city in peace. It is related that he offered Ivan raw meat, and, it being Lent, the tsar replied, "I am a Christian, and eat no meat in Lent." "Thou doest worse," was the hermit's rejoinder; thou feedest upon human flesh and blood, forgetting, not Lent indeed, but Christ Himself."
Notwithstanding the subserviency of the clergy, its patriotic spirit was not extinct. In 1580, when Russia was sore beset on every side, a council assembled at Moscow eagerly responded to the monarch's call for aid, and relinquished to the crown all the landed estates which the Church had acquired by gift or purchase from the princes of Moscow. At this critical juncture Ivan's wonted energy deserted him. Hidden from his people in the gloomy retreat of Alexandrov, he revelled and caroused with his favorites, giving his son in marriage and espousing his seventh wife, while defeat and disaster overwhelmed the empire. He was compelled to humble himself before the Polish king and sue for peace.
The pope Gregory XIII. deemed the opportunity propitious for renewing the oft-repeated attempt at union of the Churches, and, in 1581, despatched to Moscow Anthony Poissevin, a Jesuit of wily and insinuating manners, of great diplomatic skill, to act in his name as mediator between the combatants. Although the vast resources of Russia were far from being exhausted, Poissevin, adroitly playing upon the pusillanimous fears of the tsar, induced him to conclude an armistice upon disadvantageous terms, and Livonia was lost to Russia, after nearly six centuries of possession. During the negotiations with Stephen Batory, King of Poland, the tsarevitch Ivan, who, though educated in vice, inherited the manliness of his father's youth, indignant at the national humiliation, begged permission to lead an army against
