craved her support, gradually drew her—unconsciously, or almost against her will—further and further eastward, to new fields of action, which, one by one, perpetually widened the frontiers of her all-absorbing hegemony.
The emigrant colonists followed the progress of this policy, step by step, and now and then even outstripped it. From the banks of the Don and the Terek, where they had already taken root, they spread to the Crimea, to the very gates of Azov, in never-ending enlargement of the sphere called the kazatchina—the Fatherland of the whole floating population of the Empire, a Fatherland of indefinite limits and continually changing borders. The power of the system of territorial aggrandizement thus set in motion was tremendous. But it contained an element of danger.
VI.—The Cossacks.
The authority wielded by the metropolis over this element, so variable and turbulent in its nature, was purely nominal, and destined long so to remain. It was not till 1570 that Novossiltsov, one of Ivan's lieutenants, was to endue it with a little more coherence on the banks of the Don, and it was the third centenary of this event which the present army of the Don celebrated some thirty-four years since. But even in 1577, Ivan was obliged to send Mourachkine with a whole army corps to put down the brigandage and violence of his unruly subjects, and it was then, as it is believed, that Ermak and his comrades, the future conquerors of Siberia, to escape just reprisals, took refuge with the Stroganovs, other colonists of a different type, whose huge possessions touched the borders of Asia.
This led the way to a fresh, and still greater conquest; but meanwhile, the behaviour of these Cossacks and their arbitrary enterprises forced Moscow into an inevitable struggle with the last remnants of the Tartar power. Unable to make Ermak and his armed thousands on the Crimean border bend to his will, Ivan was fain to take the initiative in a duel which was not to end till Catherine II. sat on the Russian throne. As early as 1555—a prelude to the expeditions led by Galitzine and Münnich—he sent out 13,000 men under Chérémétiev. As always happened in such circumstances, the Khan, the swifter and bolder of the two, forestalled his opponent, beat a retreat before the Tsar, but inflicted a serious defeat on his lieutenant. This did not prevent a Cossack detachment, under the diak Rjevski, from making a reconnaissance as far as Otchakoy, and stirring lively emotion and an outbreak of warlike feeling among the Little Russians along the banks of the Dnieper. Then came the turn of a subject of the Polish King's,
