Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/140



Ivan the Terrible's birthday, August 25 (September 4), 1530, the whole country was filled with the noise of thunder, and with awful flashes of lightning. Even when the child began to stir in his mother's womb, the Muscovite armies fighting before Kazan had felt a flush of eagerness and valour such as they had never known before. More genuine than the prodigies of which popular legend has thus preserved the memory were the shocks which at that moment were staggering all Europe. Luther and Calvin, Wycliff and Huss, had made their entry on the world's stage, and from one end of Western Christendom to the other, on battlefields where brother fought against brother, and on public squares that bristled with scaffolds, in churches torn with distress and courts shaken by revolution, Catholics and Protestants, soldiers and priests, Princes and varlets, were striving to turn the great shout of liberty that had rung from the battlements of the Wartburg into a war-cry, an instrument of massacre and oppression. Shaken to her foundations, the Church, from her begging friars to her Pope, was arming to fight for her privileges; but within the walls of Rome, shattered by the assault of the German troops, the Holy Empire and France were disputing the empire of the world.