Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/241

 Rh rest of the population, but Ivan's victorious campaigns shortly brought in a fresh contingent of foreign neighbours, prisoners of war, or involuntary immigrants, gathered on the battlefields and in the towns and country places of Livonia. The suburb on the right bank of the Iaouza to which they were confined long preserved a certain autonomy, for it became a centre of Western culture, and a nursery for men destined to play a considerable part in the national history. We have already noted the careers of Taube and Kruse. Other Livonians, who belonged, like them, to this German sloboda—such men as Kloss and Beckmann—figured in the Sovereign's immediate circle, and were actively employed in his diplomacy.

The disembarkation of the English navigators on the northern coasts of the Empire in 1554 opened a new era of European dealings with Russia, and another current began to flow in the opposite direction—from Muscovy to Europe. Ivan IV. sent Michael Matviéiévitch Lykov, voiévode of Narva, whose father had blown himself up rather than surrender that town, to travel in Germany, for purposes of study and observation.

And the eastward journeys taken by Russians, which had hitherto been made for pious objects only, began to alter their character. Vassili Pozniakov, a merchant, sent in 1560 to carry pecuniary assistance to the Patriarch of Alexandria and the Archbishop of Mount Sinai, was also commissioned to describe the habits of the countries through which he passed, and his narrative of this journey attained the extraordinary good fortune of being handed down to posterity, and gaining huge publicity, under a false name, and thanks to a misunderstanding.

The fifteenth century had already bequeathed a variety of pilgrims' narratives, quite as interesting, according to the testimony of Srezniévski the linguist, as that of Vasco di Gama, to the national literature. Of these the general public knew nothing, and twenty years after his return to Moscow, Pozniakov's report was equally ignored. But now another traveller, Tryphonius Korobéinikov, attracted general attention. The story of his adventures, reproduced in over 200 known copies, and which ran through forty successive editions, is generally read, even nowadays. It has been accepted in chronographic works, and even by hagiographic writers. Now, Pozniakov and Korobéinikov were one and the same person, or, rather, the second man's story was a simple transcription of his predecessor's. Korobéinikov had been to Constantinople, indeed, twice over, in 1582 and 1593, but he never got as far as the Holy Places.

This confusion, unjust as it is to the memory of the more