to fly across the Don to Medvieditz with a few followers, leaving his baggage train, standards, and many prisoners in the victor’s hands. The chronicles give a somewhat different account of the matter, and relate that the rebel leader repulsed the tzarskie troops and retired in good order to Astrakhan, leaving a devastated country behind him. Whatever the actual result of the fighting, the disturbing element was at least removed from the heart of the empire, and the authorities at Moskva were able to open up negotiations with the Kozaks of the Don and Volga for the purpose of detaching them from the cause of Zaroutzkie and Marina and enlisting their services against the Lit’uanian enemy. The Tzar sent them messengers with his flag and exhortations to withdraw their allegiance from heretics and traitors; more to the purpose, he was able to send them supplies of cloth, provisions, saltpetre, and lead. The Kozaks greeted the Tzar’s name with a display of loyalty, and accepted his presents, but they did not show a readiness to enroll themselves under his flag; there seemed indeed a possibility that Zaroutzkie would succeed in gathering under his leadership the Volga and Don freebooters and the Tartars of Kazan, and thus shut in the struggling tzarstvo between his forces on the east and those of Poland on the west. Letter after letter was sent from Moskva to the men of the steppe, and appeals were made to their patriotism, their religion, and their cupidity. The downfall of Zaroutzkie and his party was brought about, however, by other agency; in dusty Astrakhan, where Marina and her third consort held their rebel Court, the townsfolk, resentful of the violence of the Volga Kozaks who were quartered on them, rose in rebellion. Zaroutzkie was driven into the stone town, and, on the approach of a body of Moskovite strielitz, the Astrakhanese kissed the cross and beat the forehead to the Tzar Mikhail. The desperate adventurers escaped from the toils which were gathering round them, and fled with a small number of adherents along the wooded banks of the Volga. Odoevskie had arrived on the scene with fresh forces, and a hot pursuit was kept up on the track of the fugitives. At the end of June the enemies of Russia’s peace—Zaroutzkie, the ambition-borne Marina, and her four-year-old son—fell into the hands of their pursuers, and were brought back in triumph to Astrakhan. The bold and stubborn Kozak kniaz ended his wild career by the horrible death of impalement, and the Polish ex-Tzaritza was torn from her child and sent in chains to Moskva, closing her chequered course in a dungeon of the city which she had entered as a monarch’s bride. Her luckless infant, the last and fittest victim of the catastrophe of Ouglitch, swung on a gibbet on the road that runs towards Serpoukhov, a tender and pitiful morsel of gallows-fruit for the Volga daws to peck at. The fate of Zaroutzkie and the extinction of the last pale ghostling of a race of spectres did not immediately deter the wild spirits of the steppes from struggling against the elements of order, so long absent from the land. Bands of Kozaks, swelled into an army by drafts of Russian freebooters and fugitive serfs, border raiders and Tcherkesses, raised anew the flag of rebellion and discord, and were not dispersed till an over-bold rush towards Moskva brought upon them a decisive defeat on the banks of the Loujha (September 1614). At the same time Lisovskie kept alive the cause of the Polish prince and made the Sieverskie land the base of operations for his light and seasoned troops. Nor was the outlook more hopeful in the north; besides Great Novgorod and the Water-ward (one of the five districts appertaining to that city), the Swedes held Keksholm, Ivangorod, Yam, Kopor’e, Ladoga, and Staraia Rousa. The Novgorodskie, who had handed themselves over to the Swedish prince on the supposition that he would be chosen Tzar of Russia, found themselves, by the election of Mikhail, confronted with the alternative of revolt against their accepted sovereign or separation from Moskovy. The citizens would willingly have chosen the former course, but the Swedes were in forcible possession, and, like the porcupine of the fable, were in no way disposed to quit the quarters into which they had been admitted. Faced with the necessity of increasing their field forces to cope with the enemies who threatened them on every side, the Russian executive were obliged to make further calls upon the resources of the gosoudarstvo; the north-eastern province, the youngest of all the Russian territories, responded manfully to the Tzar’s requisitions, but for the most part the other taxing grounds yielded poor returns. Equally unproductive was the experiment in liquor dealing, by which the Government sought to augment their revenue by monopolising the distilling and sale of wines and spirits. In another direction they were more successful in seeking for assistance; shortly after Mikhail’s coronation the young Tzar’s counsellors, recalling the terms of friendship which had existed aforetime between the rulers of Moskovy and the Tudor sovereigns of England, dispatched an embassy to the Stewart prince who had stepped into the inheritance of the latter dynasty. King James was appealed to by his brother monarch for urgently needed supplies of gunpowder, money, lead, sulphur, and other munitions with which to carry on the war of self-defence, and also for the exertion of his good services for the arrangement of an accommodation with Sweden. It was characteristic of the British negotiators that they instinctively sought to obtain concessions for their merchants to trade through Russian waterways direct with Persia, India, and China, characteristic perhaps of the Moskovites that they temporised, raised obstacles, and finally granted nothing. It was also an honourable episode in the not too satisfactory foreign dealings of the Stewarts that the refusal did not alienate the good offices which were put forward on behalf of the Tzar. In August 1614 John Merrick, a recently knighted merchant who was well acquainted with Moskva, came to that city with full powers from the King of Great Britain for opening negotiations between Sweden and Russia. Holland had also been approached on the same subject, and Merrick was joined at Novgorod by the Dutch ambassador van Brederode. At the same time that the Russian Government was seeking the intervention and aid of the northern sea powers, its agents were casting about among the military states of south-eastern Europe with a similar object. So far had the dream of a crusade against the Crescent faded away from Moskovite imagination before the nightmare of present woes, that the young Tzar and his counsellors were anxious to league their forces with those of the Sultan and the Tartar Khan against the King of Poland, and negotiations were set on foot at Constantinople for that purpose. 1615The Emperor, who was appealed to with the view of obtaining by diplomacy what the Turks did not seem likely to effect by war, accepted the post of mediator, and a meeting of the Russian and Polish ambassadors was held at Smolensk, under the presidency of the imperial representative, Erasmus Handelius. As the Poles began by demanding that Vladislav should be recognised as Tzar of Russia, the negotiations did not proceed very far, and the German returned to his master with the report that “you might so well try to reconcile fire and water.” An irregular warfare of an extraordinary character preluded the opening of a more serious campaign between the two hate-hounded States. The firebrand Lisovskie kindled the blaze of strife and devastation once more in the Sieverskie country, and with his light horsemen, innured to fatigue and rapid marches, flitted like a will-o’-the-wisp before the pursuing troops of Dimitri Pojharskie. Hunted out of the Sieverski border, he passed swiftly northward by Smolensk and Viasma, harried the slobodas of Rjhev, turned towards Ouglitch, and subsequently burst through between Yaroslavl and Kostroma and laid Souzdal in ashes; from thence he hied into the Riazan province, beat off the attacks of the Moskovite voevodas, and dashed back into Lit’uania by way of Toula and Serpoukhov. In the north meanwhile the walls of Pskov had once more proved a bulwark against the tide of Russia’s misfortunes, and the military talents which the young Gustav-Adolf had already commenced to display were unable to bring about the reduction of that stronghold. This check, together with the Polish and Danish wars in which Sweden was involved, inclined the King to be more favourably disposed towards a reasonable accommodation than his cousin of Poland had shown himself, and the peace negotiations which the English and Dutch representatives set afoot were more hopeful of result than those of Smolensk. The foreign envoys saw in the miserable desolation of the border districts through which they travelled evidence of the distress with which Moskovy was still afflicted. Save bands of Kozaks skulking in the woods, the country-side was devoid of human habitants; of the native population only unburied corpses remained, and at night the howling of congregated wolves and other beasts of prey resounded on all sides. The once thriving town of Staraia Rousa was a heap of ruined houses and churches, haunted by an under-fed remnant of scarcely 100 men. Such were the scenes amid which the ambassadors of the two contending nations and their mediators commenced their attempts at mutual accommodation. The cool-headed and business-like qualities of the British representative were perhaps the deciding factor in the protracted negotiations, and towards the end of 1616 Merrick was able to bring the opposing elements together in the village of Stolbova to discuss the final terms of peace. 1617In February the following year the treaty of Stolbova was
