When the people of Moskva became sufficiently familiar with the fact that their terrible Gosoudar was dead and safely buried, even if their imagination could not picture him, as his son had, in his coronation speech, solemnly assured them, “transformed into an angel,” they began to take stock of the men who had replaced him in the government. The effete and placid Thedor was supported by a Douma (Council) of five. Of these Ivan Petrovitch Shouyskie, member of a family which had tasted the sweets of power and drained the dregs of disgrace in the early years of the late reign, had won new consideration and honour by his celebrated defence of Pskov; Mstislavskie was another Rurik-descended boyarin-kniaz; Bogdan Bielskie represented the last of Ivan’s Vremenszhiki; Nikita Romanov was important as maternal uncle of the new Tzar, and Boris Godounov, descendant of a Tartar family Christianised in the fourteenth century,[175] stood nearest the throne from the fact of being brother to the Tzaritza Irena.[176] The Douma, thus constituted, did not long retain its original formation. A sudden popular commotion in the capital took the form of an ugly rush towards the Kreml; the Kitai-gorod was overrun by a surging mob of many thousands, scarcely to be held back by the strielitz from forcing the gates of the citadel. Mstislavskie and Romanov, fronting this tumultuous gathering and inquiring the nature of its demands, learned from a thousand throats that the blood of Bogdan Bielskie was in request. A compromise was effected; the offending boyarin was removed from the Council to the comparatively harmless post of Governor of Nijhnie-Novgorod, and the Moskvitchi returned to their houses. Whether this was a spontaneous ebullition, a reaction from the passive endurance under Ivan, or whether it was set afoot by the Shouyskie family, who had considerable influence among the merchant class, and were not unused to such machinations, it strengthened the hands of the one man whose authority dwarfed that of Romanov, Shouyskie, and Mstislavskie alike. Godounov was a man capable of grasping to the full the advantages which his position as kinsman of a weak, easily-ruled sovereign gave him, and he was of sufficient merit to labour for the welfare of the State as well as for his own interests. The latter were by no means neglected; immense territorial possessions in the Dvina district and along the valley of the Moskva, certain State revenues and other desirable perquisites swelled his yearly income to the estimated total of 93,000 roubles,[177] and he was reputed to be able to bring 100,000 men into the field.[178] But the man who swayed the councils of the Tzarstvo and stood behind the puppet-monarch Thedor was far removed from the ordinary type of Vremenszhikie, and the internal and foreign affairs of the realm suffered nothing by the transfer of administration from Ivan IV. to Boris Godounov. His predominance checked, if it did not altogether repress, the boyarin struggles and intrigues which the weakness of the Tzar invited, and at the same time the man who was practically Regent had the address to govern as though with the co-operation of the whole Council. One of the first acts necessitated by the political circumstances of the Court was the removal or banishment of the Tzarevitch Dimitri, with his mother and the whole clan of the Nagois, to Ouglitch, a town some 90 verstas from Moskva. Here they remained in a state of repressed disaffection, biding their time till the day when the young Dimitri should succeed his half-brother and the Nagois should dispossess the Godounovs. This was a factor which Boris had always to reckon with, and which perhaps forced his statesmanship out of the legitimate groove of throne-serving. That his ascendancy would be accepted without a struggle by the other members of the Council was scarcely to be expected; Romanov died in 1586, and soon after Mstislavskie drifted over to the Shouyskie faction, in opposition to Godounov. That intrigues would be set on foot against his authority was extremely probable, but whether a definite plot existed or not, one was at least “discovered,” in which the two counsellors and several other boyarins were implicated. The offenders were dealt with in a spirit of moderation which had been long foreign to the Court of Moskva; Mstislavskie entered the Kirillov monastery at Bielozero, others of his party were imprisoned or banished to distant parts of the realm. The Shouyskie, enjoying the protection of the Metropolitan (Dionisie), survived the storm which swept away so many of their colleagues. Meanwhile the Regent’s diplomacy had been exerted to defer, for the time being, hostilities with any of the four states—Turk, Pole, Swede, and Tartar—which permanently threatened Russia with aggression. With Sweden a prolongation of the truce for four years was effected in December 1585; the Krimskie khanate was weakened by civil war and dynastic revolutions, and little was to be feared from that quarter. The chief danger lay with Poland, and Batory was only held back by the controlling hand of the Diet and the protests of the Lit’uanian landowners from renewing his profitable campaigns against Moskovy. Under these circumstances it was with feelings of relief that the Council of State, sitting at Moskva, heard, on the 20th December 1586, of the death of their enemy, which had taken place eighteen days earlier (13th December according to the new reckoning of the calendar, initiated by Pope Gregory and adopted throughout west continental Europe, by which Russian—and English—time was left twelve days behind). The death of this prince reversed the whole position of affairs between the two countries, and instead of living in constant apprehension of fresh inroads upon their territory, the Moskovites were able to entertain the prospect of an advantageous union with the neighbour State. For the third time Thedor had a chance of securing the Polish crown by election, and Godounov hastened to support his candidature with more vigorous measures than had been employed on the former occasions. The Russian party, both in Poland and the grand duchy, had gained strength since the last interregnum, and the Regent was able to offer terms of a nature likely to appeal to many of the electors. A perpetual peace between the two Slav powers would allow of a vigorous and hopeful opposition to Ottoman aggression, and the troops of Moskovy, including Kozaks, Tcherkess horsemen, and Tartars from Eastern Russia, would be placed, free of charges, at the disposal of the Poles. Moldavia, Bosnia, Servia, and Hungary would be wrested from the Sultan and incorporated with Poland (an arrangement to which the Kaiser might have had a word to say), and Estland would be snatched in like manner from Sweden and annexed to the Lekh kingdom, except Narva, which would be Moskovy’s modest share of the spoil. Moreover, the rights and liberties, as well as the taxes and revenues of Poland, would remain in the hands of the Senate. Neither of the alternative candidates—the Archduke Maximilian, brother of the Emperor, and Sigismund, son of King John of Sweden and of a Yagiello princess—could hold forth such tempting inducements. The imperial Habsburg family was held in cheap estimation on account of its failure either to defend its hereditary dominions against the Turks, or to exert its authority over the Protestant princes of Northern Germany, and the Emperor himself was alluded to as “great only by title, rich only in debts.” The Archbishop of Gniezno, who had at one time and another supported the Valois and Habsburg parties, on this occasion exerted his influence on behalf of the Rurikovitch. An anarchical assembly which met near Warszawa in July (1587) under the name of a Diet, but which resembled more a triple-divided camp, was reduced to some degree of order and coherence by the adoption of badges distinctive of the various candidates. The partisans of Thedor displayed a shapka (conical Russian head-gear), those of Maximilian an Austrian cap, while the sea-power of Sweden was typified by a herring—presumably salted. The shapka carried the day by a large preponderance, and nothing remained for the agents of Thedor but to satisfy the final stipulations of the Polish Senate. Besides the demand for a certain sum of money down, which would have been conceded, the obstacles to a ratification of the election were seemingly trifling; but they were insuperable. Thedor would not consent to be crowned at Krakow, to put the title King of Poland before that of Tzar of the Russias, nor to dally in any way with the Roman Catholic religion. Without these concessions the Poles refused to bestow their suffrages on the Russian prince, and their choice finally fell on Sigismund Vasa, whose election brought the crowns of Poland and Sweden, Moskva’s two hereditary enemies, into the same family. That Godounov should have declined to bargain further with the Polish electors on behalf of Thedor does credit to his foresight; for the Russian sovereign to have accepted the crown under the limitations and conditions imposed by the Senate would have been to surrender at the outset to the turbulence and independence of the western Slavs, and possibly to weaken his hold upon his own spell-bound subjects. He would have ruled over the Polish palatinates as nominally as Rudolf over the free cities of Northern Germany, and the infusion of the ideas of the western commonwealth into Moskovite minds would have been pouring new wine into old bottles with disastrous result.

The Regent, disconcerted by the submission of all the parties in the Diet to the accession of the Swedish prince, managed to avert a possible outbreak of hostilities between the countries which had so nearly been allied by compacting for a truce of fifteen years.

While dealing with the precarious foreign affairs of the country and superintending the domestic administration, Godounov had to fight hard to maintain his own position. Thedor had inherited from his father, if nothing else, a weakness for all that appertained to religion, and the greater part of his existence alternated between devotional exercises and the safe amusement of watching bear-fights. Over a mind so constituted, a priest of high position would naturally have a good chance of obtaining a dominating influence, and the Metropolitan was quite willing to play the part of another Silvestr. The only obstacle to this ambition was the Tzar’s brother-in-law, who brooked no competitor for the tzarskie favour. Hence between Regent and Vladuika lurked an animosity which drove the latter into the arms of the Shouyskie party. Thus a powerful league of the clergy, boyarin, and merchant interests (the latter were hand in glove with the Shouyskie) was formed in Moskva against the Godounov rule. Boris derived his power in the first place from his connection with the Tzar through the Tzaritza Irena, and it was the aim of the malcontents to break this important link on the ground of the latter’s alleged sterility, and to wed Thedor instead to a Mstislavskie princess. The Metropolitan favoured the scheme—Ivan the Terrible had evidently stretched the consciences of his clergy on the marriage question beyond retraction—but the vigilance of the Regent dragged it prematurely to light. None of the conspirators were molested for their share in the intrigue, but the Mstislavskie princess was compelled to become an abiding inmate of a convent. The real or alleged discovery of a plot against the throne, presumably, since some of the Nagoi family were implicated, in favour of the young Dimitri, gave an excuse for the long-deferred vengeance of Godounov. Ivan Shouyskie, the defender of Pskov, was dispatched to Bielozero, Andrei Shouyskie to Kargopol; both, it was said, were afterwards strangled in prison. Thedor Nagoi and six of his companions were publicly executed, an example meant, no doubt, to strike terror into the disaffected at Ouglitch. Batches of the Mstislavskie were forced into religious houses, and many other boyarins were exiled to various parts of the gosoudarstvo—some to Sibiria, the first detachment of a long procession of political offenders which has never since ceased to wend its way from Russia into the “land of the long nights.” The Metropolitan was deposed and his place filled by Iov, Archbishop of Rostov.

Godounov was for the time master of the situation. His enemies were either dead, or deported, or devoted, in various monasteries scattered up and down the country, to a course of religious seclusion, if not of blessed meditation. Only at Ouglitch, growing up among the Nagoi colony, was the child who must surely one day exact a heavy retribution from the man whom he was taught to—omit from his prayers. Unless he should happen meanwhile to cut his throat in a fit of epilepsy.

A renewal of the war with Sweden drew together, at an opportune moment, the discordant forces which threatened at times to dislocate the machinery of government. The time-honoured Moskovite foreign policy, like the wolves’ hunting to which it has been already compared, derived its strength from its patient persistence, rather than from any brilliancy of rapid conception or swift action. At peace for the time being with Poland, and not anticipating trouble from the Khan of the Krim Horde, Godounov took up the threads which had dropped from the nerveless hands of the failing Ivan, and returned to the struggle for an opening into the Baltic. The truce with Sweden having expired without either country being able to come to terms, Thedor prepared, in January 1590, to lead the huge army which had been collected from all quarters of his dominions, part of the way at least towards the Estlandish and Finnish frontiers. The presence of the sovereign was to some extent necessary to maintain order and harmony in an army which included among its leaders a Mstislavskie (in chief command), a Godounov, and a Romanov, besides other jarring elements. The Tzar, however, did not venture his person farther than Novgorod, from which point the Russian host diverged upon its double destination, one body marching across the frozen Neva, the other directing its course towards the disputed fortresses of the Ingermanland province. Yam was carried by assault and a force of 20,000 Swedes defeated outside Narva, which place was then invested. To save this important stronghold, the representatives of the King of Sweden concluded a hasty truce, to run for one year, ceding meanwhile Ivangorod and Kopor’e to the Tzar’s voevodas (25th February). This sudden forward movement on the part of Moskovy aroused the alarm and suspicion of the Poles, whose young king especially felt bound to make a diversion on behalf of Sweden; hence ominous mutterings filtered through to Moskva from Krakow, and the Dniepr Kozaks (who had been organised into regiments by Stefan Batory) began to commit depredations along the Lit’uanian border. A Polish embassy which arrived at the capital in the autumn, after adopting a somewhat aggressive tone, finally renewed the truce between the two countries for a term of twelve years. The Swedes were likely, however, to renew the struggle in the north in the coming spring, having refused to yield to the Russian demand for the cession of Narva and Korelia, and there were rumours afloat of a simultaneous outburst of hostilities on the part of the treacherous Krimskie Tartars. While Moskva was thus threatened with a double attack, a mysterious and appalling tragedy had happened at Ouglitch. 1591At noon on the 15th of May the inhabitants, alarmed by the furious beating of the bell at the Nagoi Palace, rushed into the court to find the Tzarevitch Dimitri with a gaping wound across his throat, and his mother and some servants shrieking over his yet warm corpse. The palace and town had been for some time haunted and overlooked by agents of the Regent, who naturally wished to keep himself informed as to the course of events in this hotbed of sedition and intrigue; naturally also the popular imagination fastened the presumed murder on these Godounovskie emissaries, who were seized and put to death, together with their servants and one or two suspected citizens and a woman “who went often to the palace;” in all some dozen persons. The aggrieved and excited populace easily persuaded themselves that Boris Godounov had planned and caused to be executed this catastrophe, and many historians have unreservedly endorsed their judgment, though, apart from the fact that Dimitri’s death could not have been otherwise than a joyful relief to the Regent, it is difficult to see what evidence there is to connect him with the crime. The murder of a Tzarevitch, the last heir in the direct Moskovite line of the holy House of Rurikovitch, was not an event which could be passed over without inquiry, even if the alleged instigator were a boyarin in high Court favour; an investigation was necessary in any case, but it is at least worthy of notice that the man selected to preside over the collection of evidence and to sift the whole matter at the place where it occurred was Vasili Shouyskie, brother to the princes of that family who had suffered imprisonment and death at the hands of Godounov. The report drawn up by this kniaz, who could scarcely be otherwise than the enemy of the man whom the popular voice condemned, entirely exonerated both the Regent and his supposed agents, and declared the Tzarevitch to have killed himself in a fit of epilepsy, to which he was subject. The subsequent massacre was laid to the charge of the Nagois. The theory put forward by Kostomarov that Shouyskie, “a cunning and pliant man,” conducted the investigation and distorted the evidence in a manner which would win him the favour of Godounov in order to avoid unpleasant consequences to himself, seems under the circumstances scarcely plausible. The death of Dimitri left Boris more or less in the position of a claimant to the throne of the Russias, and he would be more than ever an object of jealousy and suspicion to the princely families who had the blood of Rurik or Gedimin in their veins. Hence Shouyskie, however guarded in the language of the report he was called upon to make, would hardly go out of his way to bias the judgment of Court and country in favour of his enemy and rival. Between the verdict of the men who had carefully examined the evidence relating to the affair and the wild accusations of an angry and disaffected people there was a wide divergence. Historians have for the most part endorsed the latter. Whatever the truth of the matter, a murderous retribution was meted out to the people of Ouglitch for the slaughter of the Regent’s agents; many of the Nagois were exiled or imprisoned, and Dimitri’s mother was forced to enter a convent, while numbers of the inhabitants were executed or sent beyond the Ourals. Ouglitch was reduced almost to a desert. The same summer which witnessed the death of Dimitri Ivanovitch saw Khan Kazi-Girei stealing out of the sun-parched steppes towards Moskva at the head of a large and rapidly-moving army. The best troops of Moskovy were far away in the north, watching the movements of the Swedish generals; others had to be brought in all haste from the encampments along the Oka to defend the capital from this sudden, if not altogether unexpected attack. The slobodas surrounding the city were hurriedly fortified and the outlying monasteries transformed into fortresses. The Tzar, contrary to precedent, remained at the Kreml, and was witness of the magnificent battle which ensued under the walls of Moskva, and which recalled, while it lasted, the classic struggles on the plains of Troy. The defence was superintended by kniaz Thedor Mstislavskie and Godounov, the latter of whom understood the difficult science of working in harmony with men who were his personal enemies. 4th July 1591Although the issue of the day’s strife was not of a decisive nature, the Khan had no stomach for further fighting, and fled precipitately back to his own country, arriving at Baktchisarai with scarcely a third of his army. The ignominious failure of this invasion checked any disposition which Sigismund may have had for annulling the truce with the Tzar of Moskovy, whose voevodas were now free to give their undivided attention to the scrambling hostilities which had broken out in Finland and in the neighbourhood of the White Sea. The war dragged on in these wild and bitter regions without any very decisive action enlivening the general torpidity of its course; the failing health of King John of Sweden made him anxious to obtain at least a suspension of arms, and negotiations were set on foot for that purpose previous to his death (November 1592), which resulted in the conclusion of a two years’ truce (each side to retain what it then held) in January 1593. The external peace which Russia for the moment enjoyed was clouded by the apprehension which was naturally felt at the accession of Sigismund Vasa to his father’s kingdom, an event which bound Poland and Sweden into a dual monarchy and made the acquisition of a Baltic outlet more than ever a difficult task for Moskovite statecraft. The apprehension was, however, soon allayed. The union of crowns was by no means followed by a union of hearts, and the close relationship into which the two kingdoms—one aggressively Lutheran, the other preponderatingly Catholic—were drawn only served to bring to the surface the animosities of race and creed which existed between them. Sigismund, who was Catholic by religion and more or less Polish in his sympathies, had a powerful Lutheran rival in his Uncle Karl, Duke of Sudermanland, and the Skandinavian kingdom was more likely to be involved in a civil war than to fight hand in hand with Poland against Russia. Under these circumstances the truce between Sweden and Moskovy was supplemented (18th May 1595) by an “eternal peace,” the former power ceding, besides Yam, Ivangorod, and Kopor’e, Korelia with the town of Keksholm.[179] It was probably the clearing of the atmosphere in the north which emboldened Godounov, while lulling the Ottoman Court with proffers of friendship, to send a substantial contribution to Kaiser Rudolf in furtherance of the half-hearted crusade by which he was attempting to dislodge the Turks from Hungary. A magnificent consignment of the rich fur-products of the Sibirian forests,—sable, marten, beaver, black fox, and other skins, in scores of thousands, valued at 44,000 roubles,—was spread out in twenty rooms of the imperial palace at Prague for the edification and astonishment of the courtiers and merchants of the old Bohemian city (1595). The inevitable clashing of the Ottoman and Russian powers, only deferred on account of the manifold embarrassments of both, made it desirable that Moskva should be no longer dependent in ecclesiastical matters on the Turk-tolerated Patriarch at Constantinople, and it was perhaps partly on this account, partly with the view of gratifying the Russian clergy and his partisan, the Metropolitan, Iov, that Godounov in 1589 secured the promotion of the Primate to the office of Patriarch of Moskva, with four Metropolitans (Novgorod, Kazan, Rostov, and Kroutitsk) under him. A more lastingly important stroke of internal administration, effected by the Regent at this time, also fell in with his private ends in addition to safeguarding the interests of the State. This was the abolition of the “Ur’ev den,” or S. George’s day, on which the peasants had been wont to decide for the ensuing year whether they would remain with their present masters, or migrate, literally, to fresh fields and pastures new. This right of annual “betterment” had lately shown a tendency to work in one direction; the opening up of Sibiria and the greater security from Tartar raids which the agriculturalist of the south of Russia now enjoyed drew the peasants in steady streams from their accustomed grounds, and the small proprietors, the military backbone of the gosoudarstvo, who were unable to offer the privileges and immunities which the richer landowners held forth, found their estates gradually drained of the labour which alone made them valuable. Godounov grappled boldly with the situation; he issued an edict which forbade the serf to change his master, and thus by one stroke bound the peasant to the soil and the grateful small landowner to his party.

The dynastic hopes of the house of Moskva had been fluttered in 1592 by a report that the Tzaritza was in a condition which might well be termed interesting, since the birth of an heir was of such vital importance to Russia; Irena did indeed bring forth a daughter, who was baptized with the name Theodosia, and died. This was the last expiring flicker of the paling torch of the Ivanovitch dynasty. On the 7th of January 1598 Thedor himself expired, leaving his vacant throne somewhat vaguely at the disposal of his widow, the Patriarch, the Regent, and Thedor Romanov. “In the person of this vague and virtuous sovereign,” sums up a French historian, “the race of bloody and violent men of prey who had created Russia was extinguished.”[180] For the first time in her political history Russia was fronted with an interregnum. The widowed Tzaritza, the only remaining representative of the sovereign authority in the eyes of the people, made the void still more pronounced by retiring with her brother into the New Monastery of the Virgin, which hallowed retreat promptly became the centre of anxious solicitations and political manoeuvrings. As Irena Godounov would do nothing to remove the deadlock, Boris Godounov became indispensable, and the Patriarch, with the assent of the principal citizens, offered him the crown of Monomachus and, as far as he was able to speak with authority, the sovereignty of the Russias. Boris wisely deferred the choice of a Tzar to the decision of a representative gathering of the Moskovite States, a step which, while it gave his enemies a longer time to develop their opposition, would place his election, if carried, on a surer foundation. The Sobor which assembled at the capital in the month of February was composed of 474 members, of which 99 were clergy, 272 of the boyarin and landowner class (of which 119 were small proprietors), and the remainder starostas, deputies from the provincial towns, and representatives of the merchant bodies.[181] With the clergy and small proprietors the Godounov interest was predominant, and men of all sections were conversant with the ability and energy which the Regent had displayed in dealing with the foreign affairs of the country, left by Ivan in such unpromising plight. There were many boyarins whose pedigrees gave them a more legitimate claim to sit on the throne of Rurik, but none who inspired such confidence as did Godounov. The latter was unanimously elected to the sovereignty, and only stimulated the popular voice by affecting to hold back from the proffered dignity. 1598On the 21st of February, amid the striking of the 5000 bells of Moskva’s many churches, the Patriarch went forth at the head of his clergy, followed by the greater part of the inhabitants of the city, and bearing the ikon of the Mother of God of Vladimir, towards the monastery of the Virgin; Godounov met this imposing outpour with another procession, bearing the less celebrated but equally adorable Mother of God of Smolensk. Satisfied of the solidity of his call to the throne, he at length put aside his hesitation and allowed himself to be proclaimed Gosoudar and Tzar of all the Russias. In effect nothing was changed, except that he ruled in name what he had already ruled in fact; on the other hand, however, if he exchanged the position of Vremenszhik for that of sovereign, he lost the authority which even the weak Thedor had been able to impart to him—the authority of a time-honoured “legend.” With the Russians legend and ideal counted for more than an apprenticeship of capable public service, and greater homage was paid to an Orthodox sovereign who hid from the enemy under a haystack than to a voevoda who died fighting superbly for his country. Crueller tortures were inflicted upon brave and blameless men in their midst than any for which sixty generations of Jews were held accursed, yet it was the inflictor and not the victim who was accounted holy, and worthy to sleep beneath the wings of the archangels. Boris, with all his record of past services and recommendation of present ability, with all his benevolence and dexterity, could count on nothing more than the makeshift loyalty of his subjects.

His first action after his election, before even his coronation had taken place, was one which bespoke alike vigour and calculation. A rumour, possibly not without some foundation, but such as was current at Moskva every summer, credited the Krim Khan with designs for an immediate invasion of Russian territory. Boris did not wait for more exact information, but forthwith assembled from all parts of the gosoudarstvo a splendidly equipped army which was estimated at 500,000 men. This demonstration of potential fighting power and resource not only awed the Khan into good behaviour, but served as a hint to the Swedes and Poles that the new sovereign of Russia, albeit of comparatively humble origin, was not a factor to be despised in the affairs of North-eastern Europe; it fulfilled too another purpose, that of bringing the voevodas, boyarins, Tartar vassals, and Kozak hetmans from distant parts of the realm into immediate contact with their new ruler. The development of the quarrel between Sigismund and his uncle Karl, which gradually became a struggle between Poland and Sweden, freed Moskovy from the danger of attack from either power, and had Boris been able to wholly shake off the cautious traditions of his predecessors and enter into aggressive alliance with one or other of the combatants, Riga or Revel might have fallen into his hands and the coveted eye-hole into Europe have been secured. The Tzar, however, clung too faithfully to the old policy which had borne so little fruit. Nothing but sheer force would move the Swedes out of Estland or the Poles out of Livland, and nothing short of compulsion would make the inhabitants of these provinces receive the Russians as saviours; yet the same blind of a vassal kinglet which had failed disastrously in the case of Magnus was tried again, with a Swedish prince, Gustav (son of the late Erik XIV.), as its figure-head. Gustav created no enthusiasm among the Livlanders—who were not in a position indeed to show any—and ended by inspiring disgust in his patrons at Moskva. It is probable that Boris was merely staying his hand while Poles and Swedes fought out their domestic quarrels, and hoped to profit by the exhaustion which such conflict must necessarily entail by plundering both parties. The opportunity never came. Little by little the sovereign became aware that he was scarcely possessed of the love of the people for whom he had done so much; the clergy were offended at his suggestion of founding a university, the citizens were aggrieved that he introduced skilled foreigners, who were so badly needed to reorganise the sciences and arts of the country, all classes were scandalised because he shaved off his beard. A terrible famine, caused by inclement weather in the spring and summer of 1601, brought out the good qualities of the Tzar, who disbursed immense sums ungrudgingly among the starving poor, and grappled vigorously and with partial success against the prevailing scarcity. The people, however, saw in the calamity only the wrath of God against a prince who had caused sacred blood to be shed; with their eyes strained upwards to the frescoed roofs of their churches they missed the human endeavour and the open-hearted charity which was striving to alleviate their misfortunes. Portents of disaster and bodings of coming trouble succeeded the famine, for the most part of a very understandable nature. Beasts of the chase became scarce in the forests, packs of famished dogs and wolves roamed round the villages, eagles screamed over Moskva, and black foxes were caught about the city, in addition to which, unknown birds and beasts, strange and therefore marvellous, were observed throughout the country. As there had been a general scarcity of vegetation, and as the towns were honeycombed by the hastily-dug graves of those who had died of want—numbering some hundreds of thousands—this sudden invasion of the forest-folk was not inexplicable. It was also said that women and animals gave birth to monsters; certainly about this time rumour gave birth to extraordinary reports, of more disquieting omen than any of the rest, that Dimitri Ivanovitch had survived the evil designs of his would-be murderers and was yet alive. The people who had credited an irritated Deity with exacting hecatombs of victims for the foul death of a Tzarevitch, were equally prone to believe that the Tzarevitch was not dead, and it only remained for the rumour to take concrete shape for Boris’s throne to be seriously imperilled. With the taint of disaffection visible around him, his government began to take a harsher tone. Although never verging upon the savagery of the later Moskovite sovereigns, the clemency of the first years of his reign was laid aside as useless. Bogdan Bielskie, who had earned the hatred of the citizens in the days of the Terrible, now incurred the displeasure of Boris by alleged contumacy; it was said that his beard was plucked piecemeal from his chin by the Tzar’s orders, but beyond this he was only banished to another district more remote than the one he had formerly administered. More thorough was the swoop upon the Romanov family; the five sons of the late member of Thedor’s Douma, Nikita Romanov, stood high in the public esteem, and stood also very near the throne. An elected prince had some cause to fear the competition of such a powerful and popular family, albeit they were not of Rurikovitch blood. The charge which was suddenly brought against them, of a design to remove the sovereign by means of poison, was probably one of those whispered calumnies which bred freely in the half-Asiatic, wholly mediÆval atmosphere of Moskva. It was nevertheless a convenient excuse for destroying the influence of this dangerous party; the head of the house, Thedor, was constrained to enter a monastery, where, as the monk Filarete, he seemed safely out of the way. The other brothers underwent more or less rigorous imprisonment (the severities of which were eventually relaxed), while a crowd of allied or sympathetic boyarins were ordered into captivity or received governorships in remote parts of the country. No blood was spilt except incidentally that of serfs and servants, tortured to disclose incriminating information concerning their masters. That the Tzar, who had received his earliest impressions at the Court of Ivan the Terrible, did not act more in the spirit of his times is a circumstance which may stand to his credit, especially when regard is had to the influences which surrounded him. The Moskva of those days was an environment which in itself propagated monstrous and reactionary ideas. Here were to be seen on every hand wretched hovels, “dwelling-places for human beings,” dark suspicion-speaking bazaars, crowded rookeries of cramped caravansaries, wide open spaces, bleak and untenanted, chill and massive boyarin palaces, weird and awesome temples; and in the Kreml itself “violent juxtaposition of the German Gothic style with those of India, of Byzantium, of Italy—the same tangle of edifices, packed one within another like a Chinese puzzle; the same strange wild orgy of decoration, of form, of colour; a delirium and fever, a veritable surfeit of plastic fancy. Small rooms, surbased vaulted roofs, gloomy corridors, lamps twinkling out of the darkness, on the walls the lurid glow of mingled ochres and vermilions, iron bars to every window, armed men at every door; a swarming population of monks and warriors everywhere.”[182] Such was the capital of Russia in the last days of the Rurikovitch dynasty; such it remained throughout the seventeenth century.