Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/379

 Rh commanded by two principal chiefs. One of these, Ivan Koltso, had already been sentenced to death, and the other appears to have possessed a heavily-laden conscience and a tolerably black judicial history—his name was Ermak Timofiéiévitch.

Historians do not agree as to the origin of the name which has attained such extraordinary popularity. Some guess it to be a corruption of Ermolaï or Hermann; others take it to be a nickname, recalling the humble duties performed by the hero in connection with the preparation of the kacha in some stanitsa. Ermak, in the speech of the Volga country, means a handmill. Yet Monsieur Nikitski has found the name and its diminutive, Ermachko, in the lists of the inhabitants of Novgorod, where they seem to have been common.

September 1, 1581, a little body of these Cossacks, strengthened by a detachment of soldiers drawn by the Stroganovs from the garrisons of their different forts—Russians and Lithuanians, Tartars and Germans—which swelled its numbers to some 840 men, all under Ermak's command, started forth to cross the Ural, following the path of twenty previous expeditions in the same direction, and attack Koutchoum on his own ground. That very day, a band of savage warriors, gathered by the Tartar Prince of Pelym, raided the province of Perm, and the voiévode of that province found himself overmatched. He applied to the Stroganovs for reinforcements, and they were obliged to decline on the score of the weak state in which the departure of Ermak and his men had left them. The voiévode made a complaint to Moscow, and so little was the Tsar disposed to look on this new trans-Uralian campaign as anything decisive or even exceptional, that he taxed the Stroganovs with treason, and sent orders to Perm that Ermak and his followers were to be brought back without the smallest delay. This order could not be carried out. Ermak was far away already.

Makhmetkoul, who had been sent to meet the invaders, came upon them on the banks of the Tobol, and was terrified—he had never seen firearms before—by the 'bow that smokes and thunders.' He was completely routed. Arrived at the Irtych, Ermak defeated Koutchoum himself, and, in October, took possession of the capital, from which the Khan had fled. In the spring his Cossacks captured Makhmetkoul, and they spent the summer in occupying and subduing the little towns and Tartar ouloussy on the Irtych and the Ob. This done, Ermak bethought him of sending news of his doings to