ad added to the
power of the Greek Church, which, in the hand of the Muscovite grand
princes, proved the deadliest weapon against them.

In rising against the Horde, the Muscovite had not to invent but only to
imitate the Tartars themselves. But Ivan did not rise. He humbly
acknowledged himself a slave of the Golden Horde. By bribing a Tartar
woman he seduced the Khan into commanding the withdrawal from Muscovy of
the Mongol residents. By similar and imperceptible and surreptitious
steps he duped the Khan into successive concessions, all ruinous to his
sway. He thus did not conquer, but filch strength. He does not drive,
but manoeuvre his enemy out of his strongholds. Still continuing to
prostrate himself before the Khan's envoys, and to proclaim himself his
tributary, he eludes the payment of the tribute under false pretences,
employing all the stratagems of a fugitive slave who dare not front his
owner, but only steal out of his reach. At last the Mongol awakes from
his torpor, and the hour of battle sounds. Ivan, trembling at the mere
semblance of an armed encounter, attempts to hide himself behind his own
fear, and to disarm the fury of his enemy by withdrawing the object upon
which to wreak his vengeance. He is only saved by the intervention of
the Crimean Tartars, his allies. Against a second invasion of the Horde,
he ostentatiously gathers together such disproportionate forces that the
mere rumour of their number parries the attack. At the third invasion,
from the midst of 200,000 men, he absconds a disgraced deserter.
Reluctantly dragged back, he attempts to haggle for conditions of
slavery, and at last, pouring into his army his own servile fear, he
involves it in a general and disorderly flight. Muscovy was then
anxiously awaiting its irretrievable doom, when it suddenly hears that
by an attack on their capital made by the Crimean Khan, the Golden Horde
has been forced to withdraw, and has, on its retreat, been destroyed by
the Cossacks and Nogay Tartars. Thus defeat was turned into success, and
Ivan had overthrown the Golden Horde, not by fighting it himself, but by
challenging it through a feigned desire of combat into offensive
movements, which exhausted its remnants of vitality and exposed it to
the fatal blows of the tribes of its own race whom he had managed to
turn into his allies. He caught one Tartar with another Tartar. As the
immense danger he had himself summoned proved unable to betray him into
on