Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/334

 310 previously suggested to Maximilian. As a preliminary condition, the Emperor insisted on the acknowledgment of his own suzerainty over Livonia! A similar failure awaited the Tsar at the Court of the Khan, who demanded Astrakan and a great deal of money into the bargain. At one moment Ivan had reason to fear he was really going to have the Tartars on his hands, as Batory would have desired. One of the King of Poland's envoys, John Drohojowski, did his utmost, indeed, to negotiate an alliance, in which the Khan would have been included, at Constantinople, but the Porte needed the Tartars to keep the Persians down, and the Tsar and the King were left face to face at last, alone and unallied. Still Ivan had not to beg subsidies from a recalcitrant Diet, or appeal to the goodwill of his subjects to recruit his army. His Empire was his own, with every soul and all the wealth within its borders. When he heard the Poles had marched against him, he threw garrisons into eighty towns on the Oka, the Volga, the Don, and the Dnieper, and ordered the bulk of his forces to concentrate at Novgorod and Pskov.

As to the strength of these forces, the information at our disposal is contradictory in the extreme. Karamzine's reckoning, notoriously exaggerated as to the Polish troops, concerning which we are better informed, would appear to be equally unreliable as to the strength of the Russians. With reference to these, Fletcher, who is generally well posted, has accepted a total of 300,000 men. But some writers, and amongst them Biélaiév, have raised this figure to a million, and Karamzine's view, according to which Ivan might have drowned the Polish army at a word under the wave of Russians, loosed in resistless flood upon Vilna and Warsaw, has thus acquired a new lease of authority. Students of a later date, however, have shed light on the great historian's blunder. According to the calculations of Monsieur Pavloff-Silvanski ('The Men who Served,' p. 117, etc.), after the garrisons already mentioned had been deducted, something like 10,000 warriors out of the 23,000 boïars, boïars' sons, and men belonging to the Court, on whom he could originally reckon, remained at Ivan's disposal. Each of these gentlemen was attended, on an average, by two armed men on horseback, making 30,000 horsemen in all—or 31,596, to give the author's exact figure; and there were 15,119 striéltsy and Cossacks, horse and foot, 6,461 Tartars, and 4,513 men of various arms, comprising a certain number of foreigners—Dutchmen, Scots, Danes, and Greeks—57,689 men out of the total of 110,000 which represented the whole fighting force of the Empire. Forced labour, recruited in varying quantities according to the necessities of each campaign, swelled the ranks of the army very considerably. But these men were only avail-