Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/149

 Rh keep watch and ward over it till a Prince capable of making use of it should arise in Russia. As early as in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, on the other hand, Slav genealogists had contrived to trace the descent of the Bulgarian Assanids from an illustrious Roman house, and in the fourteenth they likewise discovered a relationship between the Servian Nemanitch and the Emperor Constantine—nay, even with Augustus himself. Thus, when Macarius introduced a Prouss, brother of Augustus, whose descendant Rurik was supposed to be, into his life of St. Olga, a Russian Princess, he was only following former precedents.

The title now claimed by the son of Vassili was all this: a whole world of myths and symbols, of glorious memories and ambitious dreams, made flesh in living and tangible reality.

The coronation took place on January 16, 1547, and nothing which might heighten its glories was forgotten. In presence of a mighty concourse, amidst the joyous pealing of bells and all the mustered pomp of Church and Throne, Bishops, priests, and monks prayed God to grant the new Tsar the light of justice and of truth, while all around him his boïars scattered handfuls of gold pieces, emblems of the prosperity which was his promised lot. Yet the heir of the Greek and Roman Emperors did not venture to make known his pretensions to the foreign Sovereigns. He knew both his father and his grandfather had met with a rebuff. Vassili had succeeded, in 1514, in slipping the title of Cæsar into a treaty with the Emperor Maximilian. But Vienna, disowning her own plenipotentiary, Snitzpanner, had refused to sign until the text was altered. Poland, too, was irreconcilable as to this matter. Some of the small German States and the Patriarch of Constantinople were the only powers that showed any disposition to oblige, now they themselves offered the sole hope of dignity left to the professors of the Orthodox faith. And even in this quarter Ivan thought it well to delay his application till the morrow of his greatest victories in the year 1561, and offered with it, then, a liberal donation. He met with very moderate success. The Patriarch Jehosaphat did indeed acknowledge the son of Vassili as Tsar, and as the descendant of Princess Anne, the Emperor Basil's sister. He even went so far as to offer, superfluously, to renew the coronation ceremony by the intervention of a Metropolitan despatched for that purpose. But out of the thirty-seven signatures which adorned the charter sent from Constantinople to Moscow, five-and-thirty were later to be recognised as forgeries (Pierling, 'Russia and the Holy See,' i. 319; Milioukov, 'Essays on the History of Russian Culture,' iii. 71, founded on Regel Analecta Byzantino Rossica, 1891).