Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/236

 212 covite candidate, and in favour of Batory, and supported his view by marching out an army of 120,000 Tartars. There was a panic at Warsaw, and on December 12, Batory was elected, together with the Emperor Maximilian himself, on whom part of the votes fell, to the exclusion of his son Ernest.

This division evidently left some margin for the arrangement already suggested by Ivan; but the conferences begun at Mojaïsk in January, 1576, with the Imperial envoys Cobenzl and Printz von Buchau, bore no fruit whatever. Maximilian, instead of forestalling Batory in Poland, as he should have done, insisted on sending his son there, and requesting the Tsar's support for his candidature. He further claimed the evacuation of Livonia and an alliance against the Turks, and, in exchange, he offered Ivan Constantinople and the Empire of the East!

The game had been played—and lost.

Ivan tried to cut into the game again, and this time rather awkwardly. At that moment the Opritchnina had set his head in a whirl. He wrote separate letters to the Polish and Lithuanian lords, recommending Ernest to some, with the most terrible threats of reprisals if they gave the preference to the Sultan's candidate (Batory), and proposing himself to the others, either as King of Poland or as Sovereign of Lithuania apart from Poland. Unfortunately, Novossiltsov, whom he had at last allowed to proceed, strengthened him in his mistaken course. Chodkiewicz and Radziwill told the envoy that nothing would induce them to accept Obatura (sic). They had only voted for Maximilian in despair, when they saw the Tsar made no sign. Ivan fancied he was still master of the day and the morrow. Any man, indeed, might have been deceived. As late as in April, 1576, the Nuncio Laureo wrote to Rome that if a fresh election was rendered necessary by the division of the vote, the Russian candidate would certainly win the day, because Ernest was so hated. But both Maximilian and Ivan should have made haste. For while they were each wasting precious time, the Emperor parleying with the Poles, and the Tsar sending Prince Zakhar Ivanovitch Sougorski to Vienna to reopen the negotiations begun at Mojaïsk, Obatura hurried to Warsaw, and had himself crowned there.

Even then Ivan did not despair, and invited the Emperor to join him in common action against 'the usurper.' But when anybody spoke the word 'Poland' to Maximilian, he answered with the word 'Livonia,' and after his death, which occurred