Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/195

 Rh body was trying to be the first to put it out. Give the whole thing up? Ivan could not dream of that! Even at Kazan he had only won his victory thanks to Western help, aided by the European engineers and workmen whom he laboured to gather from Germany, Hungary, and Italy. But if in Italy, and to some extent in Germany, a disposition was shown to second his efforts, other European countries, and those his nearest neighbours, kept up a suspicious and hostile attitude, stopping his recruits on the border, forbidding the sale of the most modern war material, and striving to maintain the wall built by centuries of isolation between themselves and their too enterprising neighbour. Livonia was a door—the door which Peter the Great was one day to beat down with mighty strokes. The chance of opening it at once, and that, as it seemed, without any excessive effort, offered now.

Might not Ivan have used the shores of the Gulf of Finland between the mouth of the Siestra and that of the Narova, which were already his, to the same end? This objection has been advanced, but it is not conclusive. The foundation of St. Petersburg had not occurred to the young Tsar. Even if he had possessed the genius of Peter the Great, he would probably have found it impossible to force the huge and unreasonable labour involved in such an undertaking on his subjects. To make that other effort, the value of which is open to discussion, possible, a century and a half later, the century and a half of labour, which insured the triumph of the absolute power and gave the son of Alexis a weapon the son of Vassili never wielded, was indispensable. Peter the Great himself was not to be content with his marshy port on an inhospitable coast, and it seemed, at this time, as if all Ivan had to do was to put out his hand.

In fact, though his undertaking failed, its failure was solely due to a surprise which nothing led him to foresee. This surprise, this miracle, was the ephemeral career of Batory, a real King, in a country which for years had known mock Kings only—a Hungarian cavalier, who broke in the Polish mare, and drove her full gallop to stop the Russian horseman's way. Only ten years this wild ride lasted, but they sufficed to work an utter change in the chances and positions of the two parties: to transform the Poland of the Jagellons, which Moscow knew, and which she could defy, into another Poland, of which she had not dreamt and whose strength she could not gauge; to make the triumph on which the victor of Kazan and Astrakan had so surely reckoned a disaster, and convert the match on which every appearance had encouraged him to stake his fortunes into a most disastrous wager.

He brought the prestige of his recent exploits to it—a glory