e was the leading
feature of his policy, he pursued his plans with undeviating consistency.

But that policy was not to be accomplished by open and responsible
acts. The whole character of Ivan was tinged with the duplicity of the
churchmen who held a high place in his councils. His proceedings were
neither direct nor at first apparently conducive to the interests of
the empire, but the great cause was secretly advancing against all
impediments. While he forbore to risk his advantages, he left an
opportunity for disunion among his enemies, by which he was certain to
gain in the end. He never committed himself to a position of the security
of which he was not sure; and he carried this spirit of caution to
such an extremity that many of the early years of his reign present a
succession of timid and vacillating movements, that more nearly resemble
the subterfuges of a coward than the crafty artifices of a despot.

The objects, of which he never lost sight, were to free himself from
enemies abroad and to convert the princedom at home into an autocracy. So
extensive a design could not have been effected by mere force of arms,
for he had so many domestic and foreign foes to meet at once, and so many
points of attack and defence to cover, that it was impossible to conduct
so grand a project by military means alone. That which he could not
effect, therefore, by the sword, he endeavored to perform by diplomatic
intrigue; and thus, between the occasional victories of his armies and
the still more powerful influence of his subtle policy, he reduced
his foes and raised himself to an eminence to which none of his most
ambitious predecessors had aspired. The powers against whom he had
to wage this double war of arms and diplomacy were the Tartars and
Lithuanians, beyond the frontier; and the independent republics of
Novgorod, Vyatka, and Pskof, and the princes of the yet unsettled
appanages within. The means he had at his command were fully sufficient
to have enabled him to subdue those princes of the blood who exhibited
faint signs of discontent in their appanages, and who could have been
easily reached through the widely diffused agency of the boyars; but the
obstinate republics of the North were more difficult of access. They
stood boldly upon their independence, and every attempt to reduce them
was followed by as fierce a resistance, and by such a lavish outlay of
the wealth which their commercial advantages had enabled them to a