to meet the foe, selected his own ground for the battle in a narrow defile where the vast masses of the enemy would only encumber each other. Falling upon the invaders unexpectedly from ambuscades, he routed the Turks with great carnage. They were compelled to retreat, having lost nearly all their baggage and heavy artillery. The triumphant Russians pursued them all the way back to the city of Azof, cannonading them with the artillery and the ammunition they had wrested from their foes. Here the Turks attempted to make a final stand, but a chance shot from one of the guns penetrated the immense powder magazine, and an explosion so terrific ensued that two thirds of the city were entirely demolished.
The Turks, in consternation, now made a rush for their ships. But Zerebrinow, with coolness and sagacity which no horrors could disturb, had already planted his batteries to sweep them with a storm of bullets and balls. The cannonade was instantly commenced. The missiles of death fell like hail stones into the crowded boats and upon the crowded decks. Many of the ships were sunk, others disabled, and but a few, torn and riddled, succeeded in escaping to sea, where the most of them also perished beneath the waves of the stormy Euxine. Such was the utter desolation of this one brief war tempest which lasted but a few weeks.
Queen Elizabeth, anxious to maintain friendly relations with an empire so vast, and opening before her subjects such a field of profitable commerce, having been informed of the conspiracy against Ivan IV., of his abdication, and of his resumption of the crown, sent to him an embassador with expressions of her kindest wishes, and assured him that should he ever be reduced to the disagreeable necessity of leaving his empire, he would find a safe retreat in England, where he would be received and provided for in a manner suitable to his dignity, where he could enjoy the free exercise of his religion and be permitted to depart whenever he should wish.
The tolerant spirit manifested by Ivan IV. towards the
Lutherans, continued to disturb the ecclesiastics; and the clergy and nobles of the province of Novgorod, headed by the archbishop, formed a plot of dissevering Novgorod from the empire, and attaching it to the kingdom of Poland. This conspiracy assumed a very formidable attitude, and one of the brothers of the tzar was involved in it. Ivan immediately sent an army of fifteen thousand men to quell the revolt. We have no account of this transaction but from the pens of those who were envenomed by their animosity to the religious toleration of Ivan. We must consequently receive their narratives with some allowance.
The army, according to their account, ravaged the whole province; took the city by storm; and cut down in indiscriminate slaughter twenty-five thousand men, women and children. The brother of Ivan IV. was seized and thrown into prison, where he miserably perished. The archbishop was stripped of his canonical robes, clad in the dress of a harlequin, paraded through the streets on a gray mare, an object of derision to the people, and then was imprisoned for life. Such cruelty does not seem at all in accordance with the character of Ivan, while the grossest exaggeration is in accordance with the character of all civil and religious partisans.
War with Poland seems to have been the chronic state of Russia. Whenever either party could get a chance to strike the other a blow, the blow was sure to be given; and they were alike unscrupulous whether it were a saber blow in the face or a dagger thrust in the back. In the year 1571, a Russian army pursued a discomfited band of Livonian insurgents across the frontier into Poland. The Poles eagerly joined the insurgents, and sent envoys to invite the Crimean Tartars to invade Russia from Tauride, while Poland and Livonia should assail the empire from the west. The Tartars were always ready for war at a moment's notice. Seventy thousand men were immediately on the march. They rapidly traversed the southern provinces, trampling down all opposition until they reached
the Oka. Here they encountered a few Russian troops who attempted to dispute the passage of the stream. They were, however, speedily overpowered by the Tartars and were compelled to retreat. Pressing on, they arrived within sixty miles of the city, when they found the Russians again concentered, but now in large numbers, to oppose their progress. A fierce battle was fought. Again the Russians were overpowered, and the Tartars, trampling them beneath their horses' hoofs, with yells of triumph, pressed on towards the metropolis. The whole city was in consternation, for it had no means of effectual resistance. Ivan IV. in his terror packed up his most valuable effects, and, with the royal family, fled to a strong fortress far away in the North.
From the battlements of the city, the banners of these terrible barbarians were soon seen on the approach. With bugle blasts and savage shouts they rushed in at the gates, swept the streets with their sabers, pillaged houses and churches, and set the city on fire in all directions. The city was at that time, according to the testimony of the cotemporary annalists, forty miles in circumference. The weltering flames rose and fell as in the crater of a volcano, and in six hours the city was in ashes. Thousands perished in the flames. The fire, communicating with a powder magazine, produced an explosion which uphove the buildings like an earthquake, and prostrated more than a third of a mile of the city walls. According to the most reliable testimony, there perished in Moscow, by fire and sword, from this one raid of the Tartars, more than one hundred and fifty thousand of its inhabitants.
The Tartars, tottering beneath the burden of their spoil, and dragging after them many thousand prisoners of distinction, slowly, proudly, defiantly retired. With barbaric genius they sent to the tzar a naked cimiter, accompanied by the following message: