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Eight hundred women were drowned in one frightful mass, and their relatives were forced under torture to point out where their wealth lay hidden. It is said that sixty thousand people were slain by Ivan's orders in Novgorod alone; how many perished in the whole realm history does not relate. His only warlike campaign was against the Livonians.

"So far we have been contending for the self-determination of the Lithuanians, Poles, Livonians, Letts, Esthonians, and other peoples; and on all these issues you have told us that such self-determination is out of the question.

But, if no word came from Karl by the hour of her departure the next morning, then she would do the thing she had set out to do, and let him beware! The King dead, there would be no King. Only over the dead bodies of the Livonians would they let him marry Hedwig and the throne. It would be war.

The indignant king consigned all of the deputation, consisting of eight gentlemen, to prison, and condemned the leader, John Patgul, to an ignominious death. Patgul escaped from prison, and hastening to Poland, urged the new sovereign, Augustus, to reconquer the province of Livonia, which Poland had lost, assuring him the Livonians would aid with all their energies to throw off the Swedish yoke.

His army, composed of Swedes, Germans, Livonians, Finlanders, Scots and English, by its devoted obedience to their leader, is blended into one nation: he is a gamester in playing with whom not to have lost is to have won a great deal."

The king of these savage warriors solicited the friendship of Theodoric, and was elevated to the rank of his son, according to the barbaric rites of a military adoption. From the shores of the Baltic, the Æstians or Livonians laid their offerings of native amber at the feet of a prince, whose fame had excited them to undertake an unknown and dangerous journey of fifteen hundred miles.

After this, Bikk, the son of the King of the Livonians, escaped from the captivity in which he lay under these said brothers, and went to Jarmerik. But he did not forget his wrongs, Jarmerik having long before deprived him of his own brothers.