Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/211

 Rh districts, with the title of Duke, in vassalage to Poland, for himself and his heirs, he resigned his cross, his mantle, and the keys of the castle of Riga, into Radziwill's hands.

The spectacle offered by the Baltic provinces at that moment was an extraordinary one, even for that period of incessant territorial rivalries. It surpassed that presented at Milan or in Flanders. The new Duke of Courland, a feeble copy of the first Duke of Prussia, was beginning his reign south of the Dvina. In the north the King of Poland was installing himself as lord and master on part of the ancient possessions of the Order, and proclaiming himself suzerain of them all. Riga, while submitting to the same authority, remained in theory a free city of the Empire, and so preserved a shadow of independence. The Swedes kept Revel and Harrien. Oesel, Wiek, and Pielten were subject to Magnus. And the Muscovites, established in the Bishopric of Derpt, in Wirland, and along the Lettonian frontier, were preparing to dispute the ownership of the whole country with all its other occupants.

'At present,' wrote a gazetteer of that period, 'Livonia is like a young lady round whom everybody dances.' One important fact had already passed into history—the close of the period of the Crusades and of the Orders of Chivalry. Modern Europe, even while she still hesitated to receive Russia into her bosom, had joined with Muscovy in wiping out the past, and laying the foundations of a new order of politics. But this new order had yet to evolve itself out of a mighty and chaotic struggle, the incidents of which I must now briefly relate. 



Is the question of the possession of the Baltic provinces definitely settled even now? Such an assertion would certainly be rash. It may very possibly become one of the objects, at all events, if not the cause, of a fresh struggle—a conflict of powers far more formidable than those whose onslaught and fierce strife the sixteenth century saw. The elements of the problem have modified, to be sure; yet, great as the change has been, a certain amount of reality, living, or capable of second