Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/372

 348 shown, to those real interests which the Holy See should have striven to protect, was threatened, like all the rest, with early and complete extinction.

Very soon—and this time Rome never even dreamt of any interference—the relations between the two countries were to culminate in a fresh and most violent rupture. The difficulties connected with the execution of the treaty of Iam-Zapolski were not very important in themselves, and on both sides the inclination was to solve them in the broadest and most conciliatory spirit. There was a dispute over the possession of a small fort in the province of Viélije, at the mouth of the Méja, on a very important line of river communication between Smolensk and Louki. When the Palatine of Witebsk, Paç, seized this place in a somewhat high-handed fashion, Ivan ordered his envoy to give up the whole province rather than risk any reopening of hostilities, and Batory, for his part, had the fort destroyed. But though both parties were bent, for the present, on avoiding any immediate conflict, we know that Ivan meditated a fresh appeal to arms, at a more or less distant period, and was soliciting England's help for the purpose. And the whole history of the closing years of Batory's reign proves that he himself looked on the truce of 1582 as a mere halt on that victorious march whereby, his turbulent Poles once thoroughly tamed and subjugated, he hoped to lead his armies on triumphant, far beyond Pskov. I have already made my readers aware of this vaster military undertaking meditated by the King, supported by the assistance. swiftly obtained, of Rome, and the hoped-for help of Florence and Venice, and which he began to put into execution in the course of the years next following. Under the charm of the great warrior's bold spirit, Gregory XIII.'s successor, Sixtus V., was to turn his back on fancies, and enter the sphere of practical realities, themselves splendid enough. The anti-Turkish league, in which Ivan proposed to wed Elizabeth with the Emperor, never advanced beyond the condition of a theme for the Tsar's bitter jests. But Batory, having proved the road from Moscow to Constantinople ran through Warsaw, was resolved, now, to pass through Moscow on his own way to Constantinople, and to make others furnish him with the means of doing it. In former conversations with Possevino at Wilna he had outstripped Peter the Great, and mentioned Azov as the indispensable base of any decisive action against the Ottoman power. To obtain a hold on Azov he must have a Moscow won over to the common cause behind him—and this had just