Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/373

 Rh proved impossible; or else a Moscow conquered—and this Batory was prepared to do.

That the plan was feasible was to be proved by Dmitri's easy triumph, and the victorious though useless campaigns of his Polish protectors under Sigismund III., and only the premature death of the victor of Polotsk, in 1586, wiped out a project so worthy of his powers. Ivan himself was not to live long enough to feel the direct threat it involved. But we may be quite sure he had an alarming inkling of it. The phantom thus rising up before him certainly darkened the Sovereign's closing days, and affected his last decisions. Even before the King of Poland, having resolved to relinquish his views on Hungary and end the consideration he had hitherto shown the Porte, fully revealed his idea to the Papal Nuncio Bolognetti, in a conversation lasting four hours (1584) (Boratynski, 'Stephen Batory and his Plans for a League against Turkey,' Reports of the Cracow Academy, May, 1902), Ivan, moved by his sense of approaching peril, had made up his mind to treat with the Swedes. After appealing to England, he appealed once more, and as vainly, to Germany. The Empire was wrapped up in its religious quarrels, and the Emperor in his artistic and scientific studies. By a truce made in August, 1583, all the Russian towns taken by the Swedes—Iam, Ivangorod, and Koporié—were made over to them altogether. And after this, as Vienna still turned him a deaf ear, Ivan fell back again on London, clinging to this last plank with the gestures of a drowning man.

In the hour of his supreme effort, death overtook him. But Fortune, who does not love old men, and who had steadily failed her former favourite, showed greater kindness, at that very moment, to the interests of the Empire he was leaving behind him. Batory was not to outlive his adversary long, and at the other end of the huge dominions, scarce nibbled at, as yet, by Poland, an unforeseen and mighty compensation for the loss of Polotsk and Livonia was beginning to appear. Siberia, distant, mysterious, far extending, was opening her arms, not, as has been so generally supposed, to the bold attack of a handful of Cossack raiders, but to the long and patient efforts of a peaceful army of toiling colonists.