state was restored; the Khanates of Astrakhan and Kasan were conquered and finally annexed to Russia; the Don Cossacks were united with the empire, and Yermak, one of their chiefs, invaded and acquired for Ivan the vast regions of Siberia. The extent of Russia at Ivan's accession, was 37,000 German square miles: at his death, it was 144,000. But so little was Russia then heeded or known in Western Europe, that the charter given by Philip and Mary to the first company of English merchants trading thither purports to be granted "upon the discovery of the said country;" likening it to some region of savages which civilised man might then tread for the first time amid the American wilderness. Yet even at that period, those who watched the immense extent of the crude materials for warlike power, which the Czar of Muscovy possessed, the numbers, the rugged hardihood of his people, their implicit obedience to their autocrat, their endurance of privations, and the nature of the country so difficult for an invader, expressed their forebodings of the peril to which the independence of other states might be exposed by Muscovite ambition, if once those rude masses acquired the arms and the discipline of civilised war.*

* Richard Chancellor, who sailed with Sir Hugh Willoughby in search of a North-East Passage, and who travelled from Archangel up to Moscow, and afterwards resided at Ivan's court, in his curious account of the Russians (published in Hakluyt's Voyages, vol. i. p. 239), after mentioning the immense number of troops which the Muscovite Duke raised for war, and their endurance of hard fare and cold, graphically describes their want of discipline. He says: "They are men without all order in the field, for they run hurling on heaps." He afterwards says: "Now, what might be made of these men, if they were broken to order, and knowledge of civil warres? If this prince had within his country such men as could make them understand the thing aforesaid, I do believe that two of the best or greatest princes in Christendom were

It is melancholy to recognise in the fate of Poland and so many other countries the truth of the words used by the Polish King, Sigismund, nearly three centuries ago, when, in remonstrating with England for supplying the Czar with military engineers and stores, he called him "the Muscovite, the hereditary enemy of all free nations." *

The Russians, at the time of Selim's accession, had been involved in fierce and frequent wars with the Sultan's vassals, the Crim Tartars; but the Porte had taken no part in these contests. But the bold genius of the Vizier Sokolli now attempted the realisation of a project, which, if successful, would have barred the southern progress of Russia, by firmly planting the Ottoman power on the banks of the Don and the Volga, and along the shores of the Caspian Sea. The Turkish armies, in their invasions of Persia, had always suffered severely during their march along the sterile and

not well able to match with him, considering the greatness of his power, and the hardiness of his people, and straite living both of man and horse, and the small charges which his warres stand him in." In another page (240), Chancellor says of the Russians : If they knew their strength, no man were able to make match with them; nor they that dwell near them should have any rest of them. But I think it is not God's will. For I may compare them to a horse, that knoweth not his strength, whom a little child ruleth and guideth with a bridle for all his great strength; that if he did [know it] neither man nor child could rule him."

* "Hostem non modo regni nostri temporarium sed etiam omnium nationum liberarum hæreditarium Moscum." The letter of Sigismund to Queen Elizabeth is cited in the recent work of the Russian Dr. Hamel on "England and Russia." In another letter of Sigismund's, translated by Hakluyt (see Hamel, p. 185), the Polish King says of the Czar: "We seemed hitherto to vanquish him only in this, that he was rude of arts and ignorant of policies. If so be that this navigation to the Narva continue, what shall be unknowen to him? The Moscovite, made more perfect in warlike affaires with engines of warre and shippes, will slay or make bound all that shall withstand him which God defend."

mountainous regions of Upper Armenia and Mazerbijan. Some disputes with Persia had arisen soon after Selim's accession, which made a war with that kingdom seem probable and Sokolli proposed to unite the rivers. Don and Volga by a canal, and then send a Turkish armament up the sea of Azoph and the Don, thence across by the intended channel to the Volga, and then down the latter river into the Caspian; from the southern shores of which sea the Ottomans might strike at Tabriz and the heart of the Persian power. Those two mighty rivers, the Don and the Volga, run towards each other, the one from the north-west, the other from the north-east, for many hundred leagues, until they are within thirty miles of junction. They then diverge; and the Don (the "extremus Tanais" of the ancients), pours its waters into the Sea of Azoph, near the city of that name; the Volga blends with the Caspian, at a little distance from the city of Astrakhan, which is built on the principal branch of the Delta of that river. The project of uniting them by a canal is said to have been one entertained by Seleucus Nicator, one of the ablest of the successors of Alexander the Great. It was now revived by the Grand Vizier of Selim II.; and though the cloud of hostility with Persia passed over, Sokolli determined to persevere with the scheme: the immense commercial and political advantages of which, if completed, to the Ottoman empire, were evident to the old statesman of Solyman the Great. Azoph already belonged to the Turks, but in order to realise the great project entertained, it was necessary to occupy Astrakhan also. Accordingly,

three thousand Janissaries and twenty thousand horse were sent to besiege Astrakhan, and a co-operative force of thirty thousand Tartars was ordered to join them, and to aid in making the canal. Five thousand Janissaries and three thousand pioneers were at the same time sent to Azoph to commence and secure the great work at its western extremity. But the generals of Ivan the Terrible did their duty to their stern master ably in this emergency. The Russian garrison of Astrakhan sallied on its besiegers, and repulsed them with considerable loss. And a Russian army, fifteen thousand strong, under Prince Serebinoff, came suddenly on the workmen and Janissaries near Azoph, and put them to headlong flight. It was upon this occasion that the first trophies won from the Turks came into Russian hands. An army of Tartars, which marched to succour the Turks, was also entirely defeated by Ivan's forces; and the Ottomans, dispirited by their losses and reverses, withdrew altogether from the enterprise. Their Tartar allies, who knew that the close neighbourhood of the Turks would ensure their own entire subjection to the Sultan, eagerly promoted the distaste, which the Ottomans had acquired for Sokolli's project, by enlarging on the horrors of the climate of Muscovy, and especially on the peril, in which the short summer nights of those northern regions placed either the soul or the body of the true believer. As the Mahometan law requires the evening prayer to be said two hours after sunset, and the morning prayer to be repeated at the dawn of day, it was necessary that a Moslem should, in a night of only three hours long (according to the Tartars), either lose his

natural rest, or violate the commands of his Prophet. The Turks gladly re-embarked, and left the unpropitious soil; but a tempest assailed their flotilla on its homeward voyage, and only seven thousand of their whole force ever returned to Constantinople.

Russia was yet far too weak to enter on a war of retaliation with the Turks. She had subdued the Tartar Khanates of Kasan and Astrakhan; but their kinsmen of the Crimea were still formidable enemies to the Russians, even without Turkish aid. It was only two years after the Ottoman expedition to the Don and Volga, that the Khan of the Crimea made a victorious inroad into Russia, took Moscow by storm, and sacked the city (1571). The Czar Ivan had, in 1570, sent an ambassador, named Nossolitof, to Constantinople, to complain of the Turkish attack on Astrakhan, and to propose that there should be peace, friendship, and alliance between the two empires. Nossolitof, in addressing the Viziers, dwelt much on the toleration which his master showed to Mahometans in his dominions, as a proof that the Czar was no enemy to the faith of Islam. The Russian ambassador was favourably received at the Sublime Porte, and no further hostilities between the Turks and Russians took place for nearly a century. But the Ottoman pride and contempt for Russia were shown by the Sultan omitting to make the customary inquiry of Nossolitof respecting his royal master's health, and by the Czar's representative not receiving the invitation to a dinner before audience, which was usually sent to ambassadors. Besides his project for uniting the Volga and the