d-Lithuania was striving for the
conquest of Muscovy; lastly, the Livonian knights were not yet disarmed.
At the end of his reign we behold Ivan III. seated on an independent
throne, at his side the daughter of the last emperor of Byzantium, at
his feet Kasan, and the remnant of the Golden Horde flocking to his
court; Novgorod and the other Russian republics enslaved--Lithuania
diminished, and its king a tool in Ivan's hands--the Livonian knights
vanquished. Astonished Europe, at the commencement of Ivan's reign,
hardly aware of the existence of Muscovy, hemmed in between the Tartar
and the Lithuanian, was dazzled by the sudden appearance of an immense
empire on its eastern confines, and Sultan Bajazet himself, before whom
Europe trembled, heard for the first time the haughty language of the
Muscovite. How, then, did Ivan accomplish these high deeds? Was he a
hero? The Russian historians themselves show him up a confessed coward.

Let us shortly survey his principal contests, in the sequence in which
he undertook and concluded them--his contests with the Tartars, with
Novgorod, with the princes holding appanages, and lastly with
Lithuania-Poland.

Ivan rescued Muscovy from the Tartar yoke, not by one bold stroke, but
by the patient labour of about twenty years. He did not break the yoke,
but disengaged himself by stealth. Its overthrow, accordingly, has more
the look of the work of nature than the deed of man. When the Tartar
monster expired at last, Ivan appeared at its deathbed like a physician,
who prognosticated and speculated on death rather than like a warrior
who imparted it. The character of every people enlarges with its
enfranchisement from a foreign yoke; that of Muscovy in the hands of
Ivan seems to diminish. Compare only Spain in its struggles against the
Arabs with Muscovy in its struggles against the Tartars.

At the period of Ivan's accession to the throne, the Golden Horde had
long since been weakened, internally by fierce feuds, externally by the
separation from them of the Nogay Tartars, the eruption of Timour
Tamerlane, the rise of the Cossacks, and the hostility of the Crimean
Tartars. Muscovy, on the contrary, by steadily pursuing the policy
traced by Ivan Kalita, had grown to a mighty mass, crushed, but at the
same time compactly united by the Tartar chain. The Khans, as if struck
by a charm, had continued to remain instruments of Muscovite
aggrandizement and concentration. By calculation they h