At length the approach of winter froze the dividing river and left no further obstacle to defer the contest. But the final snapping of the Mongol yoke was to be effected in a manner which partook of the ridiculous rather than the heroic. Ivan gave orders to his boyarins to withdraw the army to a position more favourable for receiving the attack; the backward movement engendered a panic among the Russians, and the retreat was changed into a flight. On the other bank of the Ougr the Mongols were alarmed to find that the foe whom they had been watching so closely for months had suddenly vanished; a flank attack, a rear attack, some unseen horror, was evidently creeping upon them, and the hosts of Akhmet raced away from Moskovite soil as though all the saints of the Orthodox calendar had been mobilised against them. Ivan, like many another frozen-blooded strategist, had won by waiting, and might now turn his undivided and untrammelled energies towards the western foe. The dynasty of Yagiello had emerged from its lair in the Lit’uanian forests at a moment when the old reigning families of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia were dying out, and it seemed not unlikely that this new and vigorous stock would gather up the fallen threads of Piast, Arpad, and Premyslide, and weave together a powerful Slav-Magyar Empire. Already in outward appearance a considerable step towards this goal had been made. Kazimir Yagiellovitch had re-united the Polish and Lit’uanian lands under his sceptre, West Russia was entirely in his hands, Pomerellen and West Prussia had been wrested from the Order, and one of his sons filled the Bohemian throne; in Hungary his pretensions were only held in check by the vigour of Matthias Hunnyades. Against this wide-stretching dominion the Grand-principality of Moskva was pitted in a struggle as deadly as any that was waged between kindred species of life in far primæval days. And for this struggle Moskva was the more strongly equipped, despite her disparity of forces, by the solidly-wrought cohesion into which centuries of adversity had hammered her. Nor did her ruler rely for success on his own unaided resources; besides his familiar sprite of the steppes, the Krim Tartar Khan, Ivan drew into a league of suspended hostility Matthias of Hungary--the great stumbling-block to Polish expansion--and Stefan VI., Hospodar of Moldavia. The latter Prince, whose efforts had raised his country, almost for the first time in her chequered history, to a position of independence, and whose exploits against the Turks had gained for him, from Sixtus IV., the title of _l’Athlète du Christ_, was allied with the Moskovite princely family by the marriage of his daughter with the young Ivan, son of the Grand Prince by his first wife, Mariya of Tver. The outcome of these preparations was not open war; the two powers remained snarling at each other and watching for some favourable opportunity for attack. Ivan looked on complacently while Mengli-Girei