Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/173

 Rh all events, they were as though they did not exist, for their titles still appear in their signatures, and they thus maintained and affirmed their rights. But the law ignored them, and they sometimes ended by forgetting their own identity. Even in 1554, we find Michael Ivanovitch, the descendant of the ancient appanaged Princes of Vorotynsk, claiming no more than the title of dvorianine (courtier), higher, now, than any other; and the trend of the Muscovite policy itself always tended to eliminate the hereditary element in the higher sphere, for in 1566, out of ninety-four dvorianié of the first class, only thirty belonged to the princely families.

This was the work wrought by the ukase of 1550, and a few years later the system was further and largely extended by a service, reorganized in 1571, for the protection of the southern and south-western frontiers, and confided to the landed proprietors of those regions. A fort had been built, during Ivan's minority, at Temnikov, on the Mokcha, a tributary of the Oka, and a number of posts established along the natural lines of defence rendered it possible to keep a watch on the Tartars' movements. In 1555 a regular guard of Striéltsy and Cossacks was organized, all along the Volga, and one Cossack regiment, the khoperskii polk, still preserves the remnants of a standard presented to it by Ivan IV. He did more than this. By his care, another contingent of boïars' sons in search of an establishment was assigned pomiéstia in the territory threatened by invasion. The holders of these lands were thus interested in the defence of the frontier, and bound, in return for the landed properties bestowed upon them, to keep up a permanent guard. A double chain of fortified townlets thus arose, from Alatyr and Temnikov to Poutivl, and from Nijni-Novgorod to Zvenigorod. And after this, the system, which had proved its value, was successively extended to the eastern and western frontiers, and made up one huge whole, ensuring the Empire the tranquillity it had hitherto lacked.

This work alone, so wide in its conception and so vigorously carried out, in spite of the painful struggles through which he was then passing, should suffice to clear Ivan of the too general and most insufficiently justified opprobrium cast on this portion of his reign. The Terrible did not spend it in doing nothing but cutting off men's heads. It was no fault of his that the assembly of 1551, to which his Code was presented, did not itself inscribe a far more brilliant page in the nation's history.