Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/289

 Rh were—which lauds Ivan's humanity and guarantees his good intentions as to the reunion of the two Churches! This was a mere matter of trade, and when Lippoman, who was Venetian envoy in 1775, converted Ivan into a righteous judge (Hist. Russiæ Monumenta,' i. 271), he was probably inspired by similar considerations. But the Polish electors of 1572 and 1575, who were so ready to welcome the Tsar's candidature, furnish us with a far more valuable guarantee!

As a rule, the chroniclers and foreign historians of that period have drawn a terrifying and repulsive picture of the Opritchnina and its founder. But ought we to grant full belief to the stories of Taube and Kruse, who, describing the Novgorod massacres, which they claim to have witnessed, place that town on the banks of the Volga? Henning, a Livonian chronicler, tells us of a baby taken out of its cradle by the Opritchniki and carried by them to Ivan, who began by kissing and caressing it, and then cut its throat with his dagger and threw the little corpse out of the window! It is a hideous tale, but Henning had it from Magnus, and from the Palatine of Vilna, Radizwill, both of them very poor authorities. Oderborn (Joannts Basilidis vita, Vitebsk, 1585, reproduced by Sartchevski, ii. 228) has accused the Terrible of yet more frightful acts of cruelty, with a tincture of the unnatural about them. He talks of women torn from their homes to gratify the passions of the Sovereign and his minions, then murdered, and their corpses brought back to their husbands' houses, where, for whole weeks, they were hung over the dining-room tables, at which the widowers were forced to eat their food; others, matrons and maids, met by chance in town or country, were first violated, and then stripped naked in the bitter cold and exposed on the snow to the eyes and insults of the passers by. Oderborn was a Protestant pastor whose work was composed and printed on Polish soil, at a moment when the reformed religion had lost the privileges it had once possessed in Russia, and when Poland, fitting every arrow to her bow, by no means scorned a well-informed and skilfully-handled Press as an instrument towards that conquest of Muscovy for which she was preparing. The work of Guagnino, no less strong in its leanings, had figured, a few years previously, amongst Batory's munitions of war.

But as to Oderborn's book we have a criterion which may be applied to all such writings. The Pomeranian historian has devoted one of his most truculent pages to a description of the sacking and carnage which—either in 1578 or in 1580—put an end to the prosperity of the German suburb of Moscow. Young girls, we are told, were violated and then put to death under the very eyes of the Tsar, who took his share in the