Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/214

 190 this was the prologue to one of the darkest tragedies of a period most fertile in dramatic episodes. Besides the personal charms which Soukine set himself to press on his Sovereign, the betrothed thus suggested had the advantage, in Ivan's eyes, of representing, with a brother who had no sons, a race which had reigned, and reigned by hereditary right, at Vilna. In her the Tsar of all the Russias would possess yet another right, newly acquired and most incontestable, to claim his Lithuanian patrimony. Fed, no doubt, by his passionate and stubborn temperament, this idea was to root itself so deeply in the monarch's mind as to become, in the course of the following years, the directing element of his whole policy.

But very probably Sigismund-Augustus sought nothing more on this occasion than to save appearances, and so gain time. From the Polish point of view, this question of the Lithuanian inheritance, quite apart from the difference of faith, was in itself an obstacle in the way of a marriage which would have threatened the integrity of the national possessions, and might compromise the success of that other union between the two Slav races of Poland and Lithuania which the last of the Jagellons was then labouring to complete. Besides all this, Catherine had already been almost promised to John, Duke of Finland, brother of the King of Sweden. In 1562, this promise became a reality, and immediately afterwards, hostilities between Russia and Poland began.

Just as in past days, they fought while they negotiated, and negotiated while they fought. Ivan wrote abusive letters to Sigismund-Augustus, and Sigismund-Augustus avenged himself by inciting the Khan of the Crimea to invade Russia. In February, 1563, the Tsar, in command of a numerous army, and carrying with him a coffin which, he declared, was to serve either for the Polish King's corpse or for his own, won a signal advantage. First Smolensk and then Polotsk, the chief town of a Polish-Lithuanian palatinate, and an important commercial centre, carrying on relations with Riga, fell into the hands of the Muscovites. Until Batory's time, their powerful artillery was always to tel] in a war of sieges. Ivan talked more than ever of taking back Kiev; with his usual vehemence, he jeered his unlucky adversary, who had appealed to the King of Sweden in support of his claim to Livonia, and called him his 'brother.' 'What King? What brother? … He might as well fraternize with a water-carrier!' But the next year, on a battlefield which, in 1508 and in 1514, had already proved fatal to the Russian arms, on the banks of the Oula near Orcha, the Poles had their revenge. Nicholas Radziwill, 'the Red,' cut the troops led by Prince Peter Ivanovitch to pieces, and the Prince himself fell in the fray.