Russian Classics Ultimate Collection: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим ГорькийЧитать онлайн книгу.
land. Similar causes—hostility to the surrounding khanates and impatience of the certain taxes and doubtful protection of the Moskovite government—were responsible for the existence of the Don Kozaks, among whom, however, there was a strong Tcherkess (Circassian) strain, while the Russian element was proportionately weaker. But the great factor in this double evolution was undoubtedly a physico-geographical one. The nature of the steppes themselves, those vast-stretching, level, grass-grown wolds, spread in seeming endlessness under the boundless sky, those solitudes where a man and his horse might lose themselves from all pursuit, called as irresistibly to the lustre after freedom as ever the Highlands of Scotland to the Saxon-hating Kelts, or the Tcherni-Gora to the unconquered Slavs of the Balkan coast. And having lured, it held, and holding, moulded. The Kozak and his wiry steed became as much a part of the fauna of the great Russian plain as the wolves, the hawks, and the steppe-eagles that hunted and roamed throughout its wide expanse.
Grand-principality of Moskva with Grand-duchy of Lithuania and Baltic Provinces.
91 Rambaud.
92 Rosebery, Pitt.
93 Mistress of a Kniaz of Galitz, and burned alive by his boyarins.
94 Le père Pierling, La Russie et l’Orient.
95 Iz Istorie Moskvui.
96 S. Solov’ev. Karamzin. Pierling.
97 Unlike their compeers in Western Europe, who attached high importance to matters heraldic, the Russian princes were somewhat “fancy-free” in the employment of armorial bearings, and their devices took more the nature of barbaric totems than of feudal blazonry. Only in the reign of Vasili the Darkened had the S. George-the-Conqueror and dragon become the fixed stamp on the seals and coins of Moskva; an earlier form of this was a simple mounted figure, similar to that borne by the Grand Dukes of Lit’uania. The coins of Dimitri Donskoi are adorned in some cases with the image of a cock, above which is portrayed a small animal, which might represent a fox, beaver, or marten. Previous to this the tokens were usually stamped with a rude representation of the reigning prince or of a local saint.
98 Le père Pierling, La Russie et l’Orient.
99 Gennad Karpov, Istoriya Bor’bui Moskovskago Gosoudarstva s’ Pol’sko-Litovskim, 1462-1508.
100 The title Tzar, formerly reproduced in West European spelling as Czar, was, on the strength of a surface resemblance, assumed to be derived from Caesar, and given the equivalent value of the German Kaiser. With the Russians Tzar simply meant king or ruler, and was indiscriminately used for the Greek Emperors, the Tartar Khans, and the Syrian and Jewish potentates mentioned in the writings of the Old Testament; Caesar was rendered Kessar. The word korol, which also signifies king in their language, was perhaps borrowed from the Magyar kiraly, the Kings of Hungary being for a long time the only monarchs so designated with whom they had any dealings. The double-headed eagle, adopted at almost the same time as the title of Tzar, although the recognised symbol of “empire,” was not originally used with that significance in Russia; the device was employed (in the same way that the lilies of France were incorporated with the English arms) to show that the Prince of Moskva had married the heiress of the eastern empire, and for a long time the eagle occupied a secondary position to the S. George and dragon cognisance of Moskva on the seals and coins of the Grand Princes. The imperial idea was a plant of foreign conception and growth, and, indeed, at the time when the title Tzar first crept into use, the style of Emperor of all the Russias might have been borne with almost as much reason by the King of Poland as by the Prince of Moskva.
101 Schiemann, Russland, Polen, u. Livland.
102 Karamzin.
103 Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen; Sartorius, Geschichte des Hanseatischen Bundes; S. Solov’ev, Istoriya Rossie.
104 A spiked iron ball attached by a flexible thong to a short staff.
105 The wolves. S. George occupies the delicate position of patron-saint of the wolves as well as of flocks and herds.
106 Karpov, Istoriya Bor’bui, etc.
107 A.E.I.O.U.
Alles Erdreich ist Oesterreich unterthan.
Austria est imperare orbi universo.
108 Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, Rerum Moscoviticorum commentarii.
109 It is hardly necessary to state that these remarks do not apply to the Russian soldier of modern history, who has displayed his best qualities under adverse circumstances.
110 Schiemann.
111 Schiemann, Karpov.
112 S. Solov’ev.
113 Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen.
114 Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen.
115 Herberstein.
116 Karamzin.
117 S. Solov’ev; Karamzin.
118 Karamzin gives the date as 8th of October. The day is fixed by Sigismund’s letter to Leo X., written on 18th September, in which he mentions the battle as taking place on “die natali beatissime virginis Marie, que erat VIII. Septembris.”
119 Acta Tomiciana, tom. III.
120 Much that appeared eastern or barbarous to outsiders was in fact only a survival of customs and costumes that had long died out in the west. Russia, cut off by many causes, already set forth, from the