in spite of the remonstrances of his advisers, set off on a course of shrine visiting, taking with him his unfortunate offspring, who was scarcely of an age to stand such energetic piety. In fact he died on the journey. The pilgrimage of Ivan was, if the chroniclers and some of the later historians are to be believed, disastrous in another fashion. Among the religious establishments visited was the Piesnoshkie monastery, wherein was caged an interesting prisoner. Vassian, Bishop of Kolumna in the reign of Vasili, had been deprived of his episcopal office during the time of the regencies on account of his evil life; now, in the decrepitude of age, he is represented as harbouring with unquenched passion the unholy frettings of a sin-warped mind. Ivan desired an interview with the hoary reprobate; perhaps after a course of devotions among a community of irreproachable saints, living and departed, he was attracted by the rare personality of a sometime bishop who was no better than he should be. The monk-with-a-past seized the grand opportunity to poison the monarch’s mind against his boyarins, his relations, and his subjects, and Ivan drank in with greedy ears the vicious counsels of the unhallowed recluse. It is a fascinating picture, the aged priest who had eaten his heart out in helpless bitterness these many years, and chafed against the restraint of his prison-cell, given at last one deadly moment of revenge in which to work a superb evil against the society that had mishandled him. And as the Tzar went out from his presence a changed man, might not the ex-prelate have flung a crowning blasphemy at his heaven and chanted exultingly _nunc dimittis_? Ivan, indeed, in the hands of the chroniclers, is a creature easily swayed; a monk from Novgorod tells him to be good, and he straightway abandons the wrong-headed sins of his wayward youth and becomes an exemplary monarch, till a monk of Piesnoshkie gives him dark and evil counsel, and sends him forth upon the world with a cankered, blood-lusting soul. The Tzar’s return to health was accompanied by a return of Moskovite prosperity. Another Tzarevitch, Ivan, replaced the dead Dimitri; Kazan was gradually Kozaked into submission, and received a bishop as a mark of special favour. Another conquest equally important was achieved without bloodshed. The Astrakhanese having insulted the envoys of Moskovy, a small but well-equipped army was sent against them, with the result that this khanate, once the head-country of the redoubtable Golden Horde, acknowledged Ivan’s sovereignty and yielded equal rights in the Volga fishery to his Great Russian subjects. [Sidenote: 1554]The Nogai Tartars, occupying the intermediate steppes, submitted at the same time to the Moskovite dominion, and the Russian state, still cut off from the Black Sea, to which in the tenth century it had given its name,[143] wriggled its way down to the Kaspian.