Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/199

 Rh the Order and the Russian-Lithuanian bands under Svidrigaïlo, which had been artfully drawn into a fratricidal struggle, suffered a crushing defeat at the famous Battle of the Swieta. At that moment the Knights of the Black Cross were in jeopardy even in Prussia. On July 15, 1410, a quarrel, then two centuries old, renewed since then, and perpetuated under various forms, was fought out in a memorable combat, for the commemoration of which preparations are now being made at Cracow and Moscow. More appropriately divided, this time, into two hostile camps, the world of Germany and the budding world of Slavdom had set their picked warriors face to face, and at Grünwald, on that great day, the flower of German chivalry fell before the onslaught of the Polish-Lithuanian army under Iagiello and Witold, and the power of the great Order bit the red dust of that historic battlefield.

Into the balance of that fight Poland had cast her own fate. The Order, ready to join hands against her even with the Slavs, while, in its hate of their very name, it called her, to whom it owed everything, the 'hereditary foe,' had plotted her ruin, and would have shrunk from nothing that might insure it. In the previous century it had laboured to induce Sweden, Hungary, and Austria to accept a plan of partition, the earliest of them all (Treitschke, Historische und Polttische Aufsätze, 1867, p. 35; compare Martens, Recueil des Traités, v., Introd., p. vi). From that same period. too, while striving to obstruct the understanding between Poland and Lithuania which was to be its ruin, it had shown an inclination to adopt the future watchword of secularized Prussia—an alliance with Moscow and against the benefactors thus rewarded.

The Battle of Grünwald settled all these accounts for a time. The knights, obliged, in the following year, to accept a peace at Thorn, which diminished their Prussian dominions, felt their Livonian interests threatened by the Polish-Lithuanian agreement, which they vainly strove to break, and the Muscovite alliance was still a far-off dream. Meanwhile the reflux of Muscovite expansion in Livonia itself had to be faced. In 1483 the belligerents were fain to make a truce, and before this had expired, the Russians had built Ivangorod, their own Narva—a standing threat to the Teutonic Narva on the opposite bank—on the eastern side of the mouth of the Narova River.

At the same time, the Order was undergoing a process of internal decomposition, soon to be hastened by the appearance of the Reformation, and the conversion of Albert of Brandenburg, appointed Grand Master in 1510. In 1525, when, at the Landtag of Wolmar, Albert, after an unsuccessful war, accepted the suzerainty of Poland over his secularized States, Livonia seemed inclined to follow the same course. The courage of