Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/142

118 Tsar, which corresponded, in the imagination of the orthodox, with the Imperial dignity and the claim to the inheritance of Byzantium. And to this, in 1483, he added, by his own authority, the title of Sovereign of all the Russias, which amounted to an assertion of his rights over Kiev and Vilna.

This autonomous solution of the great Oriental problem had been long since prepared. The south-western Slavs had been the first to perceive it. In the fourteenth century Douchan, a Servian, and Alexander, a Bulgarian, had both suggested it, when each dreamt a conquest of Constantinople, and began by proclaiming himself Emperor. A reference to the building of a new tsargrad (imperial city) at Tyrnov appears in the manuscripts of that date. But, as Monsieur Milioukoy has justly observed, before the Russia of the sixteenth century could appropriate this programme of national greatness, she had to await an impulse that was to come from Europe, just as the Russia of the seventeenth century was to feel a similar external impetus before she could conceive and accept the reform of Peter the Great.

When Ivan III. died, in 1505, he left five sons, and divided his inheritance among them. But to Vassili, the eldest, he gave not one-third, according to precedent, but two-thirds—seventy-six towns and provinces, including the capital. Vassili had married, as his first wife, the daughter of a boïar, Salomelouriévna Sabourov. He had no children; and mourned the fact. 'The birds are happy!' he would say when he looked into a nest. The spells to which the barren wife had recourse produced no effect. A council of boïars, summoned in 1525, proposed another expedient, coinciding, no doubt, with the husband's secret desires. 'A barren fig-tree must be cast out of the field!' One councillor alone, the bearer of a name soon to win lustre in the camp of the aristocratic opposition, Simon Kourbski, dared raise his voice in defence of the sacred bond about to be broken, and his protest was supported by the members of the clergy who represented the reform party, Vassiane Patrikiévy and Maximus the Greek. They were overruled. Salome was thrown into a cloister, and Vassili led Helen Glinski, the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee, to the altar. He was desperately in Jove with her, and the barrenness of his repudiated wife was probably a mere pretext. Since the Muscovite Sovereigns had given up taking their wives from foreign Courts, a habit had come in of opening a sort of beauty competition among the native ladies, from whom the master made his choice. Hundreds were brought together from every corner of the country. Now, on this occasion nothing of the kind seems to have been attempted.

A beautiful woman, who, thanks to her origin, had enjoyed