Ivan's foes aimed at his heart in front and struck at him from behind, and he did not always content himself with giving back blow for blow. Even in the popular poetry, which treats him with so much indulgence, the feeling that the Tsar, 'after he had punished for injustice and rewarded for justice,' grew more cruel, and ceased to assign favour and chastisement in proportion to the faults and virtues with which he had to deal, becomes evident (Kiriéiévski, 'Collection of Songs,' Moscow, 1860–1862, part vi., p. 2015). But Ivan, hovering like a spectre over a heap of corpses against a red background of aurora borealis, is no isolated phenomenon, either in his country or his century. In his own country, even as the renewer of the methods of Nineveh and Babylon, the brutal proscriber of whole populations dragged from Novgorod to Moscow, or from Pskov to Riazan, he was only carrying on a tradition. Vassili, before him, had done the same thing with hundreds of families—taken them out of the same provinces, sent them into the interior of the country, and filled their places with others brought from the basin of the Volga. Thirty years before the Opritchnina came into existence, Maximus the Greek speaks of imaginary crimes imputed to innocent persons, and visited on them. When the Tsar's agents wanted a culprit they introduced a corpse or a stolen object into the house indicated, and the justice of the Sovereign took its course.
Ivan, in the course of his own century, had examples and imitators in a score of European countries, and the opinion of his time was his accomplice. Look at Italy. Read Chaplain Burckhard's notes, written in cold blood as he sat between Alexander VI. and the Borgias; or the ironic, easy-going despatches of Giustiniani, the Venetian Ambassador; or the cynical memoirs of such a man as Cellini. Make your way to Ferrara, the most refined Court of the period: you may happen on Cardinal Hyppolite d'Este, his own brother Giulio's rival in a love affair, having that brother's eyes torn out in his own presence. Look through the records of the giustizie of that time, and you will find the horrors of the Red Square equalled, if not surpassed—men burnt and hanged at the same moment, bleeding limbs crushed betwixt two pulleys. … All these things were done in broad daylight, and nobody was surprised, nobody was horrified, nobody rose up in indignation against them.
Now go to the other end of the continent—to Sweden, Eric XIV.—a great King till madness overtook him—awaits you there, with a Maliouta-Skouratov of his own, Persson, his favourite, both of them just out of the famous bath of blood of the year 1520—ninety-four bishops, senators, and patricians, all executed at Stockholm in one day. Next, John III. appears,
