rried as emblems of office a dog's head
and a broom, the first to indicate that they worried the enemies of the
czar, the second that they swept them from the face of the earth. They
were chosen from the lowest class of the people, and to them was given
the property of their victims, that they might murder without mercy.

The excesses of Ivan are almost too horrible to tell. He began by
putting to death several great boyars of the family of Rurik, while
their wives and children were driven naked into the forests, where they
died under the scourge. Novgorod had been ruined by his grandfather. He
marched against it, in a freak of madness, gathered a throng of the
helpless people within a great enclosure, and butchered them with his
own hand. When worn out with these labors of death, he turned on them
his guard, his slaves, and his dogs, while for a month afterwards
hundreds of them were flung daily into the waters of the river, through
the broken ice. What little vitality Ivan III. had left in the
republican city was stamped out under the feet of this insensate brute.

Tver and Pskov, two others of the free cities of the empire, suffered
from his frightful presence. Then returning to Moscow, he filled the
public square with red-hot brasiers, great brass caldrons, and eighty
gibbets, and here five hundred of the leading nobles were slain by his
orders, after being subjected to terrible tortures.

Women were treated as barbarously as men. Ivan, with a cruelty never
before matched, ordered many of them to be hanged at their own doors,
and forced the husbands to go in and out under the swinging and
festering corpses of those they had loved and cherished. In other cases
husbands or children were fastened, dead, in their seats at table, and
the family forced to sit at meals, for days, opposite these terrifying
objects.

Seeking daily for new conceits of cruelty, he forced one lord to kill
his father and another his brother, while it was his delight to let
loose his dogs and bears upon the people in the public square, the
animals being left to devour the mutilated bodies of those they killed.
Eight hundred women were drowned in one frightful mass, and their
relatives were forced under torture to point out where their wealth lay
hidden.

It is said that sixty thousand people were slain by Ivan's orders in
Novgorod alone; how many perished in the whole realm history does not
relate. His only warlike campaign was against the L