—to Batory, who refused to enter into any definite arrangement with him. Until 1583, when he died, the ex-King led a miserable life, reduced sometimes to the extremest poverty, assisted at others by his brother, by the Elector of Saxony, and the King of Poland, who all tried to make use of him in their turn. His widow, a poor creature, of whom Frederick II. used to say that anybody who gave her a little sugar and an apple could make her quite happy, went back to Moscow with her two-year-old girl, and mother and daughter both died in the Monastery of the Trinity during the reign of Ivan's successor.
But Ivan was soon to perceive he had made a terrible mistake. He thought he had finished with the Poles, and that all he had to do now was to treat with the Swedes. He should have followed the contrary course, and his first plan had been the best. Batory would probably have agreed to an arrangement; at the time of his election to the throne of Poland a powerful conspiracy was promising him that of Hungary (Szadeczky, Batory Istwan, in the Szazadok of December 15, 1886, and in the Ungarische Revue, April–May, 1887). To a Transylvanian, Hungary was worth more than any Livonia. But Ivan, in a way, had bereft him of his freedom of choice by forcing him to turn his back on this hope, and face an aggression which no King of Poland could leave unpunished without shutting himself out from all possibility of remaining at Warsaw. Thus war with Muscovy was forced on Maximilian's lucky rival, and when, in 1577, the submission of Dantzig insured him quietness in that quarter, he prepared to cast his sword, his genius, and his fortunes—the fortunes of a crowned parvenu—into the balance.
As an excuse for Ivan, it may be urged that nothing, either in the past history of Poland or in the former career of her new ruler, furnished any reason for anticipating the tremendous impetus with which she and he were to fall, like a hurricane, on the Tsar and his Empire, at a moment when both were still suffering from the effects of the painful internal crisis through which they had lately passed. This crisis certainly had a considerable effect on the incidents of the struggle now nearing its end, and on its final solution. Therefore, before I come to this closing episode, I must show how Ivan had come to be weakened and half-disarmed within the borders of his own country.
