Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/196

 172 the splendour of which one only of his successors was to increase, and a popularity none of them attained. The conquests and reforms of Peter the Great, less understood, have consequently been less appreciated. Ivan, the conqueror of Islam, the lawgiver who cared for the humblest, and wrought terrible justice on the 'great' only, forced admiration even from foreigners. No Prince in Christendom, thought Jenkinson in 1557, was so feared by his subjects, and so loved. At the same epoch, Foscarini, the Venetian envoy, eulogizing the justice meted out by this peerless Sovereign through his simple and appropriate laws, and praising his affability, his humanity, the variety of his information, the splendour of his Court, and the strength of his armies, places Batory's future opponent among the foremost Princes of his time. He enumerates, with evident pleasure, his gens d'armes, equipped in the French fashion, his artillery-men, drilled on the Italian system, and his splendidly taught arquebus-men, and affirms that no other European power possessed so formidable a war machine. Ina mirage of victory, his fancy beholds two armies, each numbering 100,000 men, ready to march at a sign from the great Tsar—'which seems almost improbable,' he adds, 'but it is absolutely true.'

The truth, which I have endeavoured to follow strictly, certainly warranted Ivan's momentary belief in the certainty of his superiority over his Polish and Swedish neighbours. He had a numerous army, a well-filled treasury, the advantage of a strongly-constituted power, the assurance which is born of success. All these—power, glory, and popularity, were to be swallowed up in a gulf, the dangers and the depth of which neither he nor any other man could recognise or plumb. 



sixteenth-century struggle for the possession of the Baltic was a dispute over an inheritance. This inheritance had been left by the Hansa, that great political and commercial confederation which the discovery of the New World ruined and left defenceless in the hands of its greedy neighbours. It was a formidable struggle, both as to the competitors—Sweden