nijni Novgorod, Kozma Minin by name. Brave, honest, patriotic, and
sensible, this man aroused his fellow-citizens, who took up arms for the
deliverance of their country. Other towns followed this example, an army
was raised with Prince Pojarski at its head, and Minin, the patriotic
butcher, seconded him in an administrative capacity, being hailed by the
people as "the elect of the whole Russian empire."

Driving the Poles before him, Pojarski entered Moscow, and in October,
1612, became master of the Kremlin. The impostors all disappeared;
Marina and her three-year-old son Ivan were captured, the child to be
hanged and she to end her eventful life in prison; anarchy vanished, and
peace returned to the realm.

The end came in 1613, when a national council was convened to choose a
new czar. Pojarski refused the crown, and Michael Romanof, a boy of
sixteen, scion of one of the noblest families of Russia, and allied to
the Ruriks by the female line, was elected czar. His descendants still
hold the throne.

[Illustration: CHURCH OF THE ASSUMPTION, MOSCOW, IN WHICH THE CZAR IS
CROWNED.]




_THE BOOKS OF ANCESTRY._


The noble families of Russia, for the most part descendants of the
Scandinavian adventurers who had come in with Rurik, were as proud in
their way as the descendants of the vikings who came to England under
William of Normandy. Their books of pedigree were kept with the most
scrupulous care, and in these were set down not only the genealogies of
the families, but every office that had been held by any ancestor, at
court, in the army, or in the administration.

With this there is no special fault to be found. It is as well,
doubtless, to keep the pedigrees of men as it is to keep those of horses
and dogs; though the animals, being ignorant of their records, are less
likely to make them a matter of pride and presumption. In Russia the
fact that certain men knew the names and standing of their ancestors led
to the most absurd consequences. The books of ancestry were constantly
appealed to for the support of foolish pretensions, and the nobles of
Russia strutted like so many peacocks in their insensate pride of
family.

In no other country has the question of precedence been carried to such
ridiculous lengths as it was in Russia in the days of the early
Romanofs. If a nobleman were appointed to a post at court or a position
in the army, he at once examined the books of ancestry to learn if the
officials under whom he would serve had fewer ancestors on record than
he. If such proved to be the case the office was refused, or accepted
under protest, the government being, metaphorically, forced to fall on
its knees to the haughtiness of its offended lordling.

The folly of the nobles went even farther than this. The height of their
genealogy counted for as much as its length. They would refuse to accept
positions under persons whose ancestors were shown by the books to have
been subordinate to theirs in the same positions. If it appeared that
the John of five centuries before had been under the Peter of that
period, the modern Peter was too proud to accept a similar position
under the modern John. And so it went, until court life became a
constant scene of bickering and discontent, and of murmurs at the most
trifling slights and neglects. In short, it became necessary that an
office of genealogy should be established at court, in which exact
copies of the family trees and service registers of the noble families
were kept, and the officers here employed found enough to keep them busy
in settling the endless disputes of their lordly clients.

In the reign of Theodore, the third czar of the Romanof dynasty, this
ridiculous sentiment reached its climax, and it became almost impossible
to appoint a wise man to office over a fool, if the fool's ancestors had
happened to hold the same office over those of the man of wisdom. The
fancy seemed to be held that folly and wisdom are handed down from
father to son, a conceit which is often the very reverse of the truth.

Theodore was a feeble youth, who reigned little more than five years,
yet in that time he managed to bury this folly out of sight. Annoyed by
the constant bickerings of courtiers and officials, he consulted with
his able minister, Prince Vassili Galitzin, and hit on a means of
ridding himself of the difficulty.

Proclamation was made that all the noble families of the kingdom should
deliver their service rolls into court by a fixed date, that they might
be cleared of certain errors which had unavoidably crept into them. The
order was obeyed, and a multitude of these precious documents were
brought into the palace halls of the czar. The heads of the noble
families and the higher clergy were now sent for, composing a proud
assembly, before whom the patriarch, who had received his instructions,
made an eloquent address. He ended by speaking of the claims to
precedence in the following words:

"They are a bitter source of every kind of evil; they render abortive
the most useful enterprises, in like manner as the tares stifle the good
grain; they have introduced, even into the hearts of families,
dissension, confusion, and hatred. But the pontiff comprehends the grand
design of his czar; God alone could have inspired it!"

Though utterly ignorant of what that design was, the grandees felt
compelled to express a warm approval of these words. At this Theodore,
who pretended to be enraptured by their unanimous applause, suddenly
rose, and, simulating a burst of patriotic enthusiasm, proclaimed the
abolition of all their hereditary claims.

"That the very recollection of them may be forever extinguished," he
exclaimed, "let all the papers relative to these titles be instantly
consumed."

The fire was already prepared, and by his orders the precious papers
were hurled into the flames before the anguished eyes of the nobles, who
did not dare in that despotic court to express their true feelings, and
strove to hide their dismay under hollow acclamations of assent.

As what they deemed their most valuable possessions were thus converted
to ashes before their eyes, the patriarch again rose, and declared an
anathema against any one who should dare to oppose this order of the
czar. An "Amen" that was like a groan came from the lips of the
horrified nobles, and precedence went up in flames.

The czar had no thought of effacing the noble families. New books were
prepared, in which their ancestry was described. But the absurd claims
which had caused such discord were forever abolished, and court life
thereafter proved smoother and easier in consequence of the iconoclastic
act of the czar Theodore.




_BOYHOOD OF PETER THE GREAT._


Peter the Great, grandson of the first emperor of the Romanof line, was
a man of such extraordinary power of body and mind, such a remarkable
combination of common sense, mental activity, advanced ideas, and
determination to lift Russia to a high place among the nations, with
cruelty, grossness, and infirmities of vice and passion, that his reign
of forty-three years fills as large a place in Russian history as do the
annals of all the preceding centuries, and the progress of Russia during
this short period was greater than in any other epoch of three or four
times its length.

The character of the man showed in the boy, and while a mere child he
began those steps of progress which were continued throughout his life.
He had two brothers, both older than he, and sons of a different mother,
so that the throne seemed far from his grasp. But Theodore, the oldest
of the three, died after a brief reign, leaving no heirs to the throne.
Ivan, the second son, was an imbecile, nearly blind, and subject to
epileptic fits. The clergy and grandees, in consequence, looked upon
Peter as the most promising successor to the throne. But he was still
only a child, not yet ten years of age.

The czar Alexis had left also several daughters; but in those days the
fate of princesses of the blood was a harsh one. They were not permitted
to marry, and were consigned to convents, where they knew nothing of
what was passing in the busy world without. One of the daughters, Sophia
by name, had escaped from this fate. At her earnest request she was
taken from the convent and permitted to nurse her sickly brother
Theodore.

She was a woman of high intelligence, bold and ambitious by nature, and
during her residence in court learned much of the politics of the empire
and took some part in its government. After the death of Theodore she
contrived to have herself named regent for her two brothers, Ivan being
plainly unfit to rule, and Peter too young.

There are many stories told about her, of which probably the half are
not true. It is said that she kept her young brother at a distance from
Moscow, where she surrounded him with ministers of evil, whose business
it was to encourage him in riot and dissipation, to the end that he
might become a moral monster, odious and insupportable to the nation at
large. Such a course had been pursued with Ivan the Terrible, and to it
was largely due his incredible iniquity.

If Sophia had really any such purpose in view, she was playing with
edge-tools. She quite mistook the character of her young brother, and
forgot that the same rule may work differently in different cases. The
steps taken to make the boy base, if really so intended, aided to make
him great. His morals were corrupted, his health was impaired, and his
heart hardened by the excesses of his youth, but his removal from the
palace atmosphere of flattery and effeminacy tended to make him
self-reliant, while his free life in the country and the activity which
it encouraged helped to develop the native energy of his character.

It is probable that Sophia had no such intention to corrupt the nature
of the child, for she showed no ill will against him. It was apparently
to his mother, rather than to his sister, that his residence in the
country was due, and he was obliged to go frequently to Moscow, to take
part in ceremonial affairs, while his name was used in all public
documents, many of which he was required to sign.

From early life the boy had shown himself active, intelligent, quick to
learn, and full of curiosity. He was particularly interested in military
affairs, and playing at soldiers was one of the leading diversions of
his youth. Only a day or two after a great riot in Moscow, in which
numbers of nobles were slaughtered, and in which the child had looked
unmoved into the savage faces of the rioters, he sent to the arsenal for
drums, banners, and arms. Uniforms and wooden cannon were supplied him,
and on his eleventh birthday--in 1683--he was allowed to have some real
guns, with which he fired salutes.

From his country home at Preobrajensk messengers came almost daily to
Moscow for powder, lead, and shot; small brass and iron cannon were
supplied the boy, and drummer-boys, selected from the different
regiments, were sent to him. Thus he was allowed to play at soldier to
his heart's content.

A company was formed from the younger domestics of the place, fifty in
number, the officers being sons of the boyars or lords. But these were
required by the alert boy to pass through all the grades of the service,
which he also did himself, serving successively as private, sergeant,
lieutenant, and captain, and finally as colonel of the regiment which
grew from this youthful company. Peter called his company "the guards,"
but it was known in Moscow as the "pleasure company," or "troops for
sport." In time, however, it grew into the Preobrajensky Guards, a
celebrated regiment which is still kept up as the first regiment of the
Russian Imperial Guard, and of which the emperor is always the colonel.
Another company, formed on the same plan in an adjoining village, became
the Semenofsky Regiment. From these rudiments grew the present Russian
army.

These military exercises soon ceased to be child's play to the active
lad. He gave himself no rest from his prescribed duties, stood his watch
in turn, shared in the labors of the camp, slept in the tents of his
comrades, and partook of their fare. He used to lead his company on long
marches, during which the strictest discipline was maintained, and the
camps at night were guarded as in an enemy's country.

On reaching his thirteenth year the boy took further steps in his
military education, building a small fortress, whose remains are still
preserved. This was constructed with great care, and took nearly a year
to build. At the suggestion of a German officer it was named Pressburg,
the name being given with much ceremony, Peter leading from Moscow a
procession of most of the court officials and nobles to take part in the
performance.

These military sports were not enough for the active mind of the boy,
who kept himself busy at a dozen labors. He used to hammer and forge in
the blacksmith's shop, became an expert with the lathe, and learned the
art of printing and binding books. He built himself a wheelbarrow and
other articles which he needed, and at a later date it was said that he
"knew excellently well fourteen trades."

When in Moscow, Peter spent much of his time in the foreign quarter,
joining his associates there in the beer, wine, and tobacco of which
they were specially fond, and questioning them about a thousand subjects
unknown to the Russians, thus acquiring a wide knowledge of men and
affairs. He troubled himself little about rank or position, making a
companion of any one, high or low, from whom anything could be learned,
while any mechanical curiosity particularly attracted him.

A sextant and astrolabe were brought him from France, of whose use no
one could inform him, though he asked all whom he met. At length a Dutch
merchant, Franz Timmermann by name, was brought him, who measured with
the instrument the distance to a neighboring house.

Peter was delighted, and eagerly asked to be taught how to use the
instrument himself.

"It is not so easy," replied Timmermann; "you must first learn
arithmetic and geometry."

Here was a new incentive. The boy at once set to work, spending all his
leisure time, day and night, over these studies, to which he afterwards
added geography and fortification. It was in this desultory way that his
education was gained, no regular course of training being prescribed,
and his strong self-will breaking through all family discipline.

We may end here what we have to say about the boy's military activity.
His army gradually grew until it numbered five thousand men, mainly
foreigners, who were commanded by General Gordon, a Scotch officer.
Lefort, a Swiss, who had become one of Peter's favorite companions, now
undertook to raise an army of twelve thousand men. He succeeded in this,
and unexpectedly found himself made general of this force.

It is, however, of the boy's activity in naval affairs that we must now
speak. Timmermann had become one of his constant companions, and was
always teaching him something new. One day in 1688, when Peter was
sixteen years old, he was wandering about one of the country estates of
the throne, near the village of Ismailovo. An old building in the
flax-yard attracted his attention, and he asked one of the servants what
it was.

"It is a storehouse," the man said, "in which was put all the rubbish
that was left after the death of Nikita Romanof, who used to live here."

Peter at once, curious to see this "rubbish," had the doors opened, went
in, and looked about. In one corner, bottom upward, lay a boat, very
different in build from the flat-bottomed, square-sterned boats which
were in use on the Russian rivers.

"What is that?" he asked.

"It is an English boat," said Timmermann.

"But what is it good for? Is it better than our boats?" demanded Peter.

"Yes. If you had sails for it, you would find that it would not only go
with the wind, but against the wind."

"Against the wind! Is that possible? How can it be possible?"

With his usual impatience, the boy wanted to try it at once. But the
boat proved to be too rotten for use. It would need to be repaired and
tarred, and a mast and sails would have to be made.

Where could these be had? Who could make them? Timmermann was able to
tell him. Some thirty years before, a number of Dutch ship-carpenters
had been brought from Holland and had built some vessels on the Volga
River for the czar Alexis. These had been burned by a brigand, and
Brandt, the builder, had returned to Moscow, where he still worked as a
joiner. In those days it was easier to get into Russia than to get out
again, foreigners who entered the land being held there as virtual
prisoners. Even General Gordon tried in vain to get back to his native
land.

Old Brandt was found, looked over the boat, put it in order, and
launched it on a neighboring stream. To Peter's surprise and delight, he
saw the boat moving under sail up and down the river, turning to right
and left in obedience to the helm. Greatly excited, he called on Brandt
to stop, jumped in, and, under the old man's directions, began to manage
the boat himself.

But the river was too narrow and the water too shallow for easy
sailing, and the energetic boy had the boat dragged overland to a large
pond, where it went better, but still not to his satisfaction. Where was
a better body of water? He was told that there was a large lake about
fifty miles away, but that it would be easier to build a new boat than
to drag the English boat that distance.

"Can you do that?" asked the eager boy.

"Yes, sire," said Brandt, "but I will need many things."

"Oh, that does not matter at all," said Peter. "We can have anything."

No time was lost. Brandt, with one of his old comrades and Timmermann,
went to work at once in the woods bordering the lake, Peter working with
them when he could get away from Moscow, where he was frequently needed.
It took time. Timber had to be prepared, a hut built to live in, and a
dock to launch the boats, which were built on a larger scale than the
small English craft. Thus it was not until the following spring that the
new boats were ready to launch.

Peter meanwhile had been married. But the charms of his wife could not
keep him from his beloved boats. Back he went, aided in completing and
launching the new craft, and took such delight in sailing them about the
lake that he could hardly be induced to return to Moscow for important
duties.

In this humble way began the Russian navy, which had grown to large
proportions before Peter died. The little English boat, which some think
was one sent by Queen Elizabeth to Ivan the Terrible, has ever since
Peter's time been known as the "Grand-sire of the Russian navy." It is
kept with the greatest care in a small brick building within the
fortress at St. Petersburg, and was one of the principal objects of
interest in the great parade in that city in 1870 on the two hundredth
anniversary of Peter's birth.

It will suffice to say, in conclusion, that shortly after these events
Peter became the reigning czar, and turned from sport to earnest. Sophia
had enjoyed so long the pleasure of ruling that her ambition grew with
its exercise, and she sought to retain her position as long as possible.
It is even said that she laid a plot to assassinate Peter, so that only
the feeble Ivan should be left. The boy, told that assassins were
seeking him, fled for his life. His fright seems to have been
groundless, but it made him an undying enemy of his sister. The affair
ended in the bulk of the nobility and soldiery turning to his side and
in Sophia being obliged to leave the throne for a convent, where she
spent the remainder of her life in the misery of strict seclusion.

[Illustration: ALEXANDER III., CZAR OF RUSSIA.]




_CARPENTER PETER OF ZAANDAM._


On the banks of the river Zaan, about five miles from Amsterdam, lies
the picturesque little town of Zaandam, with its cottages of blue,
green, and pink, half hidden among the trees, while a multitude of
windmills surround the town like so many monuments to thrift and
enterprise. Here, two centuries ago, ship-building was conducted on a
great scale, the timber being sawed by windmill power, while the workmen
were so numerous that a vessel was often on the sea in five weeks after
the keel had been laid.

To this place, in August, 1697, came a workman of foreign birth, who
found humble quarters in a small frame hut and entered himself as a
ship-carpenter at the wharf of Lynst Rogge. There was nothing specially
noticeable about the stranger, who wore a workman's dress and a
tarpaulin hat. But with him were some comrades dressed in the strange
garb of Russia, who attracted the attention of the people.

As for the new workman, he did not long escape curious looks. The rumor
had got about that no less a personage than the Czar of Russia was in
the town, and it began to be suspected that this unobtrusive stranger
might be the man, so that it was not long before inquisitive eyes began
to follow him wherever he went. The rumor soon brought large crowds
from Amsterdam, whose presence made the streets of the small Dutch town
anything but comfortable.

It was well known that Peter I., Czar of Russia, was travelling through
the nations of the West. A large embassy, composed of several hundred
people, some of them the highest officials of the court, had left the
Muscovite kingdom, and visited the several courts and large cities on
their route, being everywhere received with the greatest distinction.
But the czar did not appear openly among them. He was there in disguise,
but had given strict orders that his presence should not be revealed. He
hated crowds, hated adulation, and wished only to be let alone to see
and learn all he could. So while the ambassadors were receiving the
highest honors of kingdoms and courts and bowing and parading to their
hearts' content, the czar kept himself in the background as an amused
spectator, thought by most observers to be one of the servants of the
gorgeous train.

And thus he reached Zaandam, which he had been told was the best place
to learn how ships were built. Here he saw fishing in the river one of
his old acquaintances of the foreign quarter of Moscow, a smith named
Gerrit Kist. Calling him from his rod, and binding him to secrecy, he
told him why he had come to Holland, and insisted on taking up quarters
in his house. This house, a small frame hut, is now preserved as a
sacred object, enclosed within a brick building, and has long been a
place of pilgrimage even for royal travellers. Emperors and kings have
bent their lofty heads to enter its low door.

Yet Peter lived in Zaandam only a week, and during that week did little
work at ship-building, spending much of his time in rowing about among
the shipping, and visiting most of the factories and mills, at one of
which he made a sheet of paper with his own royal hands.

One day the disguised emperor met with an adventure. He had bought a
hatful of plums, and was eating them in the most plebeian fashion as he
walked along the street, when he met a crowd of boys. He shared his
fruit with some of these, but those to whom he refused to give plums
began to follow him with boyish reviling, and when he laughed at them
they took to pelting him with mud and stones. Here was a situation for
an emperor away from home. The Czar of all the Russias had to take to
his heels and run for refuge to the Three Swans Inn, where he sent for
the burgomaster of the town, told who he was, and demanded aid and
relief. At least we may suppose so, for an edict was soon issued
threatening punishment to all who should insult "distinguished persons
who wished to remain unknown."

The end of Peter's stay soon came. A man in Zaandam had received a
letter from his son in Moscow, saying that the czar was with the great
Russian embassy, and describing him so closely that he could no longer
remain unknown. This letter was seen by Pomp, the barber of Zaandam, and
when Peter came into his place with his Russian comrades he at once knew
him from the description and spread the news.

From that time the czar had no rest. Wherever he went he was followed by
crowds of curious people. They grew so annoying that at length he
leaped in anger from his boat and gave one of the most forward of his
persecutors a sharp cuff on the cheek.

"Bravo, Marsje!" cried the crowd in delight: "you are made a knight."

The czar rushed angrily to an inn, where he shut himself up out of
sight. The next day a large ship was to be moved across the dike by
means of capstans and rollers, a difficult operation, in which Peter
took deep interest. A place was reserved for him to see it, but the
crowd became so great as to drive back the guards, break down the
railings, and half fill the reserved space. Peter, seeing this, refused
to leave his house. The burgomaster and other high officials begged him
to come, but the most he could be got to do was to thrust his head out
of the door and observe the situation.

"_Te veel volks, te veel volks_" ("too many people"), he bluntly cried,
and refused to budge.

The next day was Sunday, and all Amsterdam seemed to have come to
Zaandam to see its distinguished guest. He escaped them by fleeing to
Amsterdam. Getting to a yacht he had bought, and to which he had fitted
a bowsprit with his own hands, he put to sea, giving no heed to warnings
of danger from the furious wind that was blowing. Three hours after he
reached Amsterdam, where his ambassadors then were, and where they were
to have a formal reception the next day.

Receptions were well enough for ambassadors, but they were idle flummery
to the czar, who had come to see, not to be seen, and who did his best
to keep out of sight. He visited the fine town hall, inspected the
docks, saw a comedy and a ballet, consented to sit through a great
dinner, witnessed a splendid display of fireworks, and, most interesting
to him of all, was entertained with a great naval sham fight, which
lasted a whole day.

Zaandam has the credit of having been the scene of Peter the Great's
labor as a shipwright, but it was really at Amsterdam that his life as a
workman was passed. At his request he was given the privilege of working
at the docks of the East India Company, a house being assigned him
within the enclosure where he could dwell undisturbed, free from the
curiosity of crowds. As a mark of respect it was determined to begin the
construction of a new frigate, one hundred feet long, so that the
distinguished workman might see the whole process of the building of a
ship. With his usual impetuosity Peter wished to begin work immediately,
and could hardly be induced to wait for the fireworks to burn themselves
out. Then he set out for Zaandam on his yacht to fetch his tools, and
the next day, August 30, presented himself as a workman at the East
India Company's wharf.

For more than four months, with occasional breaks, Peter worked
diligently as a ship-carpenter, ten of his Russian companions--probably
much against their will--working at the wharf with him. He was known
simply as Baas Peter (Carpenter Peter), and, while sitting on a log at
rest, with his hatchet between his knees, was willing to talk with any
one who addressed him by this name, but had no answer for those who
called him Sire or Your Majesty. Others of the Russians were put to work
elsewhere, to study the construction of masts, blocks, sails, etc., some
of them were entered as sailors before the mast, and Prince Alexander of
Imeritia went to the Hague to study artillery. None of them was allowed
"to take his ease at his inn."

Peter insisted on being treated as a common workman, and would not
permit any difference to be made between him and his fellow-laborers. He
also demanded the usual wages for his work. On one occasion, when the
Earl of Portland and another nobleman came to the yard to have a sight
of him, the overseer, to indicate him, called out, "Carpenter Peter of
Zaandam, why don't you help your comrades?" Without a word, Peter put
his shoulders under a log which several men were carrying, and helped to
lift it to its place.

His evenings were spent in studying the theory of ship-building, and his
spare hours were fully occupied in observation. He visited everything
worth seeing, factories, museums, cabinets of coins, theatres,
hospitals, etc., constantly making shrewd remarks and inquiries, and
soon becoming known from his quick questions, "What is that for? How
does that work? That will I see."

He went to Zaandam to see the Greenland whaling fleet, visited the
celebrated botanical garden with the great Boerhaave, studied the
microscope at Delft under Leuwenhoek, became intimate with the military
engineer Coehorn, talked with Schynvoet of architecture, and learned to
etch from Schonebeck. An impression of a plate made by him, of
Christianity victorious over Islam, is still extant.

He made himself familiar with Dutch home life, mingled with the
merchants engaged in the Russian trade, went to the Botermarkt every
market-day, and took lessons from a travelling dentist, experimenting on
his own servants and suite, probably not much to their enjoyment. He
mended his own clothes, learned enough of cobbling to make himself a
pair of slippers, and, in short, was insatiable in his search for
information of every available kind.

His work on the frigate whose keel he had helped to lay was continued
until it was launched. It was well built, and for many years proved a
good and useful ship, braving the perils of the seas in the East India
trade. But with all this the imperial carpenter was not satisfied. The
Dutch methods did not please him. The ship-masters seemed to work
without rules other than the "rule of thumb," having no theory of
ship-building from which the best proportions of a vessel could be
deduced.

Learning that things were ordered differently in English ship-yards,
that there work was done by rule and precept, Peter sent an order to the
Russian docks not to allow the Dutch shipwrights to work as they
pleased, but to put them under Danish or English overseers. For himself,
he resolved to go to England and follow up his studies there. King
William had sent him a warm invitation and presented him a splendid
yacht, light, beautifully proportioned, and armed with twenty brass
cannon. Delighted with the present, he sailed in it to England,
escorted by an English fleet, and in London found an abiding-place in a
house which a few years before had been the refuge of William Penn when
charged with treason. Here he slept in a small room with four or five
companions, and when the King of England came to visit him, received his
fellow-monarch in his shirt-sleeves. The air of the room was so bad
that, though the weather was very cold, William insisted on a window
being raised.

In England the czar, though managing to see much outside the ship-yards,
worked steadily at Deptford for several months, leaving only when he had
gained all the special knowledge which he could obtain. His admiration
for the English ship-builders was high, he afterwards saying that but
for his journey to England he would have always remained a bungler.
While here he engaged many men to take service in Russia, shipwrights,
engineers, and others; he also engaged numerous officers for his navy
from Holland, several French surgeons, and various persons of other
nationality, the whole numbering from six to eight hundred skilled
artisans and professional experts. To raise money for their advance
payment he sold the monopoly of the Russian tobacco trade for twenty
thousand pounds. Sixty years before, his grandfather Michael had
forbidden the use of tobacco in Russia under pain of death, and the
prejudice against it was still strong. But in spite of this the use of
tobacco was rapidly spreading, and Peter thus threw down the bars.

Great numbers of anecdotes are afloat about Peter's doings in Holland
and England,--many of them, doubtless, invented. The sight of a great
monarch going about in workman's clothes and laboring like a common
ship-carpenter was apt to aid the imagination of story-tellers and give
rise to numerous tales with little fact to sustain them.

In May, 1698, Peter left England and proceeded to Amsterdam, where his
embassy had remained, often in great distress about him, for the winter
was cold and stormy and at one time no news was received from him for a
month. From Amsterdam he made his way to Vienna, whence he proposed to
go to Venice and Rome, but was prevented by disturbing news from Moscow,
which turned his steps homeward. Here he was to show a new phase of his
varied character, as will be seen in the following tale.




_THE FALL OF THE STRELITZ._


History presents us with four instances of an imperial soldiery who took
the power into their own hands and for a time ruled as the tyrants of a
nation. These were the Pretorian Guards of Rome, the Mamelukes of Egypt,
the Janissaries of Turkey, and the Strelitz of Russia. Of these, the
Pretorian Guards remained pre-eminent, and made emperors at their will.
The other three came to a terrible end. History elsewhere records the
tragic fate of the Mamelukes and the Janissaries: we are here concerned
only with that of the Strelitz corps of Russia.

The Strelitz were the first regular military force of Russia, a
permanent militia of fusileers, formed during the early reign of Ivan
the Terrible, and themselves in time becoming a terror to the nation.
The first serious outbreak of this dangerous civic guard was on the
nomination of Peter I. to the throne of the czar. They did not dream
then of the terrible revenge which this despised boy would take upon
them.

Two days after the funeral of the czar Theodore the insurrection began,
the Strelitz marching in an armed body to the Kremlin, where they
accused nine of their colonels of defrauding them of their pay. The
frightened ministers hastened to dismiss these officers, but this did
not satisfy the savage soldiery, who insisted on their being delivered
into their hands. This done, the unfortunate officers were sentenced to
be scourged, some of them by that fearful Russian whip called the knout.

Their success in this outbreak led the Strelitz to greater outrages. The
tiger in their savage natures was let loose, and only blood could
appease its rage. Marching to the Kremlin, they declared that the late
czar had been poisoned by his doctor, and demanded the death of all
those in the plot. Breaking into the palace, they seized two of the
suspected princes and flung them from the windows, to be received upon
the pikes of the soldiers in the street below. The next victim was one
of the Narishkins, the uncles of Peter the Great. He was massacred in
the same brutal manner and his bleeding body dragged through the
streets. Three of the proscribed nobles had fled for sanctuary to a
church, but were torn from the altar, stripped of their clothing, and
cut to pieces with knives.

The next victim was a friend and favorite of the Strelitz, who was
killed under the belief that he was one of the Narishkins. Discovering
their error, the assassins carried the mangled body of the young
nobleman to the house of his father for interment. The old man, timid by
nature, did not dare to complain of the savage act, and even rewarded
them for bringing him the body of his son. For this weakness he was
bitterly reproached by his wife and daughters and the weeping wife of
the victim.

"What could I do?" pleaded the helpless father; "let us wait for an
opportunity to be revenged."

A revengeful servant overheard these words and repeated them to the
soldiers. In a sudden fury the savages returned, dragged the old man
from the room by the hair of his head, and cut his throat at his own
door.

Meanwhile some of the Strelitz, seeking the Dutch physician Vongad, who
had attended the dying czar and was accused of poisoning him, met his
son and asked where his father was. "I do not know," replied the
trembling youth. His ignorance was instantly punished with death.

In a few minutes a German physician fell in their way. "You are a
doctor," they cried. "If you have not poisoned our master Theodore, you
have poisoned others. You deserve death." And in a moment the unlucky
doctor fell a victim to their blind rage.

The Dutch physician was at length discovered and dragged to the palace.
Here the princesses begged hard for his life, declaring that he was a
skilful doctor and a good man and had worked hard to save their
brother's life. They answered that he deserved to die as a sorcerer as
well as a physician, for they had found the skeleton of a toad and the
skin of a snake in his cabinet.

The next victim demanded was Ivan Narishkin, who they were sure was
somewhere concealed in the palace. Not finding him, they threatened to
burn down the building unless he were delivered into their hands. At
this terrifying threat the young man was taken from his place of
concealment and brought to them by the patriarch, who held in his hands
an image of the Virgin Mary which was said to have performed miracles.
The princesses surrounded the victim, and, kneeling to the soldiers,
prayed with tears for his life.

All their supplications and the demands of the venerable patriarch were
without effect on the savage soldiery, who dragged their captives to the
bottom of the stairway, went through the forms of a mock trial, and
condemned them to the torture. They were sentenced to be cut to pieces,
a form of punishment to which parricides are condemned in China and
Tartary. This tragedy went on until all the proscribed on whom they
could lay their hands had perished and Sophia felt secure in her power.

In the end, Ivan and Peter were declared joint sovereigns (1682), and
their sister Sophia was made regent. The acts of the Strelitz were
approved and they rewarded, the estates of their victims were
confiscated in their favor, and a monument was erected on which the
names of the victims were inscribed as traitors to their country.

The Strelitz had learned their power, and took frequent occasion to
exercise it. Twice again they broke out in revolt during the regency of
Sophia. After the accession of Peter their hostility continued. He had
sent them to fight on the frontiers. He had supplanted them with
regiments drilled in the European manner. He had organized a corps of
twelve thousand foreigners and heretics. He had ordered the construction
of a fleet of a hundred vessels, which would add to the weight of taxes
and bring more foreigners into the country. And he proposed to leave
Russia, to journey in the lands of the heretics, and to bring back to
their sacred land the customs of profane Europe.

All this was too much for the leaders of the Strelitz, who represented
old Russia, as Peter represented new. They resolved to sacrifice the
czar to their rage. Tradition tells the following story, which, though
probably not true, is at least interesting. Two leaders of the Strelitz
laid a plot to start a fire at night, feeling sure that Peter, with his
usual activity, would hasten to the scene. In the confusion attending
the fire they meant to murder him, and then to massacre all the
foreigners whom he had introduced into Moscow.

[Illustration: DINING-ROOM IN THE PALACE OF PETER THE GREAT. MOSCOW.]

The time fixed for the consummation of this plot was at hand. A banquet
was held, at which the principal conspirators assembled, and where they
sought in deep potations the courage necessary for their murderous work.
Unfortunately for them, liquor does not act on all alike. While usually
giving boldness, it sometimes produces timidity. Two of the villains
lost their courage through their potations, left the room on some
pretext, promising to return in time, and hastened to the czar with the
story of the plot.

Peter knew not the meaning of the words timidity and procrastination.
His plans were instantly laid. The time fixed for the conflagration was
midnight. He gave orders that the hall in which the conspirators were
assembled should be surrounded exactly at eleven. Soon after, thinking
that the hour had come, he sought the place alone and boldly entered
the room, fully expecting to find the conspirators in the hands of his
guards.

To his consternation, not a guard was present, and he found himself
alone and unarmed in the midst of a furious band who were just swearing
to compass his destruction.

The situation was a critical one. The conspirators, dismayed at this
unlooked-for visit, rose in confusion. Peter was furious at his guards
for having exposed him to this peril, but instantly perceived that there
was only one course for him to pursue. He advanced among the throng of
traitors with a countenance that showed no trace of his emotions, and
pleasantly remarked,--

"I saw the light in your house while passing, and, thinking that you
must be having a gay time together, I have come in to share your
pleasure and drain a cup with you."

Then, seating himself at the table, he filled a cup and drank to his
would-be assassins, who, on their feet about him, could not avoid
responding to the toast and drinking his health.

But this state of affairs did not long continue. The courage of the
conspirators returned, and they began to exchange looks and signs. The
opportunity had fallen into their hands; now was the time to avail
themselves of it. One of them leaned over to Sukanim, one of their
leaders, and said, in a low tone,--

"Brother, it is time."

"Not yet," said Sukanim, hesitating at the critical moment.

At that instant Peter heard the footsteps of his guards outside, and,
starting to his feet, knocked the leader of the assassins down by a
violent blow in his face, exclaiming,--

"If it is not yet time for you, scoundrel, it is for me."

At the same moment the guards entered the room, and the conspirators,
panic-stricken by the sight, fell on their knees and begged for pardon.

"Chain them!" said the czar, in a terrible voice.

Turning then to the commander of the guards, he struck him and accused
him of having disobeyed orders. But the officer proving to him that the
hour fixed had just arrived, the czar, in sudden remorse at his haste,
clasped him in his arms, kissed him on the forehead, proclaimed his
fidelity, and gave the traitors into his charge.

And now Peter showed the savage which lay within him under the thin
veneer of civilization. The conspirators were put to death with the
cruellest of tortures, and, to complete the act of barbarity, their
heads were exposed on the summit of a column with their limbs arranged
around them as ornaments.

Satisfied that this fearful example would keep Russia tranquil during
his absence, Peter set out on his journey, visiting most of the
countries of Western Europe. He had reached Vienna, and was on the point
of setting out for Venice, when word was brought him from Russia that
the Strelitz had broken out in open insurrection and were marching from
their posts on the frontier upon Moscow.

The czar at once left Vienna and journeyed with all possible speed to
Russia, reaching Moscow in September, 1698. His appearance took all by
surprise, for none knew that he had yet left Austria.

He came too late to suppress the insurrection. That had been already
done by General Gordon, who, marching in all haste, had met the rebels
about thirty miles from Moscow and called on them to surrender. As they
refused and attacked the troops, he opened on them with cannon, put them
to flight, and of the survivors took captive about two thousand. These
were decimated on the spot, and the remainder imprisoned.

This was punishment enough for a soldier, but not enough for an
autocrat, whose mind was haunted by dark suspicions, and who looked upon
the outbreak as a plot to dethrone him and to call his sister Sophia to
the throne. In his treatment of the prisoners the spirit of the monster
Ivan IV. seems to have entered into his soul, and the cruelty shown,
while common enough in old-time Russia, is revolting to the modern mind.

The trial was dragged out through six weeks, with daily torture of some
of the accused, under the eyes of the czar himself, who sought to force
from them a confession that Sophia had been concerned in the outbreak.
The wives of the prisoners, all the women servants of the princesses,
even poor beggars who lived on their charity, were examined under
torture. The princesses themselves, Peter's sisters, were questioned by
the czar, though he did not go so far as to torture them. Yet with all
this nothing was discovered. There was not a word to connect Sophia with
the revolt.

The trial over, the executions began. Of the prisoners, some were
hanged, some beheaded, others broken on the wheel. It is said that those
beheaded were made to kneel in rows of fifty before trunks of trees laid
on the ground, and that Peter compelled his courtiers and nobles to act
as executioners, Mentchikof specially distinguishing himself in this
work of slaughter. It is even asserted that the czar wielded the axe
himself, though of this there is some doubt. The opinion grew among the
people that neither Peter nor Prince Ramodanofsky, his cruel viceroy,
could sleep until they had tasted blood, and a letter from the prince
contains the following lurid sentence: "_I am always washing myself in
blood._"

The headless bodies of the dead were left where they had fallen. The
long Russian winter was just beginning, and for five months they lay
unburied, a frightful spectacle for the eyes of the citizens of Moscow.

Of those hanged, nearly two hundred were left depending from a large
square gallows in front of the cell of Sophia at the convent in which
she was confined, and with a horrible refinement of cruelty three of
these bodies were so placed as to hang all winter under her very window,
one of them holding in his hand a folded paper to represent a petition
for her aid.

The six regiments of Strelitz still on the frontier showed signs of a
similar outbreak, but the news of the executions taught them that it was
safest to keep quiet. But many of them were brought in chains to Moscow
and punished for their intentions. Various stories are told of Peter's
cruelty in connection with these executions. One is that he beheaded
eighty with his own hand, Plestchef, one of his boyars, holding them by
the hair. Another story, told by M. Printz, the Prussian ambassador,
says that at an entertainment given him by the czar, Peter, when drunk,
had twenty rebels brought in from the prisons, whom he beheaded in quick
succession, drinking a bumper after each blow, the whole concluding
within the hour. He even asked the ambassador to try his skill in the
same way. It may be said here, however, that these stories rest upon
very poor evidence, and that anecdote-makers have painted Peter in
blacker colors than he deserves.

In the end the corps of the Strelitz was abolished, their houses and
lands in Moscow were taken from the survivors, and all were exiled into
the country, where they became simple villagers.




_THE CRUSADE AGAINST BEARDS AND CLOAKS._


The return of Peter the Great from his European journey was marked by
other events than his cruel revenge upon the rebellious Strelitz. That
had affected only a few thousand people; the reforms he sought to
introduce affected the nation at large. The Russians were then more
Oriental than European in style, wearing the long caftan or robe of
Persia and Turkey, which descended to their heels, while their beards
were like those of the patriarchs, the man deeming himself most in honor
who had the 

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