thickest around the tzarskie palace. In the last quarter of a century which had witnessed the opening up of far scarce-dreamt-of regions by daring European explorers, the century of Cortez and Pizarro, of the bold sea-captains who shed lustre on “the spacious days of great Elizabeth,” the Russian Tzarstvo was swollen by the haphazard conquest of the vast Sibirian “province;” a province which “comprises about a thirteenth part of the globe, and is almost 3,000,000 square miles larger than the whole of Russia in Europe, including both Poland and Finland.”[173] Nor was this huge region of the north, this “land of the long nights,” as the Chinese had called it in the remote past of their history, a barren and unprofitable possession; mines of salt, copper, and silver, forests stocked with valuable fur-bearing animals, and watered by navigable rivers and large fish-yielding lakes, and in some districts tracts of fertile arable land, compensate for the awful desolation which spreads over the greater part of it during the long winter. For many centuries the Russians had tapped at the outer fringe of this unexplored wilderness, and the enterprising folk of Novgorod had brought some of its produce into their markets; the later Grand Princes had put forward claims to a shadowy sovereignty over the principality or khanate of Sibir (a town on the Irtuish), and Ivan himself had kept an eye on this _ultima Thule_ of the Moskovite forests. The Stroganovs, descendants of a merchant family of Tartar extraction who had settled in the oblast of Perm, were granted powers of administration over as much territory as they could reclaim from the tribes on their frontier, and a system of patient pioneering was carried on for some twenty years. The happy idea of utilising the restless military energies of the Don Kozaks, who were a scourge alike to their Tartar and Russian neighbours, in more thoroughly exploiting the Sibirian country, occurred to the administrators of the Moskovite outpost; an invitation was sent to a band of these freebooters, who had made their own country too hot to hold them, to turn their weapons against the “infidels” who were resisting the encroachments of the White-Russian traders. [Sidenote: 1579] The Kozaks, headed by a chief named Ermak, responded readily to an offer which promised them full indulgence of their fighting and marauding instincts, with the additional advantage of official sanction. They were outlaws most of them, and would have been put to lingering deaths if they had strayed into the clutches of Moskva, and the Tzar was highly scandalised at their employment in his service; he showed himself, however, to be of a forgiving disposition when, with a few hundred followers, the intrepid Ermak had conquered for him the vast north-eastern province. [Sidenote: 1581] The Kozak chief, still struggling to hold and extend the territories he had won, received as a mark of Ivan’s approval a