On August 20, under the walls of Fellin, Kourbski met the flower of the Livonian nobility, gathered for one mighty effort, and crushed it at a blow. The fall of Fellin very soon afterwards gave him possession of the person of Fürstenberg, who had already resigned in Kettler's favour. The former Grand Master, with other prisoners of high rank—the Landmarschall Philip Schal von Bell, his brother, Werner Schal von Bell, Comtor of Goldringen, and Heinrich von Galen, Bailiff of Bauschenburg—was sent to Moscow, and treated, according to the Livonian chronicles, with great barbarity. The prisoners, we are told, after being led through the streets and beaten with iron rods, were put to further tortures, massacred, and their bodies left to be devoured by birds of prey. As regards Fürstenburg, this assertion is certainly disproved. He was not killed; he was given a landed property in the Government of Iaroslavl, and as late as 1575 he declared, in a letter to his brother, that he had no reason to complain. Some Danish Ambassadors happened to be at Moscow when he arrived there. They ascertained that the ex-Grand Master was being well treated, and on their return journey they testified to this effect before the magistrates of Revel. But they added that the other prisoners had been put to death.
These executions, we must admit, were logical, according to Ivan's view of the situation. As the progress of his arms in Livonia woke ancient memories, flattering to the national pride, the Tsar, not unnaturally, ended by looking on the possession of the country as his vested right, and its inhabitants as rebellious subjects of their legitimate lord. When the King of Denmark insisted on his own claim to Esthonia, did not Ivan reply that Iaroslav had established a far more valid claim 500 years before, when he built Iouriév, and covered the face of the country with Orthodox churches? Livonian and German authorities are unreliable, and Russian authorities, unfortunately, non-existent, as far as this war is concerned. It finds no echo even in the national poetry of the country. The fall of Kazan, the conquest of Siberia, and the interests, religious and economic, they involved, produced a far deeper effect on the imagination of a race which then, as now, was both realistic and mystic to a high degree. The realities to which the Livonian massacres, void of all brilliant feats of arms, led up, were nothing to it; they spoke neither to its mind nor to its heart.
Yet they were beginning to be clear enough in Ivan's brain. Three parts of the work of conquest were accomplished. Kettler and his comrades, reduced to a few strongholds in Livonia and threatened in Esthonia as well, applied, turn about, to the Emperor, to Denmark, Sweden, and Poland. Any chance of intervention seemed most problematical.
