Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/30

 6 country parts still clung to the soil. In the towns no one was left, save the soldiers, who were everywhere. This is the general hall-mark of the new settlement. The populated centres of the province of Moscow, beyond a radius of some 60 to 100 miles, themselves bore this mark. Northward, at the distance thus indicated, stretched an essentially military zone, wherein military considerations were constantly mingled with peaceful occupations, and the urban districts—Tver, Rjev, Zoubstov, Staritsa—were all strategic points. South-ward, the towns of Serpoukhov, Kashira, and Kolomna, on the Upper Moskva, and the Oka, guarded the passage of the two rivers against an ever-threatening invasion. Beyond these lay another desert, the dikoië pole (wild field), not to be colonized till in the second half of the century.

Such was the territory to which the rule of Ivan IV. was to annex, with Kazan, Astrakan, and their dependencies, the low-lying lands along the Middle and Lower Volga, the Kama, the Viatka, and the Caspian seaboard, and to which, as a field for future hope, was to be added, from the banks of the Volga to those of the Don, the Northern Doniêts, and the Lower Dnieper, the enigmatic sphere of the Kozatchina, that huge reservoir into which, from the furthest depths of Poland and Muscovy alike, a whole population of willing exiles perpetually flowed; upon which, from either side, the same action of laws, political and social, poured forth, in one continuous stream, the same quota of diverse elements, driven out of their natural centres by those three eternal instruments of the formation and disaggregation of societies—the spirit of revolt, the spirit of enterprise, and the spirit of liberty.

As to the total numbers of the population within these borders we have no clue, not even approximate. Touching the capital itself, information varies to an extent which defies all certainty. The number of houses set down for the year 1520—41,500—would give us a population of at least 100,000 souls. But thirty years later the Pope's Envoy, Possevino, gives 30,000 as a more likely number. True it is, indeed, that the town, during the interval, had undergone a Tartar invasion which had laid it in utter ruin. But the same thing is true of most of the towns of this Empire, in which war still raged almost everywhere, and, between any two given periods—often in the space of a year—changed the whole face of a country.

From the ethnographical point of view, the Russian element in nine-tenths of this country was that exceedingly slight one arising out of a very recent colonization. There is no necessity, at this period, for scratching the Muscovite to discover the Tartar, or, above all, the Finn. The bulk of the population