s deputies said to them: "Lithuania (p. 104)
has profited by the misfortunes of Russia to take our territory, but
to-day things are changed." They were right. When peace was concluded
in 1494, Ivan's frontier in the west was extended.

The marriage of Alexander to Ivan's daughter seemed to end the
hostility between the two countries, but nothing was further from the
schemes of the wily grand duke. He stipulated that she should have a
Greek chapel in the palace, and warned her never to appear in a
Catholic church, and always to wear the Russian national dress. Soon
after the wedding Ivan complained that his daughter was forced to wear
Polish costumes, and that the Greek Church was being persecuted. These
were to him ample cause for war, the more so since he had good reason
to count upon his friends, the priests and boyards of the Greek
Church. When the war broke out, cities where the majority of the
people belonged to that church, opened their gates to his army, and
Alexander was badly defeated in the battle of Vedrocha. This war added
another slice to Ivan's territory.

Alexander in his distress made an alliance with the Livonian Order and
with the Great Horde at Sarai; but Ivan's old friend, the Khan of the
Crimea, made a raid in Gallicia and Volhynia, and the Lithuanians were
defeated at Mstislaf; but they compelled the Russians to raise the
siege of Smolensk. Meanwhile Ivan had serious trouble. In 1495, he
ordered the merchants of several Hanseatic towns to be arrested at
Novgorod, and incidentally had goods to the value of $200,000,--an
immense sum in those days,--carried to Moscow. This caused the (p. 105)
foreign merchants to leave for safer places; but the Livonian Order
invaded his territory, and in the battle of Siritza, they crushed a
Russian army of 50,000 men, but the following year, 1502, they were
defeated at Pskof.

Toward the end of his life he was in doubt about his successor,
because his eldest son was dead. At first he thought of making his
grandson Dmitri, his heir; but he changed his mind, sent his
daughter-in-law and grandson to prison and proclaimed his second son
Vassili his heir. He died in 1505, after a reign of forty-three years.
It was under his direction that a new code of laws, the Oulogenia, was
prepared.

XII--RUSSIA BECOMES AN AUTOCRACY. (p. 106)

Vassili, Ivan's son, showed a great resemblance to his father. He did
not evince any greate