to complain that they were not consulted, was ordered to his
bedchamber, and there had his head cut off.

The court grew in barbaric and in Greek splendor. As the Tsar sat upon
the throne supported by mechanical lions which roared at intervals, he
was guarded by young nobles with high caps of white fur, wearing long
caftans of white satin and armed with silver hatchets. Greek
scholarship was also there. A learned monk and friend of Savonarola
was translating Greek books and arranging for him the priceless volumes
in his library. Vasili himself was now in correspondence with Pope Leo
X., who was using all his arts to induce him to make friends with
Catholic Poland and join in the most important of all wars--a war upon
Constantinople, of which he, Vasili, the spiritual and temporal heir to
the Eastern Empire, was the natural protector.

All this was very splendid. But things were moving with the momentum
gained by his father, Ivan the Great. It was Vasili's inheritance, not
his reign, that was great. That inheritance he had maintained and
increased. He had humiliated the nobility, had developed the movements
initiated by his greater father, and had also shown tastes magnificent
enough for the heir of his imperial mother, Sophia Paleologus. But he
is overshadowed in history by standing between the two Ivans--Ivan the
Great and Ivan the Terrible.

[Illustration: The Czar Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan Ivanovitch.
From the painting by I. E. Repin.]

Leo X. was soon too much occupied with a new foe to think about designs
upon Constantinople. A certain monk was nailing a protest upon the
door of the Church at Wittenburg which would tax to the uttermost his
energies. As from time to time travelers brought back tales of the
splendor of the Muscovite court, Europe was more than ever afraid of
such neighbors. What might these powerful barbarians not do, if they
adopted European methods! More stringent measures were enforced. They
must not have access to the implements of civilization, and Sigismund,
King of Poland, threatened English merchants on the Baltic with death.

It is a singular circumstance that although, up to the time of Ivan the
Great, Russia had apparently not one thing in common with the states of
Western Europe, they were still subject to the same great tides or
tendencies and were moving simultaneously toward identical political
conditions. An invisible but compelling hand had been upon ever