Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/53

 Rh of them ever went so far as to reveal his inner thought, and hint at the reason of this unflagging toil, he was simply heard to speak of the time when 'God shall deliver us from the Horde.' What they sought was liberty first and foremost, power to live without bending their backs under the conqueror's foot, and licking up the drops of fermented milk dropped on his horse's mane from the goblet they themselves had handed to the master. For they were still as low as that. And from that state of humiliation they longed to be delivered. Which done, they will amass more riches, commit more violence and more acts of spoliation, simply, as it would seem, for the sake of gaining a few more acres or filling a few more coffers to the brim.

Yet slowly the idea of a national unity works its way into the obstinate brains of these hungry spoilers. But it had sprung into being, and grown already, close at their very side. Long before any Prince of Moscow thought of making himself the political representative of a united Russia, the Metropolitan of Moscow had become its religious representative. The force of circumstance had brought this about. Eastern Slavdom could only conceive an eparchy dependent on the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Here, then, it found a first centre of unity, a common hearth. This centre, like all the rest, was nomadic for a considerable time. But a contemporary of Kalita's (1325–1341), the Metropolitan Peter, took upon him, even at that period, the title of 'Metropolitan of All the Russias,' and then among all the Princes, each claiming the primacy for Moscow, Riazan, Souzdal, Tver, arose a competition for the presence of the Primate in his capital, and, with it, a visible sign of his own pre-eminence. Michael Iaroslavitch of Tver gained the first advantage by forthwith dubbing himself of 'of All the Russias' too. But Kalita soon retaliated triumphantly, and the Muscovite hegemony was founded a century and a half before the days of Ivan IV.

A hundred and fifty years later, religious unity was to disappear, owing to the constitution, close beside it, of a new religious focus—that of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire. The Florentine union completed the severance of the two centres. But by that time political unity, as maintained and fortified at Moscow, had acquired a fair chance of integrity and duration.

The monasteries, on their side, contributed their share to that simultaneous work of colonization, of which all modern Russia is the issue. The forward progress of the monastic establishments, generally speaking, took a direction contrary to that pursued by the ordinary colonists, who were impelled by exclusively practical motives. While these last turned towards the fertile southern lands, the monks, many of them ascetics,