Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century

We have now arrived at Ivan’s last great contest — that with Lithuania. Beginning with his accession to the throne, it ended only some years before his death. During thirty years he confined this contest to a war of diplomacy, fomenting and improving the internal dissensions between Lithuania and Poland, drawing over disaffected Russian feudatories of Lithuania, and paralysing his foe by stirring up foes against him; Maximilian of Austria, Mathias Corvinus of Hungary; and above all, Stephen, the hospodar of Moldavia, whom he had attached to himself by marriage; lastly, Menghi-Ghirei, who proved as powerful a tool against Lithuania as against the Golden Horde. On the death of king Casimir, however, and the accession of the weak Alexander, when the thrones of Lithuania and Poland became temporarily disjoined; ^[118] when those two countries had crippled each other’s forces in mutual strife; when the Polish nobility, lost in its efforts to weaken the royal power on the one hand, and to degrade the kmetons and citizens on the other, deserted Lithuania, and suffered it to recede before the simultaneous incursions of Stephen of Moldavia and of Menghi-Ghirei; when thus the weakness of Lithuania had become palpable; then Ivan understood the opportunity had ripened for putting out his strength, and that conditions exuberated for a successful explosion on his part. Still he did not go beyond a theatrical demonstration of war-the assemblage of overwhelming forces. As he had completely foreseen, the feigned desire of combat did now suffice to make Lithuania capitulate. He extorted the acknowledgment by treaty of the encroachments, surreptitiously made in king Casimir’s time, and plagued Alexander at the same time with his alliance and with his daughter.^[119] The alliance he employed to forbid Alexander the defence against attacks instigated by the father-in-law, and the daughter to kindle a religious war between the intolerant Catholic king and his persecuted subjects of the Greek confession. Amidst this turmoil he ventured at last to draw the sword, and seized the Russian appanages under Lithuanian sway as far as Kiev and Smolensk.^[120]

The Greek religion generally proved one of his most powerful means of action. But to lay claim to the inheritance of Byzantium, to hide the stigma of Mongolian serfdom under the mantle of the Porphyrogeniti, to link the upstart throne of Muscovy to the glorious empire of St. Vladimir to give in his own person a new temporal head to the Greek Church, whom of all the world should Ivan single out? The Roman Pope. At the Pope’s court there dwelt the last princess of Byzantium. From the Pope Ivan embezzled her by taking an oath to apostatise — an oath which he ordered his own primate to release him from. ^[121]