In 1570 a man reported that Novgorod contemplated going over to Poland. A letter to that effect would, he said, be found hidden behind a picture in a certain monastery. Ivan’s servants found the letter where the man had put it, and the Tsar and his troops moved grimly to Novgorod. Priests and monks were brutally flogged, so that many of them died, and then the citizens were brought, in batches of a hundred, before the Tsar. Some were roasted over slow fires in the great square, where once the _Véché_ had been held: others were driven in sledges, the children tied to their mothers, down an incline into the icy river, where soldiers with pikes saw that none escaped death. The horror lasted five weeks, and so vaguely terrible was the city’s recollection of it that the number of victims is variously stated as 500, 3,000, 60,000, and even 700,000. The Archbishop of the city is said to have been sewn in a bear-skin and flung to the dogs, but many of the stories of the time--of Ivan stabbing babes and raping mothers, of his soldiers using white-hot lances, and so on--may be figments of the horrified imagination. Ivan, we must remember, was not a burly monster, cruel from his own indifference to suffering. He was rather a nervous, calculating man, shrinking behind soldiers chosen for their brutality, coldly following a policy of terror. When he had sacked the shops and palaces, and ravaged the whole territory of Novgorod, he turned upon Pskoff. It is recorded to his credit that he murdered none in that innocent city, but he relieved it of its wealth and banished many of the leading citizens. He entered Moscow with all the pomp of a great Roman conqueror, and soon set up his bloody tribunal in the capital. Hundreds were executed, and the most barbarous torture was inflicted even upon women.