Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/191

 Rh of the Mongol power, set on the middle course of the Volga, and barring the way eastward, had been an obstacle in the way of Russian development, if not an actual menace to Moscow. At Kazan the first collision between Islam and Christianity had occurred, long before this time, when the Mahometan Bulgars, the earliest inhabitants of the place, had fought with the first Princes of the new Russia of the northeast. To Asia, Kazan had been a commercial and industrial centre, to the Mongol Empire, the only solid footing left it in Europe; for, once reduced to the Khanate of the Crimea, it became a mere nomad camp, floating hither and thither over the southern steppes. Astrakan still remained, but once Kazan had fallen, the breaking of the other dyke that barred the onward course of the Muscovite flood became inevitable, and the conquest and process of colonization thus begun were to rush with resistless force towards the rich lands watered by the western tributaries of the Volga, and the eastern affluents of the Don.

Kazan, in short, was the natural rallying-point of all the numerous savage tribes—Tcheremisses, Mordvians, Tchouvaches, Votisks, Bachkirs—dwelling in the mountains and on the plains along both sides of the Volga. The mountaineers, already attracted by the shelter of Sviajsk, were creeping into the bosom of Muscovy; the men of the plains were soon to follow them.

But, in his eagerness to return to the joys of home, and taste the glories prepared for him at Moscow, Ivan had been in too great a hurry to leave the country. The boïars, Kourbski tells us, had pressed him to wait till the spring. Yet they themselves, it may be, had furnished him with good reasons for a contrary decision. Though they had had to drag him by his bridle under the walls of Kazan, at the last moment, his 'men who served' had threatened to forsake him several times before he got there at all, declaring they were worn out, and their strength and resources alike exhausted. A silent struggle was already going on between him and them. He felt he could not hold them, and they saw he was not the man to be long content with a grudging, capricious, and uncertain obedience. The reforms he had accomplished or prepared had evoked a discontent which never lost an opportunity of showing itself, among the higher aristocracy, and Ivan probably felt none too safe in the midst of the warriors who had taken upon themselves to show him his proper place in battle, and put him into it by force.

None the less, as early as in the month of December, the benefits of the victory seemed likely to slip through the victors' fingers. At Kazan and in its neighbourhood alarming symp-