♦Perfidy of Leopold.♦ The zeal of the king for the cause of the Emperor was cooled about this time by the marriage of the archduchess, who had been promised to Prince James, to the Elector of Bavaria. The queen[124] was impelled by her resentment to join the French party, and Leopold had too much cause to fear that she would induce John to make a separate peace. ♦Father Vota.♦ He therefore sent a Jesuit named Vota as his secret agent to the court of Warsaw. The mission of the holy father was not openly political; his journey was supposed to have been undertaken to convert the heretics of the Greek church; but the Emperor trusted that his literary and social talents would procure him an ascendancy over the king of Poland. He is described as a man of wide knowledge and wonderful powers of conversation; and his religious habits and unobtrusive demeanour preserved him from suspicion. He devoted himself to the king’s pleasure, and often slept on the floor of an ante-chamber in order to be at hand to entertain his weary hours. He easily kept him faithful to the league against the infidel, and hinted that the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia might, if subdued by his arms, become hereditary in his family. John knew well that they would merely become provinces of Poland; but he was anxious to extend her frontiers to the shores of the Black Sea. ♦The king tries to revive commerce.♦ In spite of the opposition of the nobles he wished to revive her commerce; and a mercantile treaty which he contemplated with Holland would have been assisted by the acquisition of a double sea-front. ♦Treaty with Muscovy.♦ By a treaty with Muscovy in this year (1686) he gave up Kiow and Smolensko, which had been long in her possession, for a large indemnity, and obtained promises of co-operation in his schemes of conquest. Posterity has blamed him for these concessions; but in his time such was the national contempt for the Muscovites that no danger was apprehended on their side.