e single trait of manhood, so his miraculous triumph did not infatuate
him even for one moment. With cautious circumspection he dared not
incorporate Kasan with Muscovy, but made it over to sovereigns belonging
to the family of Menghi-Ghirei, his Crimean ally, to hold it, as it
were, in trust for Muscovy. With the spoils of the vanquished Tartar, he
enchained the victorious Tartar. But if too prudent to assume, with the
eye-witnesses of his disgrace, the airs of a conqueror, this impostor
did fully understand how the downfall of the Tartar empire must dazzle
at a distance--with what halo of glory it would encircle him, and how it
would facilitate a magnificent entry among the European Powers.
Accordingly he assumed abroad the theatrical attitude of the conqueror,
and, indeed, succeeded in hiding under a mask of proud susceptibility
and irritable haughtiness the obtrusiveness of the Mongol serf, who
still remembered kissing the stirrup of the Khan's meanest envoy. He
aped in more subdued tone the voice of his old masters, which terrified
his soul. Some standing phrases of modern Russian diplomacy, such as the
magnanimity, the wounded dignity of the master, are borrowed from the
diplomatic instructions of Ivan III.

After the surrender of Kasan, he set out on a long-planned expedition
against Novgorod, the head of the Russian republics. If the overthrow of
the Tartar yoke was, in his eyes, the first condition of Muscovite
greatness, the overthrow of Russian freedom was the second. As the
republic of Viatka had declared itself neutral between Muscovy and the
Horde, and the republic of Tskof, with its twelve cities, had shown
symptoms of disaffection, Ivan flattered the latter and affected to
forget the former, meanwhile concentrating all his forces against
Novgorod the Great, with the doom of which he knew the fate of the rest
of the Russian republics to be sealed. By the prospect of sharing in
this rich booty, he drew after him the princes holding appanages, while
he inveigled the boyards by working upon their blind hatred of
Novgorodian democracy. Thus he contrived to march three armies upon
Novgorod and to overwhelm it by disproportionate force. But then, in
order not to keep his word to the princes, not to forfeit his immutable
"Vos non vobis," at the same time apprehensive, lest Novgorod should not
yet have become digestible from the want of preparatory treatment, he
thought fit to exhibit a sudden moderation; to conte