Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/148

Byzantium had borne it, too, and it was the Empire of the East that Ivan dreamt of raising up once more in the new capital of the Orthodox world. Church literature had long been labouring towards this resurrection. In all books written in the Slav tongue the word tsar was used indifferently to denote the Kings of Judæa, the rulers of Assyria, Egypt, and Babylon, the Emperors of Constantinople and of Rome. At the same time, by perpetual insinuation, by cunningly-suggested freaks of fancy, the illusion of an historical descent connecting the rulers of Moscow with these predecessors filled the readers' imaginations, and slowly permeated the national mind. Was not Muscovy the 'Sixth Empire' mentioned in the Apocalypse? And had not the house of Rurik, before the days of Sophia Paleologus, won a right to the inheritance of the Porphyrogenetes, to that of Constantine the Great, and even to that of the Roman Cæesars themselves? We have seen that for centuries the idea of a 'third Rome' had been floating like a dream in the Slavonic world, and perpetually seeking some more definite form. After the fall of the Slav Empires in Bulgaria and Servia, after'the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula by the Turks, this dream was naturally driven northward. Cyprian the Bulgarian, sent in 1382 from Constantinople to Moscow to fill the Metropolitan see, brought with him the phraseology elaborated by Ephimus at Tyrnov, and found it was received by willing ears. Immediately after the fall of Constantinople, all those who had escaped the shipwreck of Southern Slavdom turned their final hopes in this direction. Pakhomii the Servian, in his turn, revealed a solemn recognition of the imperial title of the Moscow Sovereigns by the Emperor John Paleologus. Other writers set to work to bring the investiture into harmony with the sacred texts. They had already succeeded in applying these prophecies to Alexander of Bulgaria. It required less effort to transfer them from one Slav Prince to another. According to the Greek tradition, Ishmael was to be vanquished by a 'fair' people, and the word for 'fair' in Russian is roussyii. One of the best-known of the legends of Byzantine origin current among the Slav peoples—one which travelled westward in the German poem of Apollonius of Tyre, and the old French romances dealing with Oberon and Huon of Bordeaux, relates that the imperial Insignia of the Porphyrogenetes came from Babylon, whither the Eastern Emperor Leo had sent to fetch them. Other legends referred to the acquisition of these insignia by Vladimir Monomachus, or St. Vladimir. In the Stépiénnaia Kniga Macarius learnedly explains that Vladimir, when he was dying, confided this sacred treasure to his sixth son, George, so that he and his descendants might