In the midst of Russia’s direst despondency, when the throne of Monomachus was empty and the lawful Patriarch starving in prison, and when the tombs and temples of Moskva’s sacred past were profaned by the unhallowed presence of strangers and heretics, within the scarred walls of the Troitza the lamp of Orthodoxy and national independence was kept steadily burning. The hegumen Dionosie, as bitter a foe of Catholicism as any of the Reformers who were convulsing Western Europe in their struggle with Rome, ceased not to call to his fellow-Russians to unite against the foreign enemy, and save alike the true religion and the empire. Like the cry of the figurative pelican re-echoing through the wilderness, the warlike summons from the Troitza passed along the wasted land; and met at length with response. The city of Nijhnie-Novgorod, advantageously situated at the confluence of the Volga with the Oka, had, since the reduction of Kazan and the decline of the Tartar power, advanced greatly in prosperity and importance. At a moment when Moskva, Velikie-Novgorod, and Novgorod-Sieverski were in alien hands the eastern city stood forth with enhanced prominence as the rallying-point of Russian freedom, and it was here that the exhortations and entreaties of the Troitza hegumen were most effective. As was usual in times of popular commotion, visions and portents were not wanting, and the religious enthusiasm of the people was wrought up to a high pitch. The anger of heaven, it was said, as the noise of these apparitions was spread from town to town and from monastery to monastery, had been visited on the land on account of the sins of its inhabitants; the Russian people had lightly sworn allegiance to successive sovereigns, and had as lightly shed their blood or driven them from the throne. Impious hands had been raised against the Lord’s anointed—hence these afflictions. It was decreed that before the work of liberation could be begun the people should purge themselves of their iniquities by a solemn and universal fast; for three days every one was to abstain from food, even the infants at the breast, though what measure of political responsibility could be brought home to the latter for the intrigues and revolutions of the past five years it would be difficult to say. The ideal of a God is usually that of a being who derives some not very comprehensible satisfaction from the contemplation of self-inflicted sacrifice or suffering of some sort, and it was quite in keeping with accepted ideas that the only remedy for the misery of a nation was—more suffering. At Nijhnie-Novgorod the patriotic upheaval produced more than unstable visions of the night, it brought to the surface of political action a man; princes and boyarins there were as usual, and some among them doubtless men of ability, but the most remarkable figure in the group of Nijhniegorodskie regenerators was one of humbler extraction, torn by the circumstances of the time from his normal rank in life, like a low-growing ocean-weed uprooted by the action of some violent pelagic disturbance. Kozma Minin-Soukhorouk, who arose as the apostle of the movement which had started into being in response to the beacon blaze from the Troitza, was a provincial starosta,[198] and by trade a cattle-dealer or, according to some accounts, a butcher. Like the peasant-girl of Domremy, his certificate for assuming the direction of affairs usually yielded to those of higher station was a supernatural “call”; S. Sergie had appeared to him and entrusted him with the task of arousing the slumbering consciences and national ardour of the Russian folk. Having convinced his fellow-men of the sacredness of the cause, Minin proceeded to convert their enthusiasm into practical support of its furtherance. “Give” was the cry, give every one, and give to depletion; goods, money, service, were asked of all, and those who had restricted ideas on the subject were brought into line by forced contributions. The emerged cattle-dealer, though good enough as an awakening influence, was scarcely fitted to conduct a campaign against the war-seasoned Polish troops, and the soldiery clamoured for a voevoda in whom they might have confidence. Such a one was forthcoming in Kniaz Dimitri Pojharskie, still weak from the wound he had received in the fight around Moskva, and under his command an army was formed which only delayed taking the field till it should have received sufficient support in men and money from the neighbouring lands. 1612Not till the end of April were the equipped forces ready to march, and by that time new dangers had begun to crop up like noxious weeds on a land that had too long lain fallow of settled government. The Kozaks around Moskva had begun to talk of Marina’s infant as the rightful heir to the throne, while at Ivangorod had arisen another phantom Dimitri, Ljhedimitri III., who had established himself at Pskov. It was time for the army of regeneration to be moving, though what it “carried in its stomach” was difficult to foreshadow. With the melting of the snows Pojharskie unfurled his standard, blazoned with a swarthy eastern Christ and thickly bestrewn with inscriptions, and led his troops towards Moskva. Vague as his political objective was, his crusade attracted adherents. At Kostroma, which a Russian kniaz held in the name of Vladislav, the people had arisen and declared themselves for Pojharskie. At Yaroslavl the citizens came forth to welcome the approaching army, with ikons and provisions and gifts for the voevoda in command. It seemed probable that a Dimitri might yet mount the throne of Monomachus. Here, however, the onward movement came to a sudden halt; Pojharskie was unwilling to lead his men direct upon Moskva, where Zaroutzkie and his Kozaks were encamped, lest they should be seduced, from sheer lack of alternative, to give in their allegiance to the adventuress Marina and her child, on whose behalf the Kozak leader was working. Pojharskie in fact, in the helplessness of a negative undertaking, was waiting upon Providence, and was not loth to receive the proposals which came from Velikie-Novgorod for the election of the King of Sweden’s brother to the tzarstvo. (Karl IX. had died in the winter, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Gustav-Adolf, brother of Karl-Filip.) But here again the double-edged difficulty arose which confronted every attempted solution of the succession problem; the House of Moskva, since the extinction of the independent Russian principalities and the disappearance of the Paleologi, was the only reigning family in Europe which professed the Greek faith, and with the dying out of the Ivanovitch line the supply of Orthodox Princes of the Blood came to an end. Hence the Russians must either submit to the elevation of a Tzar from the boyarin ranks, or persuade some foreign prince to adopt the indispensable dogmas. Pojharskie met the proposals of the Novgorodskie and Swedish agents with an inquiry on this matter of religion, and professed himself willing, if satisfied in this respect, to accept Karl-Filip’s candidature. It was doubtful, however, if the Lutheran Vasa would be more open to embrace Orthodoxy than his Catholic cousin had shown himself, and meanwhile, from the Troitza and the capital, kept coming urgent expostulations as to the dangerous stagnation on the part of the Russian vanguard. In July Pojharskie at last put his troops in motion and moved slowly towards Moskva, but turned aside from the army at Rostov to make a pilgrimage to the Souzdalskie monastery of the Saviour, where reposed the bones of his ancestors. The campaign was suddenly quickened out of its irresolute lethargy by the news that the hetman Khodkievitch was approaching Moskva with a relief force and the much-needed supplies for the Polish garrison. The Russian voevoda, still holding aloof from the Kozak encampment, threw his forces into the western end of the Biel-gorod, leaving to Zaroutzkie the eastern quarter confronting the walls of the Kitai-gorod. On the 22nd August the Lit’uanian army appeared on the western approaches of the city, and a wild scrambling engagement ensued, Pojharskie’s soldiery and the strielitz defending their lines from the attacks of the relieving force on the one hand, and the sorties of the Polish garrison on the other, while the Kozaks remained for the most part inactive. Along the banks of the Moskva on the south, at the Tverskie gate on the north-west, under the ramparts of the Kreml, and beneath the western walls of the Biel-gorod the combat was hotly waged, and evening found the Russians still interposed between the besieged and their succours. After a lull of a day’s duration the fighting was resumed at daybreak on the 24th; the hetman’s forces came into collision with Zaroutzkie’s Kozaks, and the freebooters of the Dniepr found themselves opposed by their fellows of the Don. The Russians, if fighting without cohesion, had the advantage of numbers and position, and the Poles were hampered by the baggage train which it was their object to convoy through the enemy’s lines into the Kreml. At mid-day, after having suffered enormously in his repeated attempts to force a passage through the Biel-gorod, Khodkievitch drew off his discomfited forces and retired to the Vorob’ev mountains, leaving his baggage and provision train in the hands of the enemy. Four days later he retreated towards Lit’uania. The effect of this national victory was to infuse more spirit into the measures taken to dislodge the Poles from the citadel; ill-feeling and suspicion still existed between the various elements composing the blockading army, but the leaders were at least able to arrange a concerted plan of action against the beleaguered garrison. The latter, who had seen with sinking hearts the Polish standards fade away down the Moskva valley, held out for some time against the assaults and summonses of their attackers, notwithstanding the sufferings they endured from lack of sufficient provisions. The stories recounted of parents feeding on the flesh of their children were probably exaggerations, and the starving to death of the hapless Patriarch Hermogen early in the year was a measure of severity rather than necessity, but the defenders and their Russian prisoners were undoubtedly in sore straits, and their surrender, unless relieved, a mere matter of time. In October the Kozaks under Troubetzkoi stormed the Kitai-gorod and drove the hunger-weakened Poles into the Kreml. Two days later (24th October) the garrison let down a bridge over the Neglina stream and disgorged a crowd of prisoners, among them Thedor Mstislavskie, Ivan Vorotuinskie, and the young Mikhail Thedorovitch Romanov. The unruly Kozaks rushed to plunder the outcasts, and were with difficulty held back by the country regiments of Pojharskie. On the 25th the Polish eagle was lowered from the towers of the Kreml, the gates were thrown open, and the Russians marched with triumph into their long-sealed citadel. Their Patriarch was dead and there was none whom they could call Tzar, but with pathetic eagerness they ran to prostrate themselves before their restored Bogoroditza of Vladimir. For the most part the lives of the Poles were respected, according to the terms of the surrender, but many of those who were unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the Kozaks were butchered by those fierce irregulars, who, now that the binding tie of a common military task was loosened, were more than ever a thorn in the side of the Moskovites. Helping themselves to plunder and demanding pay, they threatened to turn their weapons against the citizens and country troops, and the capital seemed likely to become the scene of renewed bloodshed. In the midst of these feuds and disorders Moskva was suddenly agitated by the intelligence that the King of Poland in person was marching against it with a large army. This was only half a truth; Sigismund had indeed made a tardy movement towards the succour of his Polish outpost in the Russian capital, but neither Poland nor Lit’uania had furnished him with the necessary forces. Valuable time was lost at Vilna and at Smolensk without any resulting increase in the King’s army, and in October he was obliged to move forward with only 3000 German troops, of whom 2000 were infantry. A junction effected with the retreating remnant of Khodkievitch’s forces did not materially strengthen his following, and the news of the surrender of the Kreml put a finishing touch to the hopes of the expedition. An ineffectual assault on Voloko-Lamsk completed the Polish monarch’s discomfiture, and soon after the Moskvitchi learned that their enemy had withdrawn across the border. The Russian land was free from the invader, and the Russian people had liberty and leisure to set about the important task of electing a new sovereign, and evolving a new dynasty from the chaos and wreckage which had attended the disappearance of the old one. In the dark winter days which followed the capture of the Kreml, when anger and fear and suspicion, rumour-bred or founded on past experiences of trouble, had sharpened the minds of the citizens, an idea had sprung up which seemed to be flavoured at least with hope. As a door had suddenly opened in the Kreml wall and given egress for a crowd of eagerly-escaping hostages, so, from that very circumstance, a way seemed opened as an outlet for Russian perplexities and troubles. Among the throng who had pressed across the gangway over the Neglina was the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov, son of the Metropolitan “Filarete,” and grandson of Nikita Romanovitch, whose sister Anastasie had been the first wife of Ivan the Terrible. Here was a representative of a family which furnished a link with the vanished dynasty, and which at the same time had no untoward reminiscences in its past history to cloud the affections of the people. If the Romanovs had rendered no striking services to the country, at least there were no skeletons of Ouglitch, no records of extortion and faction-mongering to reproach them with. Standing near the throne, they had never seemed to scheme for its possession, and if the citizens and country-folk alike turned their thoughts towards young Mikhail it was a spontaneous movement, innocent of the influences by means of which Boris Godounov and Vasili Shouyskie had engineered their elections. Nor was the young boyarin devoid of recommendatory qualities, though these were naturally of a negative order; but lately a prisoner in the hands of the Poles, as his father was still (Thedor Romanov had visited the cradle of his race under inauspicious circumstances, having been seized and carried as a prisoner to Marienburg at the outbreak of hostilities), he was scarcely likely to have leanings towards Polish and Catholic ideas. His connection with the elder family branch of Ivan IV. precluded him from sympathy with the Nagois and the brood of impostors which sprang up in mock relationship with them, and equally he was free from any taint of political association with Zaroutzkie and the partisans of Marina. The people saw in his parentage a relic of the old reigning family, in his youth perhaps a reminiscence of his namesake, their beloved Skopin-Shouyskie, and they forgave him the fact that the blood of Rurik did not flow in his veins. 1613As the dieti-boyarins and starostas, the archimandrites of monasteries and other church dignitaries, and all the various country representatives came flocking into Moskva to the national electoral sobor, one name was heard on every side; and when, in “Orthodox Week” of the great Lent, the Archbishop of Riazan, attended by the archimandrite of the Novo-Spasskie, the cellarer of the Troitza, and the boyarin Morozov, proceeded to the high place of execution and put the question of the choice to the assemblage crowded in the Red Square, one name was thundered back from a gaping chorus of throats. “Mikhail Thedorovitch Romanov.” The Time of the Troubles had ended.

Hymns of jubilation arose in the temples, the kolokols sounded from one end of Moskva to the other, and the great city and its influx of country-folk rejoiced at having once more a holy and Orthodox sovereign. But much remained to be done ere the new state of things was settled on a firm footing; Zaroutzkie and his Kozaks, driven out of the capital, plundered and ravaged in the south-east; the Poles and Swedes threatened the west and north-west; freebooters, unattached to any party, rode in marauding troops everywhere. The situation was alarming enough to deter any but the most adventurous from challenging its outcome, and when the ambassadors from the sobor came, with the news of Mikhail’s election, to the Ipat’evskie monastery at Kostroma, whither the young boyarin had retired with his mother, they found the latter reluctant to sanction her son’s acceptance of the offer. Her husband was a prisoner in the hands of the Poles, and her boy was now called upon to brave the fate which had brought to a violent end the younger Godounov, and perhaps his father, had lured on and destroyed both the False Dimitris, and had sent Vasili Shouyskie to a dishonoured captivity. When she at length yielded to their insistence other difficulties stood, literally, in the way. The Tzar-elect was constrained to halt for several weeks at Yaroslavl, on his journey to Moskva, by reason of the swarming bands of Kozaks and Polish adherents which infested the roads, and made travelling unsafe for any party smaller than an army. At length on the 2nd of May the long-looked-for cavalcade arrived, and the young Mikhail was triumphantly conducted into the Kreml which he had left under such different circumstances. Nine weeks later (11th July) the ceremony of the coronation took place in the Ouspienskie Cathedral with the customary pomp and time-honoured usages. The revered ikons of the Mother-of-God of Vladimir and the Mother-of-God of Kazan duly made their appearance on the scene, like the “male and female phoenix, entering with solemn gambollings,” which formed an auspicious feature in the festivals of Chinese Court mythology. But the throes of revolution had left the tzarstvo weak and the treasury depleted, and the young Gosoudar had to begin his reign by appealing for substantial support to a country already drained by contributions and forced distraints. The dieti-boyarins and small landowners, on whom the State depended for military service against the many enemies that threatened it, were unable to obtain the necessary sustenance from their deserted estates, and there were no means of supplying the wants of their retainers from the empty public coffers. A letter, signed by the Tzar, was sent to the administrators of the Perm and Sibirian provinces, the loyal and trusty Stroganovs, requesting the prompt payment of all outlying debts and taxes and further soliciting, “in the name of Christian peace and rest,” an immediate loan of money, corn, fish, salt, cloth, and all kinds of goods for the payment and support of the soldiery. Similar letters were sent to the principal towns and districts of the gosoudarstvo. Russian convalescence demanded feeding and strengthening against the possibility of a relapse.

Dark and anxious for the Moskvitchi was the winter following the tzarskie election; sullen and ill-fed troops quartered within the capital, and without bands of Kozaks prowling like wolves about the country; no supplies coming into Moskva, only rumours of warlike invasion from Lit’uania. The thaws of spring might bring with them Sigismund and his hetmans, and the swallow tribes returning to their nests on the Kreml ramparts might once again be greeted with the singing of the Latins in the holy places of Orthodoxy. The forebodings of Polish invasion passed away, however, with the winter snows, and the Tzar’s counsellors were able to devote their attention to a campaign of extermination against Zaroutzkie and his wild horsemen. 1614The kniaz Ivan Odoevskie was dispatched with a Moskovite army in search of the Kozak chief, and after a series of marchings and counter-marchings fell in with him not far from Toula; according to the voevoda’s report, Zaroutzkie was completely defeated after two days’ continuous fighting, and forced to fly across the Don to Medvieditz with a few followers, leaving his baggage train, standards, and many prisoners in the victor’s hands. The chronicles give a somewhat different account of the matter, and relate that the rebel leader repulsed the tzarskie troops and retired in good order to Astrakhan, leaving a devastated country behind him. Whatever the actual result of the fighting, the disturbing element was at least removed from the heart of the empire, and the authorities at Moskva were able to open up negotiations with the Kozaks of the Don and Volga for the purpose of detaching them from the cause of Zaroutzkie and Marina and enlisting their services against the Lit’uanian enemy. The Tzar sent them messengers with his flag and exhortations to withdraw their allegiance from heretics and traitors; more to the purpose, he was able to send them supplies of cloth, provisions, saltpetre, and lead. The Kozaks greeted the Tzar’s name with a display of loyalty, and accepted his presents, but they did not show a readiness to enroll themselves under his flag; there seemed indeed a possibility that Zaroutzkie would succeed in gathering under his leadership the Volga and Don freebooters and the Tartars of Kazan, and thus shut in the struggling tzarstvo between his forces on the east and those of Poland on the west. Letter after letter was sent from Moskva to the men of the steppe, and appeals were made to their patriotism, their religion, and their cupidity. The downfall of Zaroutzkie and his party was brought about, however, by other agency; in dusty Astrakhan, where Marina and her third consort held their rebel Court, the townsfolk, resentful of the violence of the Volga Kozaks who were quartered on them, rose in rebellion. Zaroutzkie was driven into the stone town, and, on the approach of a body of Moskovite strielitz, the Astrakhanese kissed the cross and beat the forehead to the Tzar Mikhail. The desperate adventurers escaped from the toils which were gathering round them, and fled with a small number of adherents along the wooded banks of the Volga. Odoevskie had arrived on the scene with fresh forces, and a hot pursuit was kept up on the track of the fugitives. At the end of June the enemies of Russia’s peace—Zaroutzkie, the ambition-borne Marina, and her four-year-old son—fell into the hands of their pursuers, and were brought back in triumph to Astrakhan. The bold and stubborn Kozak kniaz ended his wild career by the horrible death of impalement, and the Polish ex-Tzaritza was torn from her child and sent in chains to Moskva, closing her chequered course in a dungeon of the city which she had entered as a monarch’s bride. Her luckless infant, the last and fittest victim of the catastrophe of Ouglitch, swung on a gibbet on the road that runs towards Serpoukhov, a tender and pitiful morsel of gallows-fruit for the Volga daws to peck at. The fate of Zaroutzkie and the extinction of the last pale ghostling of a race of spectres did not immediately deter the wild spirits of the steppes from struggling against the elements of order, so long absent from the land. Bands of Kozaks, swelled into an army by drafts of Russian freebooters and fugitive serfs, border raiders and Tcherkesses, raised anew the flag of rebellion and discord, and were not dispersed till an over-bold rush towards Moskva brought upon them a decisive defeat on the banks of the Loujha (September 1614). At the same time Lisovskie kept alive the cause of the Polish prince and made the Sieverskie land the base of operations for his light and seasoned troops. Nor was the outlook more hopeful in the north; besides Great Novgorod and the Water-ward (one of the five districts appertaining to that city), the Swedes held Keksholm, Ivangorod, Yam, Kopor’e, Ladoga, and Staraia Rousa. The Novgorodskie, who had handed themselves over to the Swedish prince on the supposition that he would be chosen Tzar of Russia, found themselves, by the election of Mikhail, confronted with the alternative of revolt against their accepted sovereign or separation from Moskovy. The citizens would willingly have chosen the former course, but the Swedes were in forcible possession, and, like the porcupine of the fable, were in no way disposed to quit the quarters into which they had been admitted. Faced with the necessity of increasing their field forces to cope with the enemies who threatened them on every side, the Russian executive were obliged to make further calls upon the resources of the gosoudarstvo; the north-eastern province, the youngest of all the Russian territories, responded manfully to the Tzar’s requisitions, but for the most part the other taxing grounds yielded poor returns. Equally unproductive was the experiment in liquor dealing, by which the Government sought to augment their revenue by monopolising the distilling and sale of wines and spirits. In another direction they were more successful in seeking for assistance; shortly after Mikhail’s coronation the young Tzar’s counsellors, recalling the terms of friendship which had existed aforetime between the rulers of Moskovy and the Tudor sovereigns of England, dispatched an embassy to the Stewart prince who had stepped into the inheritance of the latter dynasty. King James was appealed to by his brother monarch for urgently needed supplies of gunpowder, money, lead, sulphur, and other munitions with which to carry on the war of self-defence, and also for the exertion of his good services for the arrangement of an accommodation with Sweden. It was characteristic of the British negotiators that they instinctively sought to obtain concessions for their merchants to trade through Russian waterways direct with Persia, India, and China, characteristic perhaps of the Moskovites that they temporised, raised obstacles, and finally granted nothing. It was also an honourable episode in the not too satisfactory foreign dealings of the Stewarts that the refusal did not alienate the good offices which were put forward on behalf of the Tzar. In August 1614 John Merrick, a recently knighted merchant who was well acquainted with Moskva, came to that city with full powers from the King of Great Britain for opening negotiations between Sweden and Russia. Holland had also been approached on the same subject, and Merrick was joined at Novgorod by the Dutch ambassador van Brederode. At the same time that the Russian Government was seeking the intervention and aid of the northern sea powers, its agents were casting about among the military states of south-eastern Europe with a similar object. So far had the dream of a crusade against the Crescent faded away from Moskovite imagination before the nightmare of present woes, that the young Tzar and his counsellors were anxious to league their forces with those of the Sultan and the Tartar Khan against the King of Poland, and negotiations were set on foot at Constantinople for that purpose. 1615The Emperor, who was appealed to with the view of obtaining by diplomacy what the Turks did not seem likely to effect by war, accepted the post of mediator, and a meeting of the Russian and Polish ambassadors was held at Smolensk, under the presidency of the imperial representative, Erasmus Handelius. As the Poles began by demanding that Vladislav should be recognised as Tzar of Russia, the negotiations did not proceed very far, and the German returned to his master with the report that “you might so well try to reconcile fire and water.” An irregular warfare of an extraordinary character preluded the opening of a more serious campaign between the two hate-hounded States. The firebrand Lisovskie kindled the blaze of strife and devastation once more in the Sieverskie country, and with his light horsemen, innured to fatigue and rapid marches, flitted like a will-o’-the-wisp before the pursuing troops of Dimitri Pojharskie. Hunted out of the Sieverski border, he passed swiftly northward by Smolensk and Viasma, harried the slobodas of Rjhev, turned towards Ouglitch, and subsequently burst through between Yaroslavl and Kostroma and laid Souzdal in ashes; from thence he hied into the Riazan province, beat off the attacks of the Moskovite voevodas, and dashed back into Lit’uania by way of Toula and Serpoukhov. In the north meanwhile the walls of Pskov had once more proved a bulwark against the tide of Russia’s misfortunes, and the military talents which the young Gustav-Adolf had already commenced to display were unable to bring about the reduction of that stronghold. This check, together with the Polish and Danish wars in which Sweden was involved, inclined the King to be more favourably disposed towards a reasonable accommodation than his cousin of Poland had shown himself, and the peace negotiations which the English and Dutch representatives set afoot were more hopeful of result than those of Smolensk. The foreign envoys saw in the miserable desolation of the border districts through which they travelled evidence of the distress with which Moskovy was still afflicted. Save bands of Kozaks skulking in the woods, the country-side was devoid of human habitants; of the native population only unburied corpses remained, and at night the howling of congregated wolves and other beasts of prey resounded on all sides. The once thriving town of Staraia Rousa was a heap of ruined houses and churches, haunted by an under-fed remnant of scarcely 100 men. Such were the scenes amid which the ambassadors of the two contending nations and their mediators commenced their attempts at mutual accommodation. The cool-headed and business-like qualities of the British representative were perhaps the deciding factor in the protracted negotiations, and towards the end of 1616 Merrick was able to bring the opposing elements together in the village of Stolbova to discuss the final terms of peace. 1617In February the following year the treaty of Stolbova was signed, its principal provisions being: that Sweden yielded back to Russia Great Novgorod and district, Ladoga, Staraia Rousa, and some smaller places, but retained Ivangorod, Yam, Kopor’e, Keksholm and the province of Korelia, and in addition received a sum of 20,000 roubles; that free commercial intercourse should obtain between the two reconciled countries; and that immigrants from the west should have free access to the Tzar’s dominions through Swedish territory.[199] Merrick, who had done his utmost to secure tolerable terms for the Russians, further assisted them by paying down the money demanded by Sweden.

The peace of Stolbova was as favourable an accommodation as the Tzar could reasonably have expected to secure. The surrender of a hopeless pretension to the last shred of Baltic coast still further checked the struggle for an outlet seawards which had been pursued for the last half-hundred years with such discouraging result; but Moskovy got back some of the places which had been wrung from her weakness, and above all gained breathing time to concentrate her energies on the strife with the arch-enemy Poland.

Both parties had made preparation for pushing the quarrel to the uttermost. The Korolovitch[200] Vladislav had, with the insistence of youth, induced the Poles to support him in enforcing his election to the throne of all the Russias, a sovereignty stretching away over a vast expanse of tributary lands till it was almost lost on the horizon of western politics. On the other hand, Mikhail and the Moskovites were braced to fight for their faith, their fatherland, for very existence. 1616Vladislav’s enterprise had received the cautious sanction of the Senate and the more unrestrained blessing of the Archbishop of Warszawa, and in a schismatic-Greek church in the old Volhynian capital, Vladimir, a standard bearing the arms of Moskva had been consecrated; a standard which would, it was hoped, draw the Russians over to the cause of the Polish pretender. In the autumn of 1616 a detachment under the hetman Gonsievskie, consisting of a small but capable force, moved out of Smolensk towards Dorogoboujh and camped at the gorodok of Tverdilitz. Instantly the Tzar ordered his voevodas to make a dash upon Smolensk, thus cutting off Gonsievskie’s line of communication and striking at the enemy on their own ground. The move was well conceived and swiftly executed, but its success stopped short at the outworks of Smolensk. The Russians were not well versed in the art of taking a city by sudden assault, and their leader, Boutourlin, remained helpless in his intrenchments for the rest of the year, his troops exposed to attacks from the besieged on one side and Gonsievskie’s skirmishers on the other, and reduced to feed on horse-flesh for want of other provisions. 1617The new year witnessed vigorous action on both sides; a Polish force was routed by a Russian detachment near Dorogoboujh, an event which caused much rejoicing at Moskva, while in May Gonsievskie drove Boutourlin from before the walls of Smolensk. The same month another Polish attack on Dorogoboujh was repulsed, and the Russians hoped at least to maintain an effective defensive resistance to the invaders, but the turn of the year brought with it worse tidings. In July the hetman’s troops made themselves masters of Staritza, Torjhok, and other places, and pushed their advance guard into the Bielozero district, and at the same time came news that the Korolovitch himself was marching with a fresh army upon Moskva. At the end of August Vladislav effected a junction with the Malo-Russian hetman Khodkievitch, and two months later Dorogoboujh and Viasma had both been occupied by the conquering Vasa. Mikhail saw the fate of his forerunners looming large upon him, and already perhaps heard the bells of Moskva knelling his overthrow or the crowds of Krakow jeering at his misfortunes. But the winter season brought with it a respite; the Poles were beaten back from attacks on Tver and Mojhaysk, and in December Vladislav retreated to quarters in Viasma. From here he put forward proposals for peace negotiations, hoping perhaps to gain over the boyarins and people to his side without recourse to further fighting. The Moskovites, however, answered the Korolovitch boldly, and seemed as little disposed to yield an inch of territory as he was to abate a jot of his pretensions. 1618The first six months of the ensuing year were spent in fruitless discussions, during which time hostilities were as far as possible suspended. On the 29th of June the Poles resumed the offensive by an assault on Mojhaysk, which was defended with spirit against this and several subsequent attacks. Seeing, however, the hopelessness of prolonging the defence of this place against the determined efforts of the Korolovitch’s army, the Russian voevodas withdrew their force on the dark and wet night of the first of August, and retired upon Moskva. Masters of Mojhaysk, the Poles now prepared to clinch their successes by an attack on the capital itself, and Mikhail saw himself threatened in his last stronghold. With the memory of Vasili Shouyskie and Thedor Godounov before his mind the young Tzar may well have distrusted the loyalty which was nevertheless all that remained for him to trust to, and it was not without reason that he sought, by a solemn assembly of the sobor, to confirm and invigorate the staunchness of his subjects. To all appearance the city was lost. On one side advanced the Korolovitch with his victorious army as far as the village of Toushin, of evil memory; on the other, by way of Kolomna, bore down the Malo-Russian hetman, Sagaydatchnuiy,[201] with 20,000 Kozaks. The Moskovite voevodas stood by in helpless inactivity while the hetman joined his forces with those of Vladislav, and terror settled down on the capital. The religious fanaticism of the people was countered by their superstition-soaked imaginings, and the appearance of a comet some millions of miles above them in the skies, “over against the town,” intensified the alarm felt at the more immediate neighbourhood of the Polish armies. A demand for submission sent in by the Korolovitch restored the defiant humour of the Moskvitchi; this overture was more or less a blind, as the Poles were meditating a sudden assault, but their designs became known by some means to the citizens, and when, on the night of the 1st of October, the attack was made, the Russians were ready for it. The Arbatskie gate was stoutly defended, and at red dawn the Poles were driven back from that point; along the wall from thence to the Nikitskie gate the efforts of the assailants were directed with no better result, and at the Tverskie gate the onslaught failed by reason of the scaling ladders being too short for their purpose. Nowhere could the enemy force an entrance, and the Polish hetmans had to draw off their discomfited troops from the neighbourhood of the capital. The spell which had hung round the Korolovitch’s advance was broken, and he found himself at the commencement of winter in the heart of a hostile country, whose inhabitants only needed the heartening effect of a success to rouse them on all sides against him. Under these circumstances Vladislav gave permission to his advisers to open fresh negotiations with the Moskovite boyarins of state, and Lev Sapieha, Adam Novodvorskie (Bishop of Kaminiec), and three other notables were empowered to treat for the arrangement of a peace. But notwithstanding the difficulty of keeping together a discouraged and ill-paid army and the instructions which came from Sigismund to bring the war to a speedy conclusion, the Polish prince was loth to relinquish the sovereignty which had seemed so nearly within his grasp, and placed the terms of compensation too high for Russian acceptance. The negotiations which had been opened near Moskva on the bank of the Priesna were broken off, and the Korolovitch once more assumed the offensive. Neither the capital nor the walls of the Troitza offered a very promising point of attack, and a retreating detachment of Poles was overtaken and defeated near Bielozero, but the ravages of the Dniepr Kozaks, who were undeterred in their rangings by the bitter winter weather, disposed the Moskovites to renew the proposals for a peaceable settlement. At length, in the village of Deoulino, three verstas from the Troitza monastery, a truce of fourteen years and six months was agreed upon. Vladislav left Mikhail in possession of the throne of Moskva, but retained the empty consolation of styling himself Tzar; on the other hand Russia yielded up to Poland a long list of towns, most of which had been snatched from her during the fatal “Time of the Troubles,” and which she was now too weak to recover. Smolensk, Tchernigov, Roslavl, Novgorod-Sieverskie and district, Starodoub, Dorogoboujh, Serpeysk, Nevl, and some lesser places were the price the gosoudarstvo had to pay for the peace which had been so long absent from the land; Viasma, Mojhaysk, and some other Pole-held towns were given back to the tzarstvo, and an exchange of prisoners was concerted, by virtue of which Filarete Romanov and the voevoda Shein were restored to their country. (Vasili Shouyskie had died in captivity at Warszawa some years previously.) The ikon of S. Nikolai of Mojhaysk, venerated by the Russians as a living being, and seized by the Poles as a spoil of war, was also included in the stipulated restitutions.[202] On the 1st of December 1618 the Truce of Deoulino was signed, and with the opening of the new year Mikhail saw the waters of destruction recede from around his long-menaced throne. As the Polish eagles went winging homeward the land settled down, almost for the first time in the century, to a period of peace and security, and the figurative “voice of the turtle” arose once more in the forests and fields of Moskovy. In June 1619 the inhabitants of the capital went out with their ubiquitous ikons and crosses to receive the restored Filarete, who had been elected to the vacant Patriarchate, and as the bells rang out their welcome to the returning Vladuika Mikhail hailed with joy a father and a counsellor, the Church obtained a head, and the gosoudarstvo an able administrator. State and Church emerged together from the maelstrom which had swept over them both, and in the persons of Thedor and Mikhail Romanov the Russian Empire had found the dynasty which was to nurture it to a giant growth and guide it forward on the path of power. The conclusion of the treaties of Stolbova and Deoulino drove deep wedges into the territory of the tzarstvo and thrust Moskovy back yet farther from the Baltic and from Western Europe; but all the elements of survival and absorption were present in the momentarily weakened state. While Sweden, devoid of natural resources, was manuring a fitful crop of laurels and grafted possessions with the blood of magnificently disciplined armies, the wealth of Perm and Sibiria and the trade of Makar’ev and Azov was pouring into Russia the life-spring of recuperation, the wherewithal to wring victory from defeat, and weary down less enduring opponents. And while the Poles were opening wider and wider the doors of their Constitution to every species of privileged obstruction and respectable anarchy, the Moskovites, warned by past experiences, and constrained by the grim spectre of the scaffold on the Red Place—which was not always a mere spectre—were “beating the forehead” to the sovereign authority as unreservedly as they had done in the days of the fearsome Ivan. With the firm establishment of the first Romanov on the throne the Russian Empire became an accomplished fact, and the ground was prepared for the work of his famous grandson. This was the turning-point of the long struggle for existence, and from thenceforth the two-headed eagle, blazoned with S. George the Conqueror, soars ever more prominently in the eastern heavens. With the consecration of the Patriarch Filarete in the Ouspienskie Cathedral, in the presence of the Tzar and the high boyarins, prelates, and councillors, nobles, clergy, and people, with the historic jewel-wrought Bogoroditza of Vladimir shedding its sacred lustre on the assembled throng, and the crown of Monomachus sparkling in the light of the illuminating tapers, closes the last scene of the grounding of the Russian Empire; and here may be fitly quoted, from the old Slavonic saga, “Oh, men of the Russian land, already are you this side the hill.”

S. Solov’ev, Kostomarov