Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/26

2 make its laws and accomplish all the acts of its public life. Thus, too, at the same time, and hard by, Louis XI., striving with his vassals of Burgundy, Brittany, and Guyenne, was labouring to réunir les fleurons of the crown of France.

From one end of the European continent to the other, this was the decisive hour of great political formations, everywhere attended by the same painful crises. But here, in the far North-East, the task of the 'gatherers of the Russian land,' as they have been called, was especially difficult and arduous. This was, in fact, no matter of welding together provinces already bound by numerous affinities, common traditions, an evident solidarity of interests. Conceive the France of the fifteenth century conquered by the English, and some Burgundian Prince founding, not at Dijon even, but in Germany, in Switzerland, or in Italy, the nucleus of a new monarchy, destined to gather into one whole the rsmnantsremnants [sic] of the French fatherland, dismembered, broken into pieces. There you have the equivalent of the obscure and laborious process of gestation which gave birth, in the early days of the sixteenth century, to that new world, the Russia of the Ivans and the Vassilis.

What was that Russia? Not the country you now traverse in your sleeping-car from Kiev to St. Petersburg, from Warsaw to Irkutsk. The Russia of Kiev had passed away; as yet the Russia of St. Petersburg was not. Of the lands which in the tenth and eleventh centuries had made up the Empire of the Jaroslavs and the Vladimirs, the Sovereign seated at Moscow held not an inch. He called himself Duke, or Tsar, 'of All the Russias' indeed, but his right to assume the title was much on a par with that of the English kings, his contemporaries, to reckon the crown and arms of France in their own patrimony. The Russia of Kiev was now part of the Polish territory; the Russia of Mokhilev belonged to Lithuania. Red Russia, White Russia, Little Russia, were all held by neighbours. Moscow was but a Russian colony in a foreign—a Finnish—country.

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Empire of Kiev had melted away in the fratricidal struggle waged by the sons of Vladimir Monomachus. In the thirteenth century, it underwent a Tartar invasion, in the next, a Polish-Lithuanian conquest, and naught remained. At the height of the tempest, George Dolgorouki, one of Monomachus' heirs, put himself at the head of a band of Russian colonists in quest of a new home. Crossing the huge forests which at that time parted the plain of the Dnieper from that of the Volga, he pushed north-westward, subjugating the tribes of Finnish origin he found on his way. And this led to Moscow, founded in 1147—a town set in a conquered country, an emigrant station. And here, again, the Mongol invasion had overtaken the scarcely settled