personality is swallowed up in that of the Grand Prince. But the influence of the Greek Princess can be traced in many of the important developments of this reign. Born amid the extravagant ceremonial of the Byzantine Court, and treasuring the memory of those splendid myths and vanities, the more perhaps because they were wholly lost, the exile transplanted to the rugged soil of Moskovy the ideals that had waxed to fantastic growth on the humid shores of the Bosphorus. The Velikie-kniaz of yore, moving freely among his boyarins and subjects, develops gradually into the heaven-born Sovereign, a being removed from contact with the ordinary sons of earth, withdrawn from profane touch into a Holy of Holies of pomp and ceremony. Here again Ivan was manifestly fitted to assist in working out this evolution. His cold-blooded, calculated policy, his pitiless, passionless judgment, his baleful glance, which is said to have caused women to faint, were meet attributes of a majesty that was accounted something more than human. Under the influence of the new Byzantine and Italian ideas which the Grand Prince imbibed from the inspiration of his consort and her Court followers, Moskva received new buildings and adornments, a new Cathedral of the Assumption (Ouspienskie Sobor), a new Kreml, new ordnance, new coinage. Received also new laws, new punishments; the old repugnance against taking life, expressed in the testament of Monomachus, gave way to artistically conceived executions and tortures. Heretics were put to death in a manner that the Inquisitors of Western Europe might have been proud to own--roasted gently in a cage, for example, or, if allowed to live, deprived of their unruly tongues. Knout and axe made their appearance in the penal code, flesh and blood cheapened in the market of civil life. Such were the results of the union of the last of the Caesars with the first of the Tzars. The outward expression of this alliance was the adoption on the Prince’s seals of the double-headed eagle, the arms of the defunct eastern empire; a cognisance which had, since the days of Karl the Great, been also the distinguishing device of the western empire.[97]