Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/190

 166 were carried into captivity. After all was done, the Tsar ordered a Te Deum to be sung, and with his own hands planted a great cross on the very spot over which the standard of the last Khan of Kazan had waved during the fight. A church was to be built there, and within two days it was ready and consecrated. By the end of the week two governors, Prince Vassili Siémiénovitch Serebrianyï and Prince Alexander Borissovitch Gorbatyï, were installed in the conquered city, and the victor was hurrying back to Moscow, and to Anastasia.

On his way home, at Vladimir, joyful news awaited him. The Tsarina had borne a son, who received the name of Dmitri. At Taïninskoïé, one of the oldest villages in the vicinity of Moscow, whither Ivan was one day to retire, during the trials which were to follow on this triumph, his brother George and his chief boïars came to offer him their first congratulations. At Moscow the Metropolitan, attended by all his clergy, met him, and compared him to Dmitri Donskoï, to Alexander Nevski, and to Constantine the Great; then, casting himself at the Sovereign's feet, he thanked him for having won this triumph for the country and the Church.

A great triumph it was, indeed,—greater, both in its immediate and its more distant consequences, than Henry II.'s acquisition, that same year, and at the other end of Europe, of the Three Bishoprics.

In 1555, Gouriï, first Archbishop of Kazan and Sviajsk, went forth to take up his new post, with a whole following of priests, and his departure was the counterpart of that migration of the Greek clergy which, in Vladimir's time, had brought the true faith from Byzantium to Korsoun. After officiating at the consecration of a Church of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin, built within the Kremlin, in memory of the new conquest, Gouriï took ship, the chants and prayers continuing even on board, and all along the course of the Moskva and the Volga a huge concourse of enthusiasts greeted the representative of the true faith. Russia was beginning an apostolate of her own. The blow delivered on the walls of Kazan had struck the whole of Islam, and the budding prestige of the Crimean Khans had been irreparably shaken. There was to be no more of that talk of 'beating his forehead' in their presence, which had previously appeared in Ivan's correspondence with his redoubtable neighbours, even though he claimed to be on equal terms with the Emperor of Germany and the Sultan of the Turks! From the material point of view alone, Kazan was a most precious prize. This remnant