Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/90

 66 and Aristotle, the current which had impelled intellectual circles to copy pagan customs and attack the theology of the Middle Ages, had not failed to affect him. At Venice he had known the famous typographer, Alde Manuce; at Florence he had stirred the still smoking ashes of the pile on which Savonarola had met his fate; he had realized something of the great scientific importance of Paris. None of which prevented him from being absolutely devoid of that critical instinct which is the great lever of the Western world of intellect, and deeply tinctured with an absolute scepticism as to profane learning, which led him to condemn a Russian translation, then just appearing, of the celebrated Lucidarius,—a twelfth-century work, ascribed to St. Anselm of Canterbury, or to Honoré d'Autun—and wherein certain problems in cosmography and physics were treated in a comparatively sensible spirit. He forbade its inclusion in the libraries, from which the Greek and Latin classics were banished.

A legend has grown up around a collection of these same classics, supposed to have existed, with a great number of other profane works and some Hebrew manuscripts, at the Moscow Kremlin, as early as the fifteenth century. The presumed existence of this library, revealed by the researches of two foreign savants, Klossius (1834) and Tremer (1891), has provoked, in more recent times (1894), a controversy in the press, and even a search in the subterranean chambers of the ancient palace. This has brought no result. Whether it was that the Livonian chronicler Nyenstaedt, who wrote the first book in which the library is mentioned, and Professor Dubiélov, of the University of Derpt, who, in the year 1820, invented a catalogue which nobody has ever been able to discover since, were imposed on themselves, or imposed on others, the story, it seems pretty certain, has no foundation in fact. At a much earlier period, indeed, a similar legend had ascribed the possession of a quantity of Byzantine manuscripts—made over to their safe keeping, by the Emperor John, just before the Siege of Constantinople—to the Muscovite Sovereigns. Wherefore, in the year 1600, Cardinal San Giorgio sent Peter Arcudius the Greek in the train of a Polish Embassy to verify the story, which he discovered to be false—a pure invention. Ivan IV. and his predecessors did certainly own some books and manuscripts; but up till the close of the fourteenth century, we only hear of the authentic existence of one single work in a foreign language, a German herbal, in the whole of their collection of liturgical books, instructions, chronicles, and astrological treatises.

Under the twofold influence of the original Byzantinism and the inherent materialism pervading every class of society,