Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/276

 252 was that every monk who remained in the praviéje was to be flogged to death. Then the corpses were to be taken back to the monasteries and buried there.

Now the secular clergy was to have its turn. On the Sunday, when the Tsar went to Mass, he was met on the bridge, according to custom, by the clergy, headed by the Archbishop, who, as usual, offered him his blessing. Ivan refused it, calling him a 'ravening wolf,' but nevertheless commanded Pimenius to officiate as usual in the Church of St. Sophia. He was preparing him a course of treatment which was to be a repetition of the story of his dispute with Philip. According to custom, again, he accepted an invitation to dine at the Archbishop's table. He seemed merry enough, and was eating with a hearty appetite, when a shrill cry was heard. At that signal the Opritchniki flew to perform the task assigned them beforehand. In a moment the Archbishop's house was given over to pillage, and he himself stripped of his insignia and cast into prison with all his servants. During the days that followed, the terror attained colossal proportions. On the great square of the town, where, in a parody of judicial procedure, the usual apparatus of implements of torture was displayed, the Tsar proceeded to mete out summary justice. The townsfolk, led before him by 100 at a time, were put to the question, roasted over a slow fire by some new and, as it would appear, particularly ingenious process (podjar), and then condemned, for the most part, to death, and sent out to be drowned. Covered with blood, and gasping, they were bound on sledges, driven rapidly down a steep incline to a place where, owing to the great rapidity of the current, the river never freezes, and there cast into the abyss. The children were tied to their mothers, so that they might drown with them; and Opritchniki armed with pikes, who moved about in boats on the surface of the river, took good care no victim should escape.

These massacres, according to the 'Third Chronicle of Novgorod,' lasted five weeks, and the days on which the number of persons of both sexes who suffered did not exceed 500 or 600 were few and far between. On some the tale of victims reached 1,500. The 'First Chronicle of Pskov' reckons the total at 60,000. These figures seem improbable. As to the general statistics of the executions ordered by Ivan, we possess a document left us by the monarch himself, and the information he supplies agrees, in many cases, with that supplied by Kourbski and the various chroniclers. My Russian readers will have guessed that I refer to the Sinodiki, a kind of obituary list the Sovereign was in the habit of sending to the monasteries, to request the monks' prayers for the persons he himself had sent out of life into death. His