Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/341

 Rh help, ravaged the province of Derpt right up to the Muscovite frontier.

The Swedes, on their side, did not stand idle. In November, 1580, Pontus de la Gardie had made a raid into Carelia, and taken Kexholm, at which place, so the Livonian chroniclers declare, 2,000 Russians met their death. Another body of Swedish troops besieged Padis, some six leagues from Revel, and after thirteen weeks of the most desperate resistance, in the course of which the besieged, commanded by their voiévode Tchikhatchev, devoured hides, straw, and even, as it has been believed, human flesh, the town was carried by assault. Then came the turn of Livonia, where Pontus de la Gardie suddenly appeared in the spring of 1581, and shortly captured Wesemberg. Thus was a third robber making-himself ready to snatch the conquest which had already brought his foes halfway on their victorious road to his capital, from the Tsar's grasp.

And meanwhile Batory, to whom, in February, 1581, the Diet had granted fresh subsidies for another two years, was preparing for his third campaign. With the prestige he had now acquired, with the experience he had gained, and his seasoned army, hot with the glory of so many triumphs—whither would he not go? And on his heels another army followed: the Jesuits, who were carrying on a religious campaign, of which the effects were already felt in the Russo-Lithuanian countries, and even in Livonia. Since 1576, Batory, who favoured these efforts, had been hoping, thus aided, to break the links that bound these countries to Orthodox Russia or Protestant Germany, and at Vilna the Fathers had been able to celebrate the conversion of eighty Lutherans and fifty catechumens of the Greek rite (Lubkovitch, 'Contributions to the History of the Jesuits in the Russo-Lithuanian Countries,' Warsaw, 1888; in Russian).

The aims of this endeavour were far distant, and its nature was most wide-embracing. The triumphant current of Catholicism was to flow across Livonia and so reach Sweden, where, thanks to Catherine Jagellon, Rome had once more gained a footing. When the ground lost there had been recovered, the Reformation was to be shut up and stifled within a hostile circle, and Muscovy, once vanquished, was to undergo recapture by victorious Rome. And thus, under the hero she had chosen to be her leader, and by the victories which contemporary nations already took to be a sign from God, the foremost of the Slav races of that day was to solve the twofold problem, political and religious, on which the future of the North-West of Europe hung, and there was to be an end of the 'third Rome' and all the ambitious hopes therewith connected.

Ivan must have felt all this, no doubt, and must have felt