The marriage of the sovereign of Moscow with the Greek princess was an event of great importance in Russian history. Properly speaking, an alliance with the Byzantine emperors was not a novelty, and such marriages, excepting the first of them--that of St. Vladimir--had no important consequences and changed nothing essential in Russian life. But the marriage of Ivan with Sophia was concluded under peculiar circumstances. In the first place, his bride did not come from Greece, but from Italy, and her marriage opened the way to intercourse between Muscovite Russia and the west. In the second place, the empire of Byzantium had ceased to exist, and the customs, political conceptions, the manners and ceremonies of court life, deprived of their original soil, sought a fresh field and found it in a country of a like faith--Russia. As long as Byzantium had existed, although Russia adopted her entire ecclesiastical system, yet in political respects she had always remained purely Russian, and the Greeks had no inclination to transform Russia into a Byzantium; now, however, that Byzantium no longer existed, the idea arose that Greece ought to re-incarnate herself in Russia and that the Russian monarchy ought to be a continuation by right of succession of Byzantium, in the same degree as the Russian Church was by order of succession bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of the Greek church. It happened opportunely that eastern Russia had freed herself from the subjugation of the Tatars precisely at the time when Byzantium was enslaved by the Turks, and there arose the hope that the youthful Russian monarchy, strengthened and consolidated, would become the chief mover in the liberation of Greece. The marriage of Sophia with the Russian grand prince thus acquired the signification of a transfer of the hereditary rights of the descendants of Palæologus to the ruling house of Russia. It is true that Sophia had brothers who had otherwise disposed of their hereditary rights; one of them, Manuel, had submitted to the Turkish sultan, another, Andrew, had twice visited Moscow, but had not stayed there long, and had gone to Italy and sold his hereditary rights, first to the French king Charles VIII, and afterwards to the Spanish Ferdinand the Catholic. But in the eyes of the orthodox a transfer of the rights of the Byzantine monarchs to Catholic kings could not be regarded as lawful; and such being the case a far greater right was represented by Sophia, who had remained faithful to orthodoxy, who was the wife of an orthodox sovereign, who must become and did become the mother and ancestress of his successors, and who during her lifetime earned the reproaches of the pope and his partisans, who had been greatly mistaken in counting on her mediation to bring Muscovite Russia into the Florentine union. THE GROWTH OF AUTOCRACY