Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/358

 334 Ivan best. 'Go to King Stephen,' he said, when he dismissed the Legate, 'salute him in our name, and when thou hast arranged peace according to the Pope's orders come back to us, for thy presence will always be welcome here, because of the Court which sends thee, and because of thine own faithfulness in our affairs!' He was taking the Jesuit into his service, and would gladly have paid him wages. And as the Pope had ordered peace should be made, according to the Tsar's desire, it must be made to suit the Muscovite Sovereign's convenience. Ivan would not hear of anything else. This is the one clear impression produced by this diplomatic episode.

Possevino arrived at the camp before Pskov in the early days of October, and this time played the part of the honest broker in most conscientious fashion. He informed the Poles as to the opinions he had arrived at during his stay at Staritsa, and endeavoured to combat those they had formed from the pamphlets written by Guagnino and Kruse. In his letters to Moscow he applied himself to representing military matters in the sense most favourable to the besiegers. The Poles, he said, were making great preparations. Supplies were coming in from Riga. Reinforcements were expected. Pskov was in a very bad way. The campaign would certainly be carried on all through the winter, and once the spring-time came there would be no possibility of stopping Batory.

All this was true enough at bottom, and proof of it ma be found in those very reports, drawn up on the spot, which have produced such a contrary impression on the minds of the Polish historians. I have already quoted the Abbé Piotrowski's testimony as to the effective strength of the Polish cavalry, which he represents as having been reduced almost to nothing, even by the month of October. Further on, the same witness refers to a review held on December 4, in which 7,000 horses figured. And 'the horses are good.' Losses cannot have been so great, then, or the Poles had been able to make them good, at all events. Possevino's own narrative falls into another mistake. The Jesuit mentions the enthusiastic welcome which greeted him in the Polish camp. This trait, if we take it to be correct at all, can only be ascribed to the turbulent and unruly element, the existence of which I have already noted, in Batory's army—an element which both he and Zamoyski knew how to control and bend to the necessities of war. Into this the intervention of the Papal Legate certainly introduced an additional ferment, and incited some minds to a cowardly abandonment of duty. But as far as the chief command was concerned, the Abbé Piotrowski is the first to strike a very different note.