Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/194

 170 Prince Dmitri Wisniowieçki, who occupied and fortified an island in the Dnieper—the Khortitsa—and tried to brave the neighbouring Khan by dint of an alliance with the Tsar. He was driven out in 1557, but took his revenge the next year, under the very walls of Azov; while the commander of the Muscovite forces, Daniel Adachev, reached the estuary of the Dnieper, captured two Turkish vessels, landed in the Crimea, and spread terror through that country.

The moment seemed to have arrived when a mighty effort promised to end it all, and the men about Ivan eagerly pressed him to act. But the young and glorious Sovereign had wheeled round already. His enterprising spirit, its back turned on the east, was travelling westward, whither it was drawn by stronger intellectual affinities and more seductive prospects. Livonian affairs held him a and were to absorb him for many a year. It was the story of Peter the Great already.

The two undertakings were irreconcilable, and however he may have been criticised then or since, the determination at which the Tsar arrived seems fully justified. To go to the Crimea was not the same thing as to go to Kazan or Astrakan. The transport of troops and stores from the banks of the Moskva to those of the Volga was insured by a network of navigable rivers, running, partly at all events, through a comparatively populous country. The other road, once Toula and Pronsk were left behind, was over the desert, through resourceless and shelterless wastes, in which, till the end of the eighteenth century, the ceaseless efforts of Russia's best military leaders were to meet with shipwreck. And behind the Crimea, it must be remembered, lay the risk of having to face Turkey—the Turkey of the sixteenth century, the Turkey of Solyman the Magnificent.

Further, Ivan was not absolutely free to choose. Since 1554, he had been at war with Sweden on account of this same province of Livonia, and on its account, too, but for a succession of truces, always on the point of being broken, he would have been at permanent war with Poland. Thus the solution of the one problem was not so urgent as that of the other. Anxious as the Crimean business was, it could wait. But in Livonia neither Poles nor Swedes would wait, for they could not afford to delay an intervention in which Moscow must forestall them if she was not to be cut off for ever from all access to the Baltic. The ancient colony of the Teutonic knights was reaching that condition with which Poland was one day to become acquainted, and which constitutes, in a sense, a strain on all neighbouring greeds; the house was on fire, and every-