t dangerous of them--the prince of Tver; and then
having driven his recent allies by bold attempts at usurpation into
resistance against himself, into a war for the public good, he draws not
the sword but hurries to the Khan. By bribes and delusion again, he
seduces him into assassinating his kindred rivals under the most cruel
torments. It was the traditional policy of the Tartar to check the
Russian princes the one by the other, to feed their dissensions, to
cause their forces to equiponderate, and to allow none to consolidate
himself. Ivan Kalita converts the Khan into the tool by which he rids
himself of his most dangerous competitors, and weighs down every
obstacle to his own usurping march. He does not conquer the appanages,
but surreptitiously turns the rights of the Tartar conquest to his
exclusive profit. He secures the succession of his son through the same
means by which he had raised the Grand Princedom of Muscovy, that
strange compound of princedom and serfdom. During his whole reign he
swerves not once from the line of policy he had traced to himself;
clinging to it with a tenacious firmness, and executing it with
methodical boldness. Thus he becomes the founder of the Muscovite power,
and characteristically his people call him Kalita--that is, the purse,
because it was the purse and not the sword with which he cut his way.
The very period of his reign witnesses the sudden growth of the
Lithuanian power which dismembers the Russian appanages from the West,
while the Tartar squeezes them into one mass from the East. Ivan, while
he dared not repulse the one disgrace, seemed anxious to exaggerate the
other. He was not to be seduced from following up his ends by the
allurements of glory, the pangs of conscience, or the lassitude of
humiliation. His whole system may be expressed in a few words: the
machiavelism of the usurping slave. His own weakness--his slavery--he
turned into the mainspring of his strength.

The policy traced by Ivan I. Kalita is that of his successors; they had
only to enlarge the circle of its application. They followed it up
laboriously, gradually, inflexibly. From Ivan I. Kalita, we may,
therefore, pass at once to Ivan III., surnamed the Great.

At the commencement of his reign (1462-1505) Ivan III. was still a
tributary to the Tartars; his authority was still contested by the
princes holding appanages; Novgorod, the head of the Russian republics,
reigned over the north of Russia; Polan