Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/201

 Rh masters who thus imposed their yoke, had nothing in common with them—neither tongue, nor customs, nor religion. Forced into Catholicism, and now driven towards Protestantism, it continued equally indifferent and hostile. Hence there was no solid foundation, no real link with any metropolitan or central religious power. The Emperor's power over the Order and the Pope's power over the Church were both of them purely nominal. There was no real centralization and no real unity, only a perpetual fight between the secular and regular elements, in spheres the frontiers of which were ill-defined, and perpetually altering. The general tendency of all towns was indifferently to repudiate the authority of both the rival powers. Anarchy reigned everywhere. As Droysen has justly observed (Geschichte der Gegenreformation, 1893, p. 204), in that hour, when the seven provinces of the Low Countries were evolving a new European State out of a great war, viribus unitis, the State of Livonia was crumbling, viribus unitis, under the centrifugal action of its own dissociated elements.

Against the fourfold threat of invasion—Polish, Muscovite, Swedish, and Danish—there were no home resources at all. As a military power, the Order had disappeared, and there was no money, or no inclination to give it, for recruiting an army—no hope of outside help. The Order did indeed reckon on appealing to the German Fatherland in the hour of danger, but for two centuries it had never failed to claim from that same Fatherland every right and license dear to a haughty and suspicious particularism. Poland was offering support, and even insisting on its acceptance; but Poland, torn by intestine quarrels, weakened by the vices of her own Government, and absorbed by the great work of her union with Lithuania, was more to be feared as an enemy than welcomed as an ally. In 1554, Gustavus I., King of Sweden, would fain have taken advantage of the difficulties besetting Ivan, then busy with his Eastern conquests; but the league in which he invited Livonia, Poland, and Lithuania to join him fell to the ground, and, left alone to cope with Moscow, he was forced, in 1557, to agree to a forty years' truce. Thus the unhappy Livonia was left face to face with the fourth rogue, who found plenty of reasons or pretexts for attacking her.

What reasons? In the tacit agreement entered into by a portion of Western Europe to keep the door shut between herself and her powerful neighbour in the North-West, the Baltic provinces were fond of assuming the watchdog's part. At this very moment the famous business of Hans Schlitte gave proof of their zeal in this matter. This Saxon adventurer, who, in 1548, had received the Emperor Charles V.'s permission to recruit artisans and men of learning in Germany for the Tsar's service,