Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/182

 158 had always insured the safety of their own persons. But Moscow, as Jehosaphat pointed out, had now become something more than a mere capital city. It was a metropolis, a holy town, wherein the whole of Russia had deposited all that she held most sacred—her faith and her relics, her hopes and her pride.

So Ivan held his ground, and his very presence made Saïp retire. Behind the Tsar, the crowned boy who would not flee, the Khan's fancy beheld an army strong enough to beat his Tartars, no longer what they had been in Baty's time, plunderers rather than soldiers, now, lovers of easy victories. As Ivan grew older, he did better still. Twice over, in 1548 and 1549, he exposed his own person, and led expeditions—unsuccessful ones indeed—up to the very walls of Kazan. He started too late each time, and the winter overtook him. His regiments melted in the snow, and the Volga swallowed up his artillery. In their desperate quarrels about precedence, the 'men who served' forgot all their duties. Twice over the Tsar, weeping tears of fury, was forced to beat a retreat, while the Crimeans and Kazantsy, plucking up their courage, ravaged his fairest provinces.

But the second expedition did bring some result; a town was founded on the enemy's territory, and quite near Kazan, at the confluence of the Sviaga and the Volga. This town was Sviajsk, and the neighbouring mountaineers, Tchouvaches and Mordvians, soon found it a centre of attraction, while the Kazan Tartars recognised it as an establishment with which they would have to reckon. The Khanate was dismembered, in fact. The Kazan Tartars, forsaken by the Crimeans, who quitted the town to the number of 300 fighting men, leaving their women and children behind them, but sacking everything before they went, displeased with Outémich, whom they betrayed to the Russians, and just as ill-pleased, soon afterwards, with Schah-Ali, ended by asking the Tsar to choose them a ruler, and Ivan fancied himself on the brink of a bloodless triumph. The selected governor, Prince Simon Ivanovitch Mikoulinski, had almost reached the gates of the city in February, 1552, when the intrigues of Schah-Ali, who had quietly retired to Sviajsk, and the intervention, no doubt, of some of Saïp's emissaries, operated a sudden change. The gates remained closely shut. An appeal to arms ensued. Couriers hurried into the Crimea to ask for reinforcements, and the adventure threatened to become a disaster.

At Sviajsk, on which place Mikoulinski had to fall back—for he had but few troops with him—he narrowly escaped being surrounded and destroyed. The plague, and mutiny, which came with the sickness, entered his camp. Debauchery was