he cannot be accused of favouring Ivan. He had been hospitably received by a countryman of his own who lived in a house near the suburb. One day, when everybody was at dinner, the quarter was invaded by a troop of warriors, all dressed in black. They were headed by the Tsar, with his son and several important men. In a moment every house was being sacked and the inhabitants turned out of doors, stripped of their clothing. Men, women, and children, all stark naked, fled to seek shelter from the bitter cold.
The order was that the houses were to be sacked, but that nobody was to be hurt, yet they were pursued and struck without mercy. Several men dealt Boch blows in the face with their fists, and he was whipped all over his body and quite disfigured. He had been stripped of his clothes like the rest, was dragged out of the hiding-place he had found, flogged several times over in the course of the night, and tormented in every kind of way, till, when the day broke, a Livonian nobleman interfered, took him out of his torturers' hands, and got a surgeon to attend to him.
The scene thus described is revolting enough, but my readers will perceive a difference. There are no violations of women, no massacres; all we have is a police operation rather roughly carried out, after the fashion of those times. Boch asserts it to have been caused by the Metropolitan, who had declared the foreigners were debauching the Tsar's soldiery in their drinking-shops. Oderborn and Horsey have evidently embroidered on a web which stood in no need of any such over-ornamentation, and taking them thus in the very act of inventing their slanders, we attain a certainty as to the truthfulness of other testimony of similar origin.
Summary and violent, excessive and extravagant, was the chastisement administered by Ivan the Terrible, and we cannot justify it. The Sinodik of the Monastery of St. Cyril alone enumerates 3,470 of the Tsar's victims, and many names are followed by the words, which make one shiver: 'With his wife'; 'with his wife and children'; 'with his daughters'; 'with his sons.' We find, too, such sentences as these: 'Kazarine Doubroyski and his two sons, with ten men who had come to his help'; 'twenty men belonging to the village of Kolomenskoié'; 'eighty belonging to Matviéiché. …' And under the head of Novgorod we read: 'Remember, Lord, the souls of Thy servants, inhabitants ofthis town, to the number of fifteen hundred and five persons'! Thus did Louis XI. pray for his brother, the Duc de Berry!
In other documents Ivan leaves the exact number of souls to the Divine knowledge, and simply recommends 'the dead,
