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Of the origin of the enormous fortune of the bridegroom, to which this change in the sentiments of his future father-in-law was unquestionably to be attributed, nobody could give a distinct account, though it was pretty generally whispered that he had entered into a compact with the mysterious money-lender of the Kolómna, and from him obtained a large loan.
Marching nearly south, along the valley of the Moskwa, they reached, in a few days, the large city of Kolomna, a hundred miles distant, on the banks of the Oka. Here they were joined by several confederate princes, with their contingents of troops, swelling the army to one hundred and fifty thousand men. Seventy-five thousand of these were cavalry, superbly mounted.
It was the Russians who fought at the Kalka, at Kolomna, at the Sit; the Poles and Silesians at Liegnitz; the Bohemians and Moravians at Olmutz. The Germans suffered nothing from the invasion of the Mongols but the fear of it. It exhausted itself principally on those plains of Russia which seem a continuation of the steppes of Asia. Only in Russian history did the invasion produce great results.
But what is most remarkable is, that this population of Kolómna, made up of pensioners, half-pay officers, petty functionaries, obscure artists, and others equally necessitous, preferred bearing the utmost distress to having recourse to the dreaded money-lender. They all declared they would rather mortify their bodies than destroy their souls.
The nobles, with their armies, gathered around Vassali, and Youri was so thoroughly abandoned, that, convinced of the impossibility of maintaining his position, he sent word to his nephew that he yielded to him the capital, and immediately left for his native principality of Galitch. The journey of Vassali, from Kolomna to Moscow, a distance of two hundred miles, was a brilliant triumph.
The defenders of the old faith found themselves, at the first step, deprived of the means of practicing its rites. A single bishop, Paul of Kolomna, had held out for the ancient books at the time of Nikon's reform, but he had been imprisoned, and perhaps put to death: at all events, he died without consecrating a bishop, and the Raskol was consequently left without an episcopate or a priesthood.
All these persons, and many others, who sank into misery and crime, or perished by violent deaths, had been customers of the mysterious Asiatic, of whom these stories, related, as they often were, with additions and exaggerations, inspired the quiet and peaceable inhabitants of the Kolómna with an involuntary horror. Nobody doubted the real presence of the evil spirit in this man.
RAZLYULYÁYEV. Stay, girls, I'll sing you a song. ANNA IVÁNOVNA. Sing, sing! "A bear was flying through the sky." ANNA IVÁNOVNA. Don't you know anything worse than that! LÍZA. We might think you were making fun of us. "Beat! Beat! upon the board. Moscow! Moscow! that's the word. Moscow's got it in his head That Kolomna he will wed. Tula laughs with all his heart. But with the dowry will not part.
The Tartars, intoxicated with blood, dispersed over the whole principality; and all its populous cities, Vladimir, Zvenigorod, Yourief, Mojaisk and Dmitrof, experienced the same fate with that of Moscow. The khan then retired, crossing the Oka at Kolomna. Dmitri arrived with his army at Moscow, only to behold the ruins. The enemy had already disappeared.
And it is worthy of remark, that all the colony of Kolomna, all these poor old women, small officials, petty artists, and insignificant people whom we have just recapitulated, agreed that it was better to endure anything, and to suffer the extreme of misery, rather than to have recourse to the terrible usurer.
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