Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/200

 176 Walter von Plettenberg, who led the Livonian party in the Order, failed him; but from the towns Protestantism was pouring forth with resistless strength, shaking the knights' fortresses to their foundations, finding its way even into the Bishops' courts, leaving nothing of the Catholic establishment standing, save its external trappings, and casting the whole country into a state of anarchy which, whencesoever it came, rendered the final catastrophe inevitable. In 1554, Plettenberg's successor, Fürstenberg, began to treat with Moscow; but in 1557, having shown an inclination to defy Poland, he was forced to appear before King Sigismund-Augustus at Pozwol, and accept an offensive and defensive alliance against Russia. It became clear, then, that Livonia was to be the lists on which that country's own fate was to be fought out between its neighbours, and for their benefit. She was to save nothing for herself, not even her honour.

The Muscovite invasion, to which all this was the prelude, and all the horrors that came in its train, have been represented in the German literature, and even in the popular poetry of that epoch, as a Divine chastisement. Truly, the spectacle the country then presented was both sad and repulsive. The Order was fast nearing its end. The warlike spirit of the old knights had died out; there was no civic spirit to take its place. The vow of celibacy had given rise to a state of unbridled and filthy debauchery. Immoral women swarmed round the knights' castles, and the perpetual orgies in which they lived and the luxury they displayed reduced the poor to a state of hideous misery. Sebastian Münster, in his 'Cosmography,' published in 1550 (French translation, dated 1575, p. 1618), has given us a dark and revolting picture of this revelry, and the distress which was the reverse of the medal; and a preacher of that period—Tilman Brakel, of Antwerp—has not left us a more favourable account of the lives of the upper clergy, greedy and dissolute, living in the midst of concubines and bastards.

But morals were corrupt at that time all over Europe, and this feature would not in itself suffice to explain the weakened condition of every local institution. To this other causes contributed. Ever since the twelfth century, the country had been offering the contradictory spectacle of a German colony, engaged, after the fashion of the Greek settlements on the coasts of Sicily and Asia Minor, in forming an independent State, without any national basis at all. The local population, of Finnish or Lettonian race, though it submitted to the foreign