Novgorod and Pskov was diverted to Revel and the Livlandish towns.[103] Skandinavian affairs next engaged the Grand Prince’s attention, and the embarrassments of Sweden offered an opportunity for wiping off old scores with that ancient enemy. Under the administration of the Regent Sture the Swedes had broken away from the Kalmar Union, and refused to acknowledge as their sovereign Johann, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and King of Denmark and Norway; with this monarch Ivan entered into an active alliance, and the bleak uplands and marsh-choked forests of Finland became the scene of an obstinate war. Ivangorod, the newly-built Russian frontier fortress and the Swedish outpost of Viborg were in turn besieged by the belligerents, and the Finns experienced the calamities to which border peoples are particularly liable. Neither side gained any important advantage, and the war was brought to a sudden termination by the election of Johann to the crown of Sweden. The influence of Byzantine ideas which had permeated the Moskovite Court showed itself in a series of sinister developments, which closely reproduced the palace intrigues for which the Greek capital had been infamous. [Sidenote: (1490)] By the death of the young Ivan, son of the Grand Prince by his first wife, the heirship in the direct line had devolved upon the former’s infant son, Dimitri; a formidable competitor existed, however, in Vasili, eldest son of Ivan by his second marriage, and herein lay the constituents of a pretty succession dispute, in which of course the two mothers, Elena of Moldavia and Sophie Paleologus, urged with inconvenient insistency the claims of their respective sons. The law of hereditary succession was an exotic plant on Russian soil, and men’s ideas were not yet sufficiently fixed to remove all question of doubt on the subject. For a comparatively newly established Court matters were carried through with remarkable correctness of detail. Plots were discovered--or imagined, tortures extracted confessions, guilty boyarins yielded up their lives on the banks of the river Moskva, Sophie and her son were disgraced, and the child Dimitri solemnly crowned as Ivan’s successor. The latter decision may have been influenced by a desire to “keep in” with the Hospodar Stefan, rather than by any scrupulous regard for hereditary rights, but at least it shows how little the heirship-of-the-Cæsars idea had taken hold of Moskovite minds. [Sidenote: 1499] Renewed intrigues brought about a reaction, Sophie and her son were restored to the light of the Grand Prince’s countenance, and another batch of executions and imprisonments, among the Dimitri party this time, restored peace and happiness to the domestic circle. Vasili was decorated with the title of Prince of Novgorod and Pskov, and the succession remained for the present a reopened question.