Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/352

 328 Volga; talked too freely, and so revealed the difficulties of his master's position; and hurried off to Rome, where he arrived on February 24, 1581.

He was made welcome at first, and better treated than his rank—that of a mere courier (goniéts)—warranted. But the perusal of the letter—genuine this time—he had brought from his master cast a chill over things. It expressed the Tsar's wish that the Pope should order Batory to 'renounce the Moslem alliance and the war he was making against the Christians.' But as to the religious question his message breathed never a word. Ivan was asking a great deal, and offering nothing at all, and the Roman authorities were well informed as to the extent of the Porte's share in the war that was being carried on. Yet the temptation to open intercourse by hook or by crook was too great, and the Pope decided to send an emissary to Moscow, charged with the duty of presenting the terms of the problem in their proper order: the religious union first of all, and after that the political understanding. Polish influences may, as some have supposed, have had something to do with the adoption of this plan. In any case, and from every point of view, it was the wisest.

But once the emissary had been chosen, matters, under his personal influence, went further still. Possevino was a diplomat by profession. He had been employed, twice over, in 1578 and 1580, on a somewhat similar mission to the Court of Sweden. He had been appointed Vicar Apostolic for all the North of Europe, had acquired a certain reputation for cleverness, and betrayed a strong inclination to suppress the spiritual in favour of the temporal side of his mission, and even to sacrifice the former to the latter. At Stockholm, where he had appeared dressed as a nobleman, sword on hip and bonnet in hand, he had not achieved any union with Rome, but he had been an active agent in the negotiations between Sweden and Poland for that alliance against Moscow which had turned out so ill. In 1579, he waited on Batory at Vilna, and with the same object. So well did he now play his cards that the Court of Rome, swayed by his influence, allowed itself to be led, unconsciously, to set politics before religion.

The idea of a league against Islam was a chimera. Portugal, Philip's new conquest, gave him too much trouble, and Venice had too many new-found interests in the Levantine seaports. But at Rome, as at Moscow, this same league—perpetually put forward, though Rome knew right well there was nothing and nobody behind it—was a sort of decorative façade, which concealed other and more practical arrange-