The catastrophe which had overtaken the impostor-Tzar included in its scope the foreign guests who were partly responsible for the outbreak. The massacre commenced with Dimitri’s musicians and servants in the Kreml and extended to the lodgings of the Poles and Lit’uanians in the Kitai- and Biel-gorod. For seven hours the church-bells dinned out their vibrating war-music, and tumultuous crowds of citizens and strielitz put to death such of the foreigners as were unable to defend themselves. Well to the fore in the work of butchery were the priests and monks, who turned the occasion of the Marina marriage into a S. Bartholomew of their own, hunting down with zealous rage the “enemies of their religion.”[188] The houses of the Palatine and of some of the other Polish nobles were vigorously defended by their retainers, who fired from the windows upon their assailants. Vasili Shouyskie (who had led the first rush into the Kreml, crucifix in one hand, sword in another), and other boyarins rode about the streets endeavouring to calm the tempest they had raised, and were able to save Mnishek, the Tzaritza, the ambassadors, and those of the Poles who had been successful in defending their thresholds. The bells were quieted, and the people dispersed to their homes, or vented their smouldering rage in mutilating the figure on the Red Place.
With the disappearance of the Ljhedimitri the Moskovites were again confronted with an interregnum, and on this occasion there was no one very obviously marked out to fill the vacant throne. By a process of exhaustion they fixed on the Rurik-descended kniaz who had offered the most determined opposition to the impostor, and who had engineered the revolution which had brought about his overthrow. Vasili Ivanovitch Shouyskie, a man of mediocre talents, widowed and past his prime, was scarcely a promising personality with whom to start a new dynasty, and the election of a sovereign of such an obviously stop-gap nature almost invited new intrigues and new apparitions. Prudence suggested at least a recourse to a national assembly, such as that which had elected Boris, but Shouyskie preferred to take the tide of his fortune at its flood, and was content to receive the crown of all the Russias from the hands of the boyarins, clergy, and merchants of Moskva. Nor was this the only error he committed in the impatience for power to which old men are especially liable. The trail of Polish influence made itself visible even in the electoral gathering of the nobles and citizens who had just entered a blood-drenched protest against all that pertained to the West-Slavonic state. An oath was exacted from Vasili to the effect that he would swear to govern in consultation with the boyarins, and to put no one to death without their consent; that he would listen to no false denunciators; and that he would not confiscate the lands, goods, shops or houses, of the relatives of condemned offenders.[189] This concession, the first step towards the Pacta conventa of Poland, was an innovation which shook men’s ideas of the sacred nature of the sovereign, and reduced the new Tzar more than ever to the position of a make-shift ruler, the mere head of a boyarin douma. Without waiting for the consecration of a new Patriarch (the Russian Primates regularly toppled over and disappeared in the political earthquakes which engulfed their temporal masters), Vasili’s coronation was solemnised on the 1st of June, the earliest date by which the corpses of the victims of the late massacre could be cleared out of the city. The first act of the new reign was one of nervous ostentation; the remains of the genuine Dimitri were solemnly transported from Ouglitch to the Kreml of Moskva, where they were reinterred in the Cathedral of the Archangel. Here, in this sacred environment, under the eye of the Tzar, it was hoped that this troublesome Ivanovitch would sleep in peace and cease to haunt the throne which should have been his heritage. The revolution was completed by the election of Hermogen, Metropolitan of Kazan, to the Patriarchate, the new head of the Church being a bitter opponent of all that savoured of foreign heresy. Surrounded by courtiers who had not had time to develop disaffection, by complaisant priests and heavily-armed strielitz, encompassed on all sides by the stately and sanctified buildings of the Kreml, and breathing an atmosphere laden with the exhalations of centuries of accumulated homage rendered to saints and sovereigns, Vasili may have fancied himself, in fact as well as title, Tzar of all the wide Russias. But throughout the hot days of July and August, when the sun blazed on the white and gold cupolas, and the dogs slunk about with lolling tongues in the shady bazaars of the Kitai-gorod, and frogs croaked dismally from the steamy marshes of the Neglina, dust-coated messengers kept pouring in to the Tzar’s paradise, by the Saviour and Nikolai Gates, with tidings of trouble and unrest throughout the land. From the Sieverski country, from Toula, Kalouga, from the camp at Eletz, from the Volga valley, and from far Astrakhan came reports of sedition and open rebellion, and the burden of each report was the magic name Dimitri. It almost seemed as if, in scattering the ashes of the impostor to the winds, his undertakers had sown a crop of phantoms which was now springing up in all directions. The most persistent rumour was that Dimitri had escaped once again from the hands of his would-be murderers and had fled into Poland, another man having been killed in his stead; the Moskvitchi instantly recalled the fact that the face of the corpse so ostentatiously exposed on the Red Place had been covered by a mask. Another widely-circulated version invented a new Dimitri who had only just emerged from the obscurity of his exile and claimed the throne as the real child of Ouglitch. Nowhere at the outset was there even the foundation of a pretender round whom these legends might crystallise; he existed as yet only in the popular imagination. The first impostor had created the belief in a romantically restored Dimitri; the belief now called for another impostor. Several princes and boyarins of the lesser rank (styled dieti-boyarins, literally “children-boyarins”) took up arms in support of what was more than ever a phantom, but the most formidable of the war-brands which blazed out at this time was remarkable for belonging to a class which had supplied few men of note to Russian history. Bolotnikov, who claimed to have seen the real Dimitri in Poland and to have been appointed his lieutenant, was a serf who had been carried off in one of the Tartar raids by which South Russia was periodically drained of her already sparse population, and had continued his life of toil in a Turkish galley. Obtaining his liberty, he had wandered back to his native country, to reappear, like a trouble-scenting beast of prey, in the hour of mischief and calamity. His real purpose, which underlay the Dimitri agitation, was to inaugurate a peasant rebellion, and if an apprenticeship of hardship and suffering were any qualification for the championship of a down-trodden class, the enterprise was in good hands. The sedition of the voevodas and their military followings, the loosening of the central authority over the provincial kniazes and boyarins, and the open door which the general dislocation offered to the free-lances and Kozaks of the borders, swelled the insurrection to alarming dimensions. As in the long struggle of the Fronde which distressed France in the same century, it was difficult to say what each particular band-in-arms was fighting for. The very vagueness of the threatened danger added to its alarm, and the waning of the year, instead of dispersing the insurgent army which had gathered round Bolotnikov, impelled it towards Moskva. Towns and gorodoks surrendered to the ex-serf as they had done before to the reputed ex-priest, and the rebels reached the village of Kolomensk on the 2nd December. But the ambitious nobles who had thrown in their lot with the peasant leader saw no prospect of seizing or holding the capital on the strength of an empty name, the shadow of a shadow, nor did they propose to install a serf and sometime galley-slave on the throne of Monomachus. Several flitted away from the insurgent camp, and the young voevoda Mikhail Skopin-Shouyskie defeated and dispersed the diminished company of rebels, whose leader fled to Kalouga. 1607Relieved from the onslaught which had threatened to overturn his throne, Vasili was able to celebrate Christmas in his capital, and the New Year was marked by another of the coffin-movings which accompanied every change in the dynasty, and were characteristic of a period when the dead seemed to share the restlessness of the living. This time it was the remains of Boris, his wife, and Thedor II. which were conducted to the Troitza monastery, possibly as a guarantee against inconvenient reappearances—a precaution certainly not uncalled for. Bolotnikov meanwhile had gathered fresh adherents and joined his forces to those of the pretended Tzarevitch Petr, who brought a large following of Don and Volga Kozaks. The Tzar marched against this new rival in person, at the head of an army of 100,000 men, and drove the rebels into Toula. Bolotnikov, seeing the hopelessness of the struggle under existing circumstances, sent a courier to the Palatine of Sendomir, urging the immediate production of a flesh-and-blood Dimitri, without whom all was lost.[190] The precedent of Kromi, however, was not repeated, and in October the besieged leaders of the revolt, Bolotnikov, the “Ljhepetr,” and two or three boyarins who had continued staunch to the movement, surrendered the fortress on the condition that their lives should be spared. The holy and Orthodox Tzar crowned his victory by inflicting a signal chastisement on his too confiding enemies. Bolotnikov had his eyes struck out and was then drowned, a fit climax to his career; the pretended Tzarevitch was hung, and hundreds of his followers flung into the river. The boyarins escaped with lesser punishments. Vasili returned to Moskva “in triumph.” But the demolition of one pretender seemed to make way for a whole crop of dragon-heads; on all sides sprang up self-styled heirs of the vanished line of Moskva. One was a pretended son of Ivan Groznie, another of the murdered Ivan Ivanovitch, while in the Oukrain alone no fewer than eight apparitions disputed the parentage of the saintly Thedor Ivanovitch.[191] It was as though a whole baby-farm of tzarskie foundlings and unacknowledged offspring had suddenly come to maturity and public notice. But more formidable than any of these shadowy claimants, there appeared in the spring of 1608, in the Sieverski land, the long-demanded Dimitri—Ljhedimitri II. of Russian historians. Who this man was is as deep a mystery as the origin of his forerunner, but his claims received almost as ready a recognition. His following of Dniepr Kozaks and Polish adventurers was swelled daily by desertions from the Moskovite soldiery, and town after town proclaimed him. He advanced as far as Toushin, a village twelve verstas from the capital, where he pitched his camp, which instantly became a rallying-point for all the disaffected and intractable elements which the period of troubles had called forth. Among other birds of sinister omen who made their appearance at the impostor’s improvised Court were the Palatine Mnishek and his daughter, widow of the first Ljhedimitri, and though there was little outward resemblance between the two men, the new pretender was publicly “recognised” by Marina as her husband.
The Moskovites by this time had lost their first enthusiasm for romantically restored Tzarevitches and took their revolutions more soberly. The tide of success carried the Ljhedimitri no farther than Toushin; in Moskva itself there was no popular upheaval such as that which swept the first pretender into the Kreml over the ruins of the Godounov dynasty. On the other hand there was as little enthusiasm for the cause of the Tzar, who inspired none of the reverence and affection which the people had been wont to lavish on their legitimate hereditary sovereigns. The mutual weakness of the rivals led to an extraordinary situation; the Tzar of Moskva dared not march against the “thief of Toushin,” and the pretended Dimitri dared not march against the “usurper.” Russia was divided by two Gosoudars whose antagonistic Courts were pitched within a few miles of each other. Many of the Moskovite upper class, hovering in their allegiance, flitted to and fro between Toushin and the Kreml, paying their respects to both Tzars and gathering favours and presents from both masters—a course of action which earned for them the designation of “péréleti” (birds of passage). The merchant folk of the capital pursued a similar policy, and finding a better market for their goods among the free-spending camp-dwellers at Toushin, almost depleted the city of its necessary supplies, a state of things further aggravated by the fact that the rebels held the roads to the rich corn-province of Riazan. Beyond the flat meadows of the Moskva valley the contest was waged more briskly; despite Sigismund’s solemn assurances of a strictly enforced neutrality, numbers of Poles flocked to the adventurer’s service, among them the voevoda Sapieha, already distinguished by his military exploits in Transylvania and Sweden. The rapidly moving Kozak and Polish troops of the Pretender’s army outmatched in activity the heavily-armed and, for the most part, slackly-led forces of Vasili. In the north-eastern province town after town fell into the hands of the “Toushinists”; Souzdal, Vladimir, and Péréyaslavl opened their gates or were captured after a perfunctory resistance; Rostov, where resided Filarete Romanov, raised to the dignity of Metropolitan of that town by the first ’Dimitri, made a bolder stand against the conquerors. Defeated in battle outside the walls, the garrison and citizens defended their ramparts for three hours, and when finally overpowered took refuge with Romanov in the cathedral. The town submitted to the impostor’s voevodas, and the Metropolitan was dragged from his sanctuary and conducted with indignity to Toushin, where not martyrdom but preferment awaited him. Out of consideration for Filarete’s kinship with his “late half-brother” (the Tzar Thedor I.), the ’Dimitri proclaimed his captive Patriarch of Moskva and of all Russia.[192]
Unable to attempt a direct attack upon the capital, the pretender endeavoured to possess himself of the Troitza lavra. The accumulated wealth of this famous monastery, which had risen like a celestial city on the site of the lonely cell from which S. Sergie had watched the beavers playing, necessitated safe keeping. High walls and strongly fortified towers and gates peeped out from amid the thickly growing trees, and spoke defiance to Tartar raiders and plundering bands of freebooters. They were now called upon to withstand an organised siege from the batteries of the False Dimitri. In anticipation of the threatened attack two voevodas and a detachment of soldiers were dispatched from Moskva to the assistance of the monks, who numbered scarcely more than 300 brothers; the monastery servants and peasants from the neighbouring villages brought the effective of the defenders to 2500. At the end of September 1608 a force of 30,000 men, Poles, Russians, Tartars, Kozaks, and Tcherkesses, led by Sapieha and Lisovski, invested this secluded haven of peace and piety, which was suddenly transformed into a beleaguered fortress. The balls from ninety heavy cannon crashed incessantly against the walls and towers, which “shivered, but did not fall”; mines and assaults alike were fruitless, and the siege dragged on month after month. The monks fought as vigorously as the soldiers, and during the lulls in the attack paraded their venerated ikons on the ramparts.[193] Meanwhile the tide of the Ljhedimitri’s success had begun to ebb. The composition of his following bore within itself the elements of defeat. The Poles, Kozaks, and Russian outlaws, who formed the most active contingents of his adherents, drove from his cause, by their licentiousness and indiscriminate marauding, the people whom they had previously won over by their energy and the renown of their arms. Wherever the opportunity offered, the towns which had acknowledged the pretender renounced his sovereignty and recognised that of Vasili. The reaction was further hastened by the victorious campaign of Skopin-Shouyskie and his Swedish allies. Vasili, less prudent than Boris, had accepted the renewed offer of assistance which King Karl held out, and, at the price of yielding up the town of Keksholm and district of Korelia, had obtained the services of 5000 Swedes, led by Jacob de la Gardie, son of the famous general. With this reinforcement Skopin-Shouyskie proceeded to strike at the northern strongholds of the Toushinists, and the two young captains (Mikhail was twenty-three, de la Gardie twenty-seven) swept all before them. 1609A victory over the rebels in May was followed by the capture of Toropetz, Kholm, Velikie-Louki, and other places. In July the army of the False Dimitri was driven out of Tver after hard fighting. Temporarily deserted by the Swedes, whose demands he was unable to satisfy, Skopin continued to organise victory; his exhausted war-chest was replenished by patriotic disbursements from several monasteries, while the Stroganovs sent him valuable aid in men and money from Perm. The young voevoda “whom the people loved” had the art of opening purse-strings as well as of forcing strongholds. In August a force detached from the siege of the stubbornly defended Troitza was met and repulsed with loss on the banks of a Volga tributary stream, and in October Skopin, rejoined by the Swedes, drove his enemies successively out of Péréyaslavl and the Aleksandrovski sloboda. The loss of the latter place threatened the blockade which the Ljhedimitri’s voevodas had drawn round Moskva, and Sapieha made a determined effort to beat back the indomitable pilot of the reaction. Around the horror-haunted village where the Terrible had amused himself with his bears and gibbets and services, a bloody battle was fought between the armies of the rival Tzars; Shouyskie’s Moskovite and Permskie troops and the Swedish allies crowned their campaign by another victory, and the followers of the Thief straggled away from a scene of defeat and slaughter. Wearily back they made their way to the doleful camp at Toushin or to the monastery whose battered walls still held them at bay, while the ravens and hooded corbies came barking and croaking out of the darkening woods to interest themselves in the corpses stiffening in the snow; and from afar, perhaps from the distant Valdai mountains, the vultures swooped down on the same errand.
1610
The cause of the phantom was fading; on the 12th January the defenders of the Troitza, worn with sixteen months of siege and wasted with want and disease, saw their foiled enemies withdraw sullenly from their dismantled trenches and vanish from the landscape they had so long disfigured. In February the impostor withdrew southward to Kalouga, and by March the famous camp of Toushin was deserted. But the decline of the Ljhedimitri’s fortunes was not followed by a corresponding improvement in those of Vasili. Sigismund, who had secretly abetted the cause of the second pretender, prepared to play a bolder game now that the insurrection seemed on the wane. The calling in of the Swedes, the “interference” of the rival branch of the House of Vasa, gave him a diplomatic excuse for displaying open hostility towards the Tzar, and the confusion which reigned throughout Russia furnished him with an opportunity for intervening with specious solicitude in the eddying course of the troubles. In September he crossed the border with a not very numerous army, and invited the burghers of Smolensk to admit him as a friend who wished only to stay the shedding of Russian blood. A similar declaration was forwarded to Moskva. Shein, the governor of Smolensk, refused to be cajoled by the benevolent overtures of the honey-lipped King, and the city was blockaded. Sapieha and the Poles and West-Russian Kozaks were summoned from the pretender’s service to join the royal camp, and many of the Moskovite adherents of the Ljhedimitri went with them. Thus a new danger trod on the heels of the old one, and Vasili once again beheld his Sysiphus stone of subjugation and pacification roll back from the almost-gained summit. A catastrophe which was suspiciously like a crime deprived him at once of the services of his ablest voevoda and of the lingering affections of the Moskvitchi. Skopin-Shouyskie and de la Gardie had wintered their troops at Aleksandrov; in March 1610 they made their entry into the capital, where the young Mikhail was received with a public enthusiasm such as had probably never been so spontaneously exhibited since the triumph of the victor of Koulikovo. Far out into the slobodas and meadows the populace streamed to welcome their hero, falling prostrate as he rode by with his companion-in-arms, and calling him their saviour; some were said to have hailed him as their Tzar. This demonstration could scarcely fail to be displeasing to Vasili; it was the old story of a consciously feeble monarch and a victorious and idolised warrior. Still more would it jar upon the Tzar’s brother and natural heir, Dimitri Shouyskie, whose chances of succession were undoubtedly threatened by the popularity of his nephew. At a christening feast given by the Tzar’s brother-in-law, Ivan Vorotuinskie, on the 23rd April, the young hope of the Moskovites was seized with a deadly illness, and expired as soon as he had been carried to his own house. His friend and fellow-in-arms, de la Gardie, forced himself into the death-chamber, and, gazing wofully on his stricken comrade, exclaimed, “People of Moskva, not only in your Russia, but in the lands of my sovereign, I shall not see again such another man.” The heart-wail of the young soldier was echoed by the people, who mingled with their lamentations bitter and not unreasonable accusations of foul play against the Shouyskies. Ekaterina, wife of Dimitri Shouyskie, of the “viper brood” of Skouratov (she was daughter of Maluta), was generally credited with having administered poison to the unsuspecting Mikhail. To crown the universal resentment, Dimitri Shouyskie was given the vacant command of the tzarskie troops.
While the muttering roll of disaffection sounded louder every day on the Red Place and in the markets of the Kitai-gorod, in the west the Polish invaders (who had put forward Vladislav, son of Sigismund, as candidate for the throne of Moskva) were making themselves masters of the Russian border towns. Starodoub, Potchep, and Tchernigov were taken by assault, Novgorod-Sieverski and Roslavl “kissed the cross” to Vladislav. Against these advancing enemies it was necessary to oppose such force as could be rallied on behoof of the disliked and despised Tzar. An army of 40,000 Russians and 8000 Swedes, under the supreme command of the incompetent Dimitri Shouyskie, moved west towards Smolensk. They did not get far. Near Mojhaysk they were attacked by the royal hetman Jholkiewsko on the morning of the 23rd June and completely defeated, the Moskovite cavalry breaking at the first shock.[194] The German troops in de la Gardie’s following deserted to the enemy early in the battle; “the Poles advanced to their regiments crying, Kum! Kum! and the Germans came flying like birds to a call.”[195] The tzarskie voevodas, Shouyskie, Golitzuin, and Mezentzkie, galloped away into the forest, the first-named leaving his baggage, money, staff of command, and his furs in the hands of the victors. De la Gardie, regretting more than ever his lost comrade, surrendered to Jholkiewsko, and was permitted to return with his diminished battalions to the north. As a result of this decisive encounter Voloko-Lamsk, the Iosif monastery, and other places were forced to submit to the Polish commander. In the capital the effect was to hasten the downfall of the Shouyskie dynasty. The brothers Prokopie and Zakhar Liapounov, Rurik-descended nobles possessing immense influence in the province of Riazin, stirred up the Moskvitchi to depose Vasili on the ground that his rule had not restored peace to the land nor checked the spilling of Christian blood. The city was in a ferment; on the 17th of July the ferment came to a head. The kolokols clanged out from their bell-towers the curfew of the reign of Vasili Shouyskie, as they had sounded the death-knell of the first Ljhedimitri. The people, Liapounov led, surged in angry crowds from one point to another; gathering first beyond the Arbatskie gate, thence to the Kreml, where the Tzar vainly endeavoured to recall them to their fealty, back through the Red Place, they finally swarmed outside the Serpoukhovskie gate. There the assembled citizens—boyarins, clergy, traders, and lesser folk—decreed that the stop-gap Tzar must go. Vasili bowed before the storm and departed from the tzarskie palace to his hereditary mansion. To prevent the possibility of a reaction in his favour (he was known to be distributing money among the Strielitz) he was seized by Zakhar Liapounov two days later and forced to undergo tonsure and frocking in the monastery of the Ascension. Thus ignominiously disappeared the last Tzar of the line of S. Vladimir. The government of the city devolved upon a council of boyarins with Thedor Mstislavskie at their head; this was naturally only a provisional arrangement, and the most urgent business of the new Douma was to take steps to give the Moskovite empire the ruler necessary for its cohesion and administration. The choice lay practically between two evils; on the one hand was the exploited and discredited “Dimitri,” with his following of Don Kozaks and bandits, on the other the foreign Prince Vladislav, connected by birth and association with Russia’s two historically hostile neighbours. The common folk and peasants were ready to accept the former and shut their eyes to the gaps in the evidence connecting him with the child of Ouglitch; the boyarins and upper classes—the same aristocracy that had rebelled with pious horror against the Polish and Catholic taint of the first Ljhedimitri—turned their thoughts and inclinations more and more towards the son of Sigismund.
Undoubtedly the near neighbourhood of the pretender (he was then at Kolomensk) and the disposition of the people in his favour forced the hands of the boyarins, who feared that if they did not come speedily to terms with Vladislav the bestowal of the crown would be rudely diverted from their disposal. Their anxiety on this score smoothed the way for Jholkiewsko, who entered into negotiations from his camp at Mojhaysk on behalf of the Polish candidature. He was empowered to give solemn assurances for the upholding of the Orthodox religion, and to promise a share of the administration to the Douma, besides guaranteeing fair trial for all political offenders. In the teeth of the opposition of the Patriarch, and without recourse to the counsel of the citizens in general, still less with regard to the voices of the people as a whole, a small group of the Douma boyarins, Mstislavskie, Golitzuin, and Mezentzkie, and two secretaries of council, signed the treaty which placed the throne of Moskovy conditionally at the disposal of a Polish prince (17th August). Four years previously the Poles had been hunted down like wolves in the Kitai-gorod and Kreml, now the guardians of the State, fearing a popular outburst in favour of “the thief,” were only anxious to see the Polish hetman installed with his troops in the capital. As a precaution against another possible revolution, which might restore Vasili from his cloister-prison to the throne, the persons of the deposed Tzar and his brothers were handed over to Jholkiewsko and by him transmitted to Poland. On the 27th of August, on the road half-way between Moskva and the Polish camp, the oath of allegiance to Vladislav was sworn by a large number of the citizens and boyarins, and the example of the capital was followed by the provincial towns of Souzdal, Vladimir, Rostov, and others. A lingering hope on the part of the Russians that the new Tzar would adopt the Orthodox religion caused a hitch in the progress of the negotiations, and a large embassy, at the head of which was the Rostov Metropolitan, Filarete Romanov, and the kniaz Golitzuin, set out to wait upon Sigismund at his camp before Smolensk, which city still held out against his attack. The anxiety of the leading boyarins to complete a political manœuvre with which they had already gone too far to draw back, led them to take a step which left them no power to enforce their demands. The doubtful proposals of the Polish king, who began to covet the Russian crown for himself, had aroused strong symptoms of patriotic sedition in the capital, and the Douma, having for the moment appeased the irritated citizens, invited Jholkiewsko to bring his troops into Moskva. On the night of the 20th September the stroke was effected, and the people awoke next morning to find the Poles quietly established in the Kreml, Kitai-gorod, and White-town.
With a garrison at Moskva and others in some of the provincial towns, Sigismund felt certain of securing the crown of Monomachus, which it was now his object to obtain for himself. The voevoda and citizens of Smolensk, though ready to kiss the cross to Vladislav, still stubbornly defended their walls against the King, who had announced his intention of annexing the town to Poland. The Moskovite ambassadors stoutly refused to agree to this projected dismemberment, but in the extraordinary state of affairs they were unable to make any show of relieving the place. Since the days of the Mongol servitude Russia had not been in such a humiliating position. In the north a new trouble arose; the King of Sweden, seeing his ally Vasili deposed and Vladislav of Poland elected in his place, changed his good relations with the gosoudarstvo into open hostility, and sent an invading force into Russian territory. The northern voevodas, divided in their allegiance between the pretender and the Pole, offered an ineffective resistance to the Swedes, and Ladoga and Ivangorod fell into their hands. Meanwhile the weeks dragged on in lengthened negotiations, and the royal camp before Smolensk was the scene of as many intrigues and self-seeking subserviencies as had distinguished the impostor’s Court at Toushin. An unlooked-for event towards the close of the year rid Sigismund of a rival and the Moskovites of an embarrassment. 11th Dec.The false Dimitri, decoyed out hare-hunting on to the steppes by a Tartar who nursed against him a private enmity, was murdered on the lonely plain; his death broke up the camp at Kalouga, despite the efforts of the twice-widowed Marina to form a party on behalf of her infant son Ivan. For the most part the malcontents gave in their adhesion to the elected Tzar Vladislav. Sigismund had now no further excuse for prolonging the uncertainties and anxieties of an interregnum in a country already suffering from the effects of a long period of anarchy and revolution; his object seemed to be, however, to weary the Moskovites into an unconditional acceptance of his rule. From the beginning of the troubles he had played an ungenerous part and sown a fresh crop of bitter animosities between the two Slav nations—a crop which was to yield a rueful harvest to Poland. Threatened with a hostile league between Moskovy and Sweden, it was but natural that he should view with satisfaction the dawning of internal troubles in the former State, natural perhaps that he should give underhand support to the two successive impostors; natural also that he should attempt to secure for his son or himself the eastern Slav sovereignty. But the double-dealing and hypocrisy which marked his policy towards the Russian nation, before whom he posed as a friend and deliverer, while seeking to filch from its weakness an important frontier city, was scarcely worthy of the great House of Vasa, which was about to present to Europe so splendid a warrior.