Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/366

 342 destined to play so important a part in the Empire of the Tsars, and the civilizing influence of which cannot be denied.

After all. what had just been signed was not a peace—it was only a ten years' truce. According to precedent, certain disputed points which had been kept out of the discussion—such as the theoretical claim to the disputed possession of all the Russo-Lithuanian countries—prevented any final agreement. When the victors occupied the town and province of Derpt, now made over to Poland, they were struck by the proofs left by their beaten foes of a power—a gift of organization and a military superiority, at all events—which would have been turned to better account, no doubt, in the hands of such a genius as Batory. 'We were all astonished,' writes the Abbé Piotrowski, 'to find in every fort a quantity of guns and an amount of powder and ball such as we should not have been able to get together in the whole of our country.' And he adds: 'We have won something like a little kingdom; I doubt whether we shall know what to do with it!' In spite of the fault-finding quality so constantly apparent in the Abbé's diary, these impressions of his reproduce a certain amount of truth, the consequences of which were to be evidenced by history.

Latin inscriptions on the restored walls of the castle of Riga and on the doorway of the church at Wenden thus expressed the meaning of the event which was taking place.

And again :

All this was a proof, in the eyes of the Livonians, that Batory's triumph was above all things the triumph of Catholicism and of the Jesuits, who came close on the victor's heels, wherever he went. The new Polish Government was to feel the consequences of this conviction.

As far as Possevino was concerned, the important matter was the form the treaty took. It openly asserted the Pope's authority, 'so that everything appeared to have been carried out in his name.' Thus the Legate boasted in his letters to the Cardinal of Como, and, in spite of his disagreement with the Muscovite envoys, he was eager to pursue the advantage he had gained at the Kremlin itself. To put forward the anti-Ottoman league once more, seeing it would serve as a pretext