chain that I wear! My subjects would have given me over to the
Tatars, sold me to my enemies. Think of the enormity of the treason!
If some were chastised, was it not for their crimes, and are they not
my slaves--and shall I not do what I will with mine own?"

His grievances were real. His _boyars_ were desperate and determined,
and even with their foreheads in the dust were conspiring against him.
They were no less terrible than he toward their inferiors. There never
could be anything but anarchy in Russia so long as this aristocracy of
cruel slave-masters existed. Ivan (like Louis XI.) was girding himself
for the destruction of the power of his nobility, and, as one
conspiracy after another was revealed, faster and faster flowed the
torrent of his rage.

In 1571 he devoutly asked the prayers of the Church for 3470 of his
victims, 986 of whom he mentioned by name; many of these being followed
by the sinister addition: "With his wife and children"; "with his
sons"; "with his daughters." A gentle, kindly Prince had been
converted into a monster of cruelty, who is called, by the historians
of his own country, the Nero of Russia.

He was a pious Prince, like all of the Muscovite line. Not one of his
subjects was more faithful in religious observances than was this
"torch of orthodoxy"--who frequently called up his household in the
middle of the night for prayers. Added to the above pious petition for
mercy to his victims, is this reference to Novgorod: "Remember, Lord,
the souls of thy servants to the number of 1505 persons--Novgorodians,
whose names, Almighty, thou knowest."

That Republic had made its last break for liberty. Under the
leadership of Marfa, the widow of a wealthy and powerful noble, it had
thrown itself in despair into the arms of Catholic Poland. This was
treason to the Tsar and to the Church, and its punishment was awful.
The desperate woman who had instigated the act was carried in chains to
Moscow, there to behold her two sons with the rest of the conspirators
beheaded. The bell which for centuries had summoned her citizens to
the _Vetche_, that sacred symbol of the liberty of the Republic, is now
in the Museum at Moscow. If its tongue should speak, if its clarion
call should ring out once more, perhaps there might come from the
shades a countless host of her martyred dead--"Whose names, Almighty,
thou knowest." Ivan then proceeded to wreck the prosperity of the
richest commercial cit