Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/370

 346 to dazzle him. 'What was this talk of Byzantium and the Greeks? The Greek religion bore that name because King David, long before the birth of Christ, had foretold that Ethiopia should enjoy the first-fruits of the Divine mercy; now Ethiopia was Byzantium! But he, Ivan, cared neither for the Greeks nor for Byzantium! His religion was not that of the Greeks, but that of Christ—the only true religion! And what was this talk, again, of a traditional union with people who shaved their beards off, contrary to every tradition?'

Possevino fancied he had found a crushing answer: Gregory XIII.'s chin was adorned with a magnificent beard.

'And thou thyself?' rejoined the Tsar, pointing to the Legate's shaven countenance.

According to the record of the sitting drawn up at Moscow, Possevino, whose own report is dumb as to this incident, ascribed his hairless condition to a physical cause: he did not cut his beard, and neither did he shave. But already Ivan was growing hot over the game, and, carried away by his natural temperament, he was to deliver yet harder blows, and crush his adversary altogether. Very cunningly he turned the discussion to a question where all the advantage would be on his side, and which, indeed, was the crux of the disagreements between East and West—that of the Pope’s primacy. The Popes of the earlier centuries—Clement, Sylvester, and so forth—had always been revered as saints by the Muscovite Church. But their successors, who had cast off the poverty and austerity of the primitive Christians; who lived in a pomp which had astonished Chévriguine; who had mounted a throne, and wore the holy symbol of the Cross upon their boots; who, forgetting every feeling of decency, publicly indulged in the most shame debauchery—this new order of Pontiffs must be considered to have fallen from their ancient dignity! In vain did Possevino make signals of distress and strive to check the flood of invective. He had had his warning. If the dispute turned out ill, now, for his master and himself, so much the worse for them! Like all orators of his kidney, Ivan lost control of his own tongue, and when the Jesuit tried to put in a timid apology, the Tsar cried out, 'Your Roman Pontiff is not a shepherd at all: he is a wolf!'

'If the Pope is a wolf, I have nothing more to say!'

This reply, and the outrage which called it forth, both of them reproduced in the Russian version, do not appear in Possevino's published narrative (Moscovia). But the original manuscript, it would appear, does mention the incident (Pierling, as above, ii. 169). According to the Russian version, it ended the discussion, and Ivan dismissed the Jesuit with more kindly words, and immediately afterwards sent him